News-Record.com

The following is a Counterpoint column:

By Kenneth Caneva

Stephen Wessells' Counterpoint essay (Dec. 16) argued that opponents of intelligent design have distorted a viewpoint about which they are ignorant. On the contrary, it's intelligent design's proponents who are guiltiest of obfuscation by obscuring the difference between evolution — the idea that species are related via a process of descent with modification — and natural selection — the principal Darwinian mechanisms of change via the differential survival of individuals possessing small random differences.

Advocates of intelligent design typically fudge the question of whether they accept evolution, their chief target being the adequacy of natural selection to explain organic structures.

Michael Denton identifies deficiencies in the evidence for species' interrelatedness, but while he attacks the very idea of such continuity he leaves unaddressed the superabundant evidence for it — that is, for evolution.

Michael Behe only questions the adequacy of natural selection to explain "irreducibly complex structures," yet by incessantly criticizing "Darwinism" he obscures the fact that he hasn't explicitly questioned the overall evolutionary interconnectedness of species.

By defining "creationist" as "any person who believes that God creates," Phillip Johnson implicitly allows a creationist to accept evolution as the way God created. But he doesn't explicitly acknowledge this, thus allowing readers to understand creationism as a denial of evolution. Such scholarly critics are careful not to deny that which only a seriously uninformed person could deny: that there is superabundant evidence that all species are related via a process of descent with modification.

Wessells' claim that the works of intelligent design proponents contain abundant support for it is another rhetorical distortion. Although they identify what they take to be deficiencies in the explanatory power of evolution by natural selection, they don't offer any alternative scenario that might explain the same range of evidence.

Arguing for design in nature is like explaining the existence of a watch by saying it must have been designed. Sure, but a design doesn't create anything. If a cosmic Designer did in fact design "irreducibly complex structures," one wonders how the Designer turned the design into reality. Did God create each species separately out of nothing, or did He work with existing species and somehow direct the evolutionary process toward His ends?

The intelligent design folks don't tell us, because they have no theory of species creation, let alone one that does justice to the many facts of their interconnectedness. They only have criticisms of one of the best-supported theories in science.

The writer teaches the history of science at UNCG.