Intelligent Design: Irreducible Complexity?

[Esquilax]

I think that Irreducible Complexity is just a reformed "God of the Gaps" argument. For example, my Religious Studies (yes, I had to take that class) teacher used the Human Eye as "evidence' for I.D.. It was along the lines of:

"Oh! Look at the human eye! It's so complex! It's retina, it's muscles connecting to it, the cornea, etc... It could have only be designed by an Intelligent Designer!"

You might also recognize this as the classic argument from ignorance: "You can't tell me how this could have evolved, and therefore it was designed."

The trouble is that this is all ID is. Intelligent design makes no positive claims, offers no tests, no falsification or hypotheses; all it is, from front to back, is a series of attempts to poke holes in evolution by looking at specific cases, missing the forest for the trees and, in the process, falling victim to yet another fallacy, the "99 percent equals 0 percent" fallacy. In this fallacy, if you cannot present a complete, comprehensive view of your position, if your opponent can find even a single thing for which you don't have an answer, they claim the entire position is therefore wrong, regardless of the rest of the evidence.

Intelligent design arguments not only commit this fallacy, they also commit the reverse version of it, a "1 percent equals 100 percent," if you will, because even if we were to accept the proposition that intelligent design may explain one of the many single cases ID proponents bring up, to then expand that and say that everything was designed is a huge leap they can't possibly support. Evolution wasn't accepted as a theory based on a single case, after all, and yet ID attempts to end run around the entirety of the scientific process to do just that.

For being dressed up as science, ID is the least scientific version of this creation notion.