Another point against Intelligent Design: blurry lines of design

In reading some of the older posts from the Evolution News and Views blog, I came across a short post by Casey Luskin explaining that there is some wiggle room to what was and wasn’t designed in the Intelligent Design (ID) theory.

Luskin writes:

Of course anyone with a cursory knowledge of ID would be aware that ID fully allows for the action of natural processes, and design is only invoked when we find tell-tale signs of intelligent action, such as high levels of complex and specified information.

At the surface, this seems like a perfectly reasonable statement that makes ID sound as though it is a well-defined theory.  However, this view of intelligent design leaves a lot of leeway.  How complex and specified does it really have to be to be considered ‘designed’?  Since these are arbitrary values, one could never really separate two objects or organisms and say one is designed and one isn’t.  This sort non-measurable attributes makes ID not science.  However, it does give an ID proponent a way out when something is demonstrably nature driven.   All they have to say is that the designer didn’t design that, but now look over here…

Intelligent Design more focused on politics than science?

It has been awhile since I have delved into the ideas coming out of the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views blog.  When I visited it last night, I was shocked bemused at how much the focus of the blog was on global warming.  I decided to count how many articles were focused on global warming (which has absolutely nothing to do with evolution).  I came up with this little chart of the blog’s topics:

ENVs post topics from 12/9/2009

The chart is very telling on the state of affairs of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement.   First, there is not one single post showing any evidence for ID.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it is always nice to point out.  Second, most of the posts were focused on something that is not even related to evolution or ID: global warming.  Together with the prevalence of the immorality of believing in evolution, I think it is clear that the ID movement is more political / philosophical than it is focused on science and the determination of reality.  Just another reason why the whole idea is pseudoscience.