Dossier Évolution et créationnisme. Intelligent Design Theory

Abstract

Intelligent Design Theory is the claim that some fea- tures of organisms are so complex - irreducibly com- plex - that they could not possibly have come into exis- tence through normal causes, through processes of blind law, and hence demand the supposition of a designer who thought them up and put them into place (Ruse, 2005; Forrest and Gross, 2004). The key work is that of Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe (1996), who argues in Darwin's Black Box that things like the clotting process of blood areso intricate that they cannot possibly have evolved, and certainly not evolved through Charles Darwin's mechanism of natural selection 1 .T here must have been an intelligence behind such a process. Behe and his fellows try deliberately not to say what this in- telligence might be, but truly no one thinks that it is an extraterrestrial. No one thinks that there is some gradu- ate student on Andromeda who is running life on Earth as an experiment and who intervenes in the course of nature every now and then to see what will happen. The intelligence is the God of Christianity. Intelligent Design- ersaremuchgiventoquotingthefirstverseofthe Gospel accordingtoSaintJohn-Inthebeginning wastheword, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Ineedhardlysaythatforregularscientists,Intelligent Design Theory is anathema. They argue that it simply cannot be supported by the evidence.A favorite example