Page 12 - RD (English) - Sample

4 IntroductIon

Nevertheless, after Darwin the role of any intelligent agent such
as God was pushed so much into the background that for all practical
purposes He ceased to exist for the world of biology and for science in
general. It was soon taken for granted that if life could have evolved
into complex forms on its own, then life itself could have started with-
out any intelligent agent.
Darwin’s proposal caught on wildly, and in its wake it ushered in
a modern era of materialism, or naturalism – the idea that material
nature and the universe are closed, self-contained units and that to
explain anything within them, including our selves, our feelings, our
thoughts, and our consciousness, we need refer to nothing beyond the
laws that govern matter, the laws of physics and chemistry.
But in spite of the widespread acceptance of Darwinism and its
attendant materialism, Darwin’s theory has always had its scientific
critics, and their number has not decreased. Rather, and to the surprise
of many, the criticism has greatly increased. Since the late 1980s, evo-
lution has faced opposition from a growing number of members of the
scientific community itself. This opposition has gradually united into
an Intelligent Design front and pulled the world of science into what
has been called “the Evolution War.”
What Intelligent Design (ID) entails will be explained in the chap-
ters to follow. But for now let me give a simple definition: Intelligent
Design is the theory that infers signs of intelligence from the workings
of nature. What this means becomes clearer if for a moment we turn
to the field of archeology. Archeologists study discovered objects, such
as flints, and ask the question whether everything about these objects
can be explained naturally or whether, on the contrary, certain traits are
the result of intentional work by humans. When archeologists deter-
mine that a discovered object could not have been shaped by natural
processes alone, they infer design and regard the object as a human
artifact. Similarly, ID is the attempt by scientists to draw a line between
what could have been caused by nature working alone and what could
not have and must therefore have been caused by an intelligent agent.
What makes ID controversial is not that it tries to discriminate