Here’s a good argument against intelligent design: life is just too weird and random to be the product of an overarching, ordered plan. Take, for example, the case of the Labord’s chamelon–a lizard residing in Southwestern Madagascar. This lizard incubates in its egg for eight to nine months, then hatches and develops very rapidly over the next few months, mates, and then, between 4-5 months later, dies, making the Labord’s chameleon the shortest-lived four-legged animal known the science.
And it’s just weird. Consider the fact that the chameleon spends the bulk of its existence inside an egg. Why such a short life-span? The researchers, from Oklahoma State University, don’t know. There must be something in the chameleon’s habitat driving its peculiar life cycle. But for now, it’s a mystery.
Source: Eureka Alert
It seems this argument, based upon the subjective and limited cognition of the individual writer - a cognition that experiences/evaluates things as “weird and random” - commits a basic logical fallacy of “argumentum ad ignorantium”; this proposition would assert the truth of an atheistic evolution on the basis that it can neither comprehend nor discern the inherent “design” reasoning for the life cycle of the Labord’s chameleon, and thus there can be no Intelligent Designer (i.e. in absence of any discernable intellegint design there can be no designer). But on what basis does the writer hope to gauge or evaluate the intent of the “creation” or the “creator”? Arguably (albeit unsatisfyingly one could just as easily argue) by definition if there were a creator of “life” that creator must be cognitively and potently superior to the creation/created man asking its question. As was said to Job, did you, oh man, bind the leviathan? Simply put, isolating the peculiarity of a single species, abstracted from its role in the ecosystem, is missing the forest for the trees and that even when the conversation should not merely be about the one type of ecosystem but that of the world at large, a whole of the sum of varied ecosystems. This is a crucial difference to evolution: God/IntelligentDesign theorist have the onneous of explaining the design of not just the world (itself a collection of ecosystems) but that world within the scope of “all creation” - i.e. the cosmos at large. And that this world is “geared” towards life, in light of not just the mathematical improbablity but also the mathematical precison of the basis of life, is a “gearing” quite obviously suggesting design. I think (though i don’t recall well) that Stephen Hawkins suggested that had the expansion rate of the universe been an infitessimaly small amount off life could not have developed as it did here on earth. Such precision as this, or precision say in the angle of the moon to the earth, can be said to orient towards design. Argaubly one could say that as random is the Lobard Chameleon so to would be microbial life found on Mars or any other distant planet, and the argument has become one merely of scale. Then one could offer in refute of the objection that all that must coher for the life to have developed on earth, and the lack of such elements/situations on these other planets (where this theoretical microbe is found) suggests an intentionality to the life that specifically is found on earth. Bottom line, it is a wierd lizard, and the writer point actually is rather fascinating in itself, albeit not seemingly effective in arguing against intelligent design. I do have a question, however: to some theoretical entity who could calculate pie to the millionth decimal place in its head, lets say, what is considered random to us would not seem so random to it, so why do we believe that what appears random and without reason is random and without reason (especially because we merely lack the faculties (dare we say omniscience) to see it any other way)?
But on what basis does the writer hope to gauge or evaluate the intent of the “creation” or the “creator”?
Exactly … there’s no way to do this. I’m open to the notion that there exists a creator and that life has evolved according to some preordained plan. And, in fact, on the surface at least, the universe appears to function so beautifully and harmoniously that it’s easy to assume that the there in fact is some governing entity controlling it all, or at least having set things in motion. Part of me can’t help but believe this.
But it’s a belief based on a gut feeling, as opposed to knowledge based on empirical evidence. As I’ve written in this space several times before, I have no problem with intelligent design and creationism as religious philosophies or what have you, but they’re not scientific theories because there’s no way to prove or disprove them.
Jeremy
Then, on your line of reasoning, Evolution (and I am not referring to Natural Selection - a properly testable science) is also a religious philosophy (as is the Big Bang), as it cannot possibly be proved or disproved. Not only has no one ever observed the spontaneous outbreak of life, but no ‘mere mortal’ has ever managed to ‘create’ it! As an aside, just how much ‘evidence’ of Creation WOULD satisfy you? The only ‘background noise’ out there in the cosmos is the Creator screaming: “Are you all too dumb to realise that all this could not possibly come about at random?”
Keith Allen.