Monday, December 11, 2006

More on intelligent design

The Web site of the American Prospect has published an intriguing article about what the Creationists are planning next after significant losses in the courts. The piece, by Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of biology, geography, and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, points to the publication of a landmark book among intelligent design proponents. "The Privileged Planet" (2004) and its accompanying documentary were the work of Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards from the Discovery Institute, and they contend that the physics of earth seem to be carefully arranged to allow the possibility of life forms able to investigate the universe itself, i.e. us:

According to Gonzales and Richards, conditions on Earth have been carefully optimized for scientific investigation in such a way that it is "a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we've been willing to expect to imagine." The evidence for creation, in other words, now comes from physics, not biology.

This is a clever maneuver by creationism, for in a sense it uses pure science, the enemy, as evidence. But it seems vulnerable to me to a big-picture objection: physics could have given rise to a planet in an infinite number of ways, and any one of them could have provided -- randomly -- for the creation of some form of life, for who's to say that in these alternate scenarios the conditions for life wouldn't be different? Perhaps another world would have allowed the possibility, for instance, of free-floating minds, without bodies. If these minds were capable of investigation into the universe, moreover, I don't see how that "whispers of" anything. After all, our minds haven't been able to prove the existence of a creator, no matter how hard we try.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:04 AM

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