Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Intelligent Design

Another, more modern, and more widely accepted approach in the quest for God, one more widely accepted among Christians comfortable with a non-literal interpretation of scripture, is evolutionary Intelligent Design (ID). It is a seductive idea.

It is important to note that many critic of ID simply refer to it as Creationism, or creationism in disguise. ID proponents, however, seldom use the word Creationism. In fact, they rarely use the word God and carefully avoid references to the Bible. ID is in the strictest sense an attack on evolution on scientific (and pseudoscientific) terms.  The implication is none the less clear to everyone on both sides of the debate. ID is a defense of the existence of God against those who use evolution to argue that God does not exist. tend to reserve the term Creationism for biblical literalism.

Lehigh University’s Michael Behe, who supports this idea, describes irreducible complexity as “A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

What does this mean? Behe uses a conventional mousetrap to illustrate. It consists of five parts: a base, a spring, a hammer or trapping bar, a bar to hold the hammer down and a catch to hold the hold-down bar in a triggered state so that when it is nudged the hammer is released. Remove any one part and you don’t have a functional mousetrap. 

The important thing to realize is that each part would have needed to evolve independently without a natural-selection-sense of purpose. All the parts would have needed to evolve before the mousetrap could have evolved. “[I]f intelligence is necessary to make something as simple as a mousetrap,” wrote Behe, “we have strong reason to think it is necessary to make the much more complicated machinery of the cell.”