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Karl Giberson, director of Gordon College's Forum on Faith and Science, Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and Marcus Ross, a professor of geology at Liberty University suggest the best ways the intelligent design movement can gain academic credibility.

One of ID's strengths is its philosophical minimalism: the search for patterns in nature that are best explained by intelligent agency rather than by undirected forces.

This big-tent approach allows a broad range of perspectives—young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, some theistic evolutionists, as well as design-friendly non-Christian scientists—to work together under the ID banner. That diversity allows ID folks to test ideas among supporters and friendly critics before bringing them to more hostile academic audiences.

But the minimalistic stance of ID is also a weakness that, I believe, renders it unable to fully compete in the academy. While ID proponents have made progress in advancing design-detection methods, and have been modestly successful in applying them to real biological systems, the problem is that ID offers no historical narrative.

It is one thing to argue that an object or organism is designed. But then comes the question of how and when the design was implemented (and also by whom). Because ID is minimalistic, a number of options are available. Was the design implemented over a multibillion-year history of Earth, or in six rotational days several thousand years ago? Was it worked out through a genetic unfolding of a single information-rich cell, or through designed interventions within evolutionary lineages, or by separate, ex nihilo creations? Various ID proponents offer different answers, but none speaks for ID itself, because if one perspective were widely accepted, the other members would be forced to leave the tent.

Consider a brief sketch of naturalistic evolution, the dominant perspective in the academy and one that includes a set of postulates about historical events. These postulates say life originated from nonliving chemical interactions, life forms developed and evolved in unbroken ancestor-descendant lineages, and only unguided processes, such as mutation, natural selection, and others, are responsible.

ID, as defined, is a statement about mechanism. It addresses only the last of naturalistic evolution's postulates; the first two are untouched. So ID is not a full-fledged contender here. In contrast, each of the various perspectives included under ID's big tent makes historical claims. Young-earth creationists believe that creation happened in six rotational days, and that the geological record is largely a product of Noah's Flood; old-earth creationists posit ex nihilo creative events during a multibillion-year history; and so on.

Each of these perspectives is a comprehensive program that offers a full history of Earth and its inhabitants. Only such a comprehensive program, which synthesizes both the present and historical worlds, may compete with naturalistic evolution. So while ID research will continue and, I hope, succeed in developing workable design-detection methods, its academic credibility will be limited by its very nature: ID is not a comprehensive theory of Earth and the history of life.

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Marcus Ross is a professor of geology at Liberty University and assistant director of Liberty's Center for Creation Studies. Karl Giberson and Stephen C. Meyer also suggest the best ways the intelligent design movement can gain academic credibility.

Previous Christianity Today articles on science and intelligent design include:

The Other ID Opponents | Traditional creationists see Intelligent Design as an attack on the Bible. (April 25, 2006)

Verdict that Demands Evidence | It is Darwinists, not Christians, who are stonewalling the facts. (March 28, 2005)

Unintelligent Debate | It's time to cool the rhetoric in the Intelligent Design dispute. (September 3, 2004)

Previous Village Green sections have discussed preaching, immigration, Lent, premarital abstinence, aid to foreign nations, technology, and abortion.

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May 2010, Vol. 54, No. 5

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