Theological Pitfalls of Intelligent Design

Discussions about design by God in the natural world have in recent years tended to be dominated, as they were in parts of the nineteenth century, by those features of the world that are currently thought to be scientifically inexplicable. For example, Michael Behe has suggested that there are biological entities, such as complex biochemical pathways, that display ‘irreducible complexity’ in the sense that, in his view, they could not have come into being by gradual Darwinian processes and therefore display the properties of ‘design’. A considerable body of literature has been generated by the ‘intelligent design’ controversy. The main advocates of this school see the evidence for design especially in those scientifically describable features of the world that at present have no convincing scientific explanation.