Introduction

Over the past few years, the concept of Intelligent Design (I.D.) has caught on among those who are uncompromising in their religious beliefs as an alternative to evolution and has sparked fierce debate as well as attempts to force this idea into public schools. The question we must consider is this: can I.D. be conclusively supported by any physical evidence in nature? If so, not only would that make it scientific, it would indeed allow believers in a religion to use biology as a means of promoting their brand of theism once again. There are two basic components to I.D. that must be critically examined.

Irreducible complexity
Reviving the arguments of the 18th Century religious philosopher William Paley, the I.D. promoters claim that many biological structures in nature have parts that all must function together to make the structure work. Removal of any part would cause the structure to fail. This is the idea of "irreducible complexity". I.D. promoters refer to a bacterial flagellum, a whip-like structure, as an illustration of this. Flagella are made of proteins and all of them are needed to make the flagella function. Therefore, the flagella must have been designed by a supernatural intelligence.

The problem with this assumption is that while the flagellum may indeed fail if one of its proteins is missing, the proteins themselves may all have other uses in a cell that may not involve being parts of a flagella.

Consider the very computer system I am using to produce this essay. It consists of several parts, including the monitor, the printer, the mouse, the keyboard, and the central case of the system. We may ignore the printer since it is not essential for the computer to function, though its absence prevents me from printing documents. Let us look at the remaining parts.

The central case contains the CD-ROM and DVD drive, the hard drive, the CPU, the memory chips, a power supply, a modem, and various system boards that enable the computer to function. The CD-ROM and DVD drive functions much like an ordinary CD player, while the hard drive may be considered a relative of CD-ROM drives. The modem is descended from the telephone, while the memory chips, system boards, and CPU resemble circuit boards in many other electronic machines. The monitor, including its speakers, is clearly descended from the television and may be modified to serve as one. The keyboard is descended from the typewriter. The mouse can be turned upside down and turned into a track ball device similar to the one used in the classic video game Centipede. This track ball can be used either as a pointer for the computer like a mouse or as a body-massaging device. Thus a computer system is not irreducibly complex, for most of its components can have different uses and are directly descended from other devices that need not involve computer work at all.

It is the same with those proteins in a flagellum. Research has already discovered proteins similar to the ones in flagella that have different functions. (And it must be noted that many species of bacteria lack flagella, raising the question of why the Intelligent Designer would give flagella to some bacteria but not others.) But if we merely assumed that flagella could not have formed via natural selection, we might never have discovered those other uses for the protein components of flagella. And that is the danger of the I.D. concept. Its proponents in essence are saying, "We don't understand yet how this could have developed naturally, so we will assume it came about supernaturally." If such attitudes were accepted, the advancement of science would come to a grinding halt. Hippocrates, the founder of medicine as a scientific process, stated, "Men think epilepsy divine because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine that they do not understand, there would be no end to divine things." Today, of course, we know what causes epilepsy and do not consider it "divine", merely a nervous disorder that can be treated.

Specified Complex Information
I.D. promoters also are fond of stating that the simplest cell is far more complex than the finest pocket watches, which everyone knows do not self-assemble. Thus, it must have taken an intelligence to create the first cell, since a cell is said to contain a vast amount of "specified complex information". However, biologists do not assume that life began at the cellular level, especially since even today there are life forms smaller than any cell called viruses. Instead, life may have started at the molecular level. DNA and proteins are polymers, which are defined as molecules consisting of repeating parts. They occur due to the amazing ability of a carbon atom to bond with up to four other atoms at a time, thus enabling carbon in conjunction with other atoms to form long chains of unlimited length. DNA and proteins are made of smaller molecules that are common in nature.
 
On the Earth of four billion years ago, there may have been trillions upon trillions of organic molecules of various forms. Though it is highly improbable that the right combinations of molecules could have started the process of DNA or RNA replication, it was not impossible and it only needed to happen once for life to began. And as those life forms, which may have been little more than viruses, proceeded to reproduce, the process of natural selection would have begun to work on them to gradually change them over billions of years. Because of the very simplicity of those early forms, they would have been extremely adaptable  and  hardy. Mutations of all kinds would have been possible that would not have necessarily hindered the ability of the organisms to live and reproduce, but could have added more order to the organisms. Longer and more varied DNA and RNA sequences would have generated longer and more varied proteins. Ironically, most species of life forms today, including us humans, are so complex (that is, their standards of order are so extremely high) that only a very limited number and range of mutations can be tolerated without disrupting the workings of the life form. Bacteria may seem lowly compared to us, but they are so adaptable that they can colonize extremely hostile places on Earth no other "superior" organisms have ever reached. Viruses such as HIV can mutate even faster than bacteria, which makes the efforts to find a vaccine against it extremely difficult and uncertain.

The concept of "complex specified information" only has any meaning in the human world and is entirely subjective in nature, while the concept of "order" is objective. A person who cannot read would look at the text of a book and only see patterns of ink on paper, nothing more, while a person who could read would see the information in the page. But both the reader and non-reader would agree that the page contains order. Information can only exist in the mind of the reader, not in the book being read. The very assumption of complex specified information in nature instead of order presumes the existence of a Creator which is Himself beyond the realm of scientific study, therefore making the entire concept a semantic one rather than a legitimate scientific one.

Censorship?
I.D. promoters claim that the exclusion of their favored concept from science classes would be unjustified censorship. But in that case, evolutionists should insist that the criticisms against I.D. should also be allowed into science classes, including the criticisms I have written here. But that would make the science classes appear to be promoting atheism by arguing directly against the possibility of an Intelligent Designer rather than for evolution. Teaching evolution alone does not promote atheism because it is possible to believe in God and assume that God was involved in the evolutionary process. Evolution is not atheistic, but it is anti-fundamentalist, and that is the real issue. And when one considers that it is fundamentalists of all kinds that have pushed for censorship throughout history of anything that goes against their narrow views, their arguments for including Intelligent Design in biology courses fall flat.

For any conspiracy to succeed, there are several conditions that may be required: 

1. The participants must be as few as possible.
2. The conspiracy must be of as short a duration as possible.
3. The conspiracy must be extremely secretive.

Condition 3 relies on the first two, as indicated in the proverb, "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead."

Thus, the commonly held 9-11 conspiracy theory that many government officials under the Bush Administration were directly involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is far less credible than the idea that a dozen operatives of Al-Qaeda were responsible. Likewise, it is far more credible that Exxon and its operatives have been planting misleading claims about global warming in the popular press and various blogs over the past couple of decades than that thousands of scientists have been misleading people about global warming since 1896, when Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first identified the heat retaining properties of carbon dioxide (called "carbonic acid" in Arrhenius' paper referred to below).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf

People make up conspiracy theories to explain what could be responsible for something they happen to dislike. The "theory" could be more properly considered a hypothesis in science. The problem comes when these people do not take the next step in the scientific method, which is to test the idea via observation or experiment. Instead, they proclaim the conspiracy theory as DOGMA and proceed to interpret all evidence according to that dogma, despite never finding any direct evidence to confirm the theory. Then they abandon all willingness to allow the claim to be disproven.

You can't do science that way! Just because a theory explains something doesn't mean it is true. You must ultimately rule out all other possibilities before stating something questionable to be FACT.