WHAT IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY Biology Divine Technology

WHAT IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY? • Biology = Divine Technology • • Organisms are literally machines, life is literally a code, and God literally creates as we do – only much, much better: ‘Univocity of Being’ • • A revival of theological imagination that led to the Scientific Revolution: the intelligibility of reality based on humanity’s divine privilege. • • Literate non-experts taking science into their own hands (via the internet, popular media, etc. ) just as mass readership of the Bible spurred the Reformation • • New twist: Use probability arguments to show by reductio the dependency of Darwinian evolution on an extended timeframe, given nature’s ‘complex specificity’ • • My twist: ID is The Problem of Humanity: Are we more intelligent designers or design detectors?

WHY INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY NOW? l US politics of science and religion: ‘stealth creationism’ and the ‘wedge strategy’ l l Internal disagreements within biology about the mechanisms of evolution l l Shift in biology’s research frontier away from Darwin’s comfort zone: From the field to the lab – from natural history to biotechnology l l Darwinism’s unsavoury normative legacy: racism and, more generally, the ‘casualisation of the human condition’ l l The need to motivate science beyond market demand in an era of weak states: recognition that science has now itself become ‘secularised’ and hence scientific explanations need to be justified explicitly as world-views.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN’S ORIGINAL LEGACIES l The idea of theory-based ‘pure research’ that is not merely driven by curiosity or practicality l l The pursuit of science as a lifelong vocation that progresses over the course of many generations – not simply a hobby l l The capacity to adopt ‘the view from nowhere’ or ‘enter God’s mind’ – the role of mathematics as the ultimate discipline of ‘reason’ as something irreducible to the senses l l Modern ethics understood as secular theodicy: From global optimisation to universal self-legislation (Malebranche & Leibniz Kant & Bentham)

HUMANS ARE DESIGN DETECTORS INTELLIGENT DESIGNERS KEY DIVIDE God and Creatures Humans and Creatures UNIVERSITY ORIGINS Paris Oxford ICONS Aristotle, Aquinas Plato, Scotus SECULAR SCIENCE Natural History Optics WHAT IS POSSIBLE? What is Probable What is Conceivable MODERNITY IS Differentiation ABOUT Purification PROJECTING ‘THE HUMAN’ ‘The Singularity is Near’ ‘Animal Liberation’