Questions of Design are Scientific
I'm not at all persuaded that proponents of Intelligent Design (ID)
have made their case, although I also haven't at this point spent the
time to understand William Dembski's work fully enough to come to a
firm conclusion about it. That said, I am convinced that the pundits who
breezily dismiss questions of design as unscientific are trumpeting
their ignorance. It is in fact easy to see that, under the right
circumstances, there would be no question that "life was designed"
could be the best possible scientific conclusion.
For instance, consider the following scenario. Suppose that
someone somewhere someday decides to apply a particular mapping from
each of the 64 codons (triplets of nucleotides) of the DNA of some
organism to one of the 27 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (obviously,
some letters will be mapped to by multiple codons). Furthermore,
suppose--just suppose--that for this mapping, long stretches of the
genome become recognizable as slightly corrupted versions of portions
of Hebrew scriptures, portions such as (in English) "Let the water teem
with living creatures" and "Let us make man in our image" (taken from
Genesis 1, New Internation Version). Suppose that the number of
these phrases and their relevance to the question of the design of life
were such that it would be unimaginable that the phrases were there by
chance.
Now you might be saying, "That's preposterous! That's never going
to happen." I suspect that you're right. But that's not the
question. The question is, if something like this was
discovered--maybe not this specific scenario, but something similarly
uncanny--would it be "good science" to conclude that something more
than blind laws of nature were involved in the emergence of life?
Of course it would be. The alternative, to claim in the face of
such evidence that "Science can never conclude that a supernatural
agent is responsible for natural phenomena" would be laughable.
It would be akin to saying, "While we don't (yet) know of any natural
explanation for Stonehenge, the only scientific conclusion is that some
natural explanation must exist."
In short, if one is open to the possibility of an intelligent designer,
then it does not take much imagination at all to envision ways in which
a designer might leave scientifically detectable fingerprints.
Yes, there might be theological or philosophical reasons to suspect
that a designer, if one did exist, might choose to leave no
evidence. But there is no good reason to believe that science is
so limited that it could not detect design if design was there to
detect.
Thus, questions of design are most certainly within the realm of
science. Let's move the ID debate forward to real issues.