Why intelligent design "proofs" are pointless

[robvalue]

(Apologies if there has already been a thread about this, I couldn't find a search option for the forum.)

As science gets further towards the truth, the gap between holy book scripture and reality gets larger and larger. To this end, more and more ridiculous arguments are created or modified to try and steer people back.

One of these is intelligent design. It is basically saying that humans and/or other things in the world are obviously the result of some form of intelligence creating them. The arguments are poor and flawed, but I want to point out why they are in fact entirely pointless.

Let us pretend for a minute that I believe one of these arguments. Say I concede that it is the logical conclusion that there is some sort of intelligent designer behind us and the planet. The next question would be, what do we know about this designer?

The answer: nothing. All we've shown is that there is a designer, we haven't demonstrated that the designer is what we would like it to be. It could be any one of an infinity of possibilities. It could be that we are the creation of beings who exist in higher dimensions that we can never see or detect. It could be that some magical invisible undetectable aliens who float around us all the time made us for kicks. You can label this designer "god", but that doesn't mean you know the first thing about it.

It could be anything. All we "know" (if I concede the intelligent design argument) is that we were designed by something. Claiming to jump from this to absolute knowledge that the designer is the christian god, the muslim god, or whatever, is ludicrous. All you are doing is guessing and inserting the answer that you want. You don't even know that there was a single designer and not a team of them. You don't know how powerful they are, whether they still exist, what their motivations were or how they actually created anything. You have nothing.

So the argument is pointless because the best it can do is to demonstrate there is a designer. Until we have some way of gathering reliable information about this designer, that is as far as this argument can ever go. "Something made us." So what? It gets you to theism, and no further. The same is true of trying in some way to debunk science, evolution, cosmology etc. Even if you proved science to be completely wrong, that in no way provides evidence that a particular alternative is in fact true.

And since science is showing more and more that a universe without an outside influence like that of a "god" is indistinguishable from a universe without any such influence, the only logical conclusion is that the "god" (if there is one) created the universe and then had no further involvement. That is called deism.