In his opinion, Judge Jones the Third declared:

“The overwhelming evidence is that (intelligent design) is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory. . . . It is an extension of the fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution.”

But if intelligent design is creationism or fundamentalism in drag, how does Judge Jones explain how that greatest of ancient thinkers, Aristotle, who died 300 years before Christ, concluded that the physical universe points directly to an unmoved First Mover? ~Patrick Buchanan

The “debate” over Intelligent Design (ID) is one of those things I heartily wish would crawl away somewhere and die. ID theorists and their opposite number, the philosophical materialists who champion evolutionism as the explanation for the origin of life and man, are both frustratingly unscientific and impervious to criticism. Tell an ID theorist that he is not doing science, which is basically a statement of fact, and he will yell that the Darwinists are out to suppress free debate and enshrine Darwin as a prophet, and tell the dogmatic materialist that science has no answers for any metaphysical and cosmological questions of significance, which is simply a matter of logic, and he will scream that you are a madcap theocrat trying to burn him at the stake.

This “debate” is marked, for the most part, by the two camps firing almost irrelevant broadsides at each other. Aside from the fact that judges should have nothing to do with the setting of curricula anywhere, Judge Jones also muddles the issue. Whatever else ID is, it is not creationism or creation science redux. Whatever the philosophical merits of the argument from design or the almost ineluctable logic that there must have been, according to Aristotle, a First Cause, these things do not make ID into science. The Unmoved Mover is Aristotle’s answer to a problem of causality, mainly in order to avoid regression ad infinitum. ID not only takes for granted that there was a First Cause (which is not really what is at stake in the “debate”) but assumes that the mechanisms of mere cause and effect in the physical world cannot explain the rise of complex structures in nature. According to ID, the Unmoved Mover must keep moving, if you will, and directing development throughout natural history and, what is more, the structure and organisation of organisms reflect the intelligence of the Mover and insists that random selection through empirically observable material processes cannot possibly account for this structure and organisation.

Scientists do not, as far as I know, deny or affirm the idea of a First Cause as something that they can actually prove, but they may grant that it is a logical claim. In a related way, almost all scientists do not accept that the working of a Designer can be demonstrated or that theorising that the Designer has directed things to evolve as they have done will add an iota of understanding about the biological processes under investigation.

Mr. Buchanan is right to throw light on the dubious and unproven claims of evolutionists about the origins of life and the transformation of one species into another. Those claims are theoretical in the sense that they are truly speculative. However, the failures and excesses of one dogmatism do not make ID one bit more scientific. If we were to take it for granted that one species does not derive from another, however, we would find ourselves pitted against ID theorists as well–they do not object to the claim that man evolved from a common ancestor that we and apes share (Dr. Behe accepts the idea of a common ancestor), but they do object to the claim that random selection was responsible for the change. ID is not anti-evolution or even really anti-Darwin as such–it is simply opposed to a certain understanding of random evolution.

If ID were proposed as a possible philosophical answer to what the theory of evolution means for understanding the role of a Deity or Author in the universe, it would have some real merit. Because it proposes to augment the theory of evolution as science, it will never be taken seriously by most scientists and will remain an embarrassment to its defenders.