It is clearly ludicrous to treat “Intelligent design” as a serious theory of anything. It has no predictive nor explanatory power. It cannot be tested or falsified. Its only significance in scientific terms must be its role in the teaching of science. So its dissemination is an issue for social science (the history of ideas, the role of ideas as ideologies, the power relations involved in how it is being treated as a serious alternative to evolutionary science.) Even in religious terms it is impossible to see it as a genuine point of view. (Even the Catholic Church has recently dismissed it.)

Hence, getting drawn into a discussion of it as science is like entering a medieval debate over the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. Which brings me to my point about Dawkins and other extremists on evolution. The ID proponents have won a victory when the idea is treated as an alternative way of understanding the world.

Evolution is a scientific theory. It can be observed in the laboratory and in the universe. It gives rise to major leaps in human technical capacity. At its base level, it refers to the survival of the fittest. This is purely descriptive. Those species best able to respond to a given environment will survive. Agreed, there is a potential philosophical problem here. If an species survives, it is by definition the best adapted. Evolutionary success is determined by the fact of succeeding. The apparent teleology is partly due to my having oversimplified the processes of evolution – my understanding of which is basically at pop science level.

Intelligent design cannot explain anything. My argument is that it is a perspective derived from the natural human capacity to feel that the universe is so amazing that it must have express a spirit. This is basically an animist viewpoint which is not necessarily in conflict with science. Throughout most of human existence, various forms of beliefs that the universe is the expression of one or more souls have co-existed with the desire to experiment and innovate. These beliefs represent a recognition that consciousness is a component of the universe, despite the fact that we cannot see, touch or smell it and can only derive its existence from its effects.

There are any number of scientific responses to the problems of consciousness. Even in the least human-centred science – physics, there has been recognition of the role of consciousness. Answers such as “Something like God must have planned everything because things are so intricate” are be definition the answers of people who are not even trying to grasp the intricacies of the interaction between the internal and external.

That is, the ID viewpoint is not just an smuggling in of spiritual concepts into the realm of scientific thought, but it is a smuggling in of very undeveloped and naive concept of God or gods. The ID viewpoint is based on ideas of the transcendent that are taught to 5 year-olds in Sunday school.

So why does Dawkins seek to counter these with the theory of evolution, as if there is some sort of religious war. The value of evolution theory is its practicality. It requires no value judgements. There is no moral worth attached to success or failure. The processes of evolution are not affected by our belief or disbelief in it. They operated millions of years before Darwin and Huxley were born and will operate until the end of the universe.

Why argue about ID then? There are several answers in the realm of social science – sneaking religion into education under the cover of science must be utterly resisted. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that evolution must be raised to the status of a religion. As religions go it lacks any ethical basis and any capacity to meet our needs for transcendence.

Even on the p*-poor record of world religions, evolution would score very badly if it became a basis for social interaction, as it could be used an excuse for any ruthlessness. I posit that there is a tendency among biologists to try to take over realms that are really no more their concern than evolution is the concern of ID adherents.

Twenty years ago, there was “socio-biology” – the “selfish gene” – a movement in which Dawkins “team” seemed to provide a biological basis for the current forms of social relations of class, gender, ethic division. Their conclusions about human behaviour were derived from interpretations of animal behaviour based on their learned cultural assumptions about competition, gender and race. The nature vs nurture debate was supposedly settled with nature (as defined by them and given a spurious scientific basis on a claim to evolutionary biology) .

This is a naive interpretation of what it is to be human. Every wing of the social sciences can counter these assumptions with intelligent and sophisticated arguments (E.g., in philosophical terms it is biologically reductionist. In sociological and anthropological terms, the “evolutionists” are culturally and socially blinkered by the assumptions of their own social and cultural milieu).

So my argument here is – while ID is self-evidently bull*, there is equally no justification for grabbing an oversimplification of the issues based on extending the clear logic of evolution beyond its own legitimate realm.