From Laszlo Bencze:
First off, I maintain there can be no science telling us how an intelligent designer creates. That process is not only mysterious when applied to a supernatural agent; it is mysterious when applied to us. We have only the dimmest of comprehension about our own creativity. Can writers trace the source of every word that pops into mind as they write? Can chemists fully explain why they choose one approach to analysis over another? Can engineers completely justify all materials choices? Can photographers explain precisely why they chose to frame an instant in time as they did? Of course if you pressure these people they will come up with what seem to be cogent answers related to education, an influential book, the memory of a poem, habits instilled by a strict professor, a crucial experiment, or a great work of art studied years ago. These answers are interesting and insightful, but they are hardly comprehensive. Nor can any “science” be derived from such ambiguous, incompletion.
As far as I can tell, the work of the most rigorous ID proponents like Bill Dembski and David Berlinski is mathematical. They labor hard to explain why complicated things are statistically impossible. Such statistical exploration is indeed useful. But telling us why something cannot be does not tell us why it is. It’s fairly easy to understand why a gang of children fooling around in a junk yard circa 1885 will not create a functional motor car. Their actions are playful, random, inexperienced, and unguided by a goal. But it’s impossible to explain precisely how Otto Benz actually developed the concept of and built the first car. What choices was he rejecting? How many did he try out mentally without so much as doodling a scribble on a napkin? Was there a pivotal point or was it merely a succession of little ideas? We have no way of knowing. And even if he were alive and could be quizzed on the topic, I doubt he could offer the comprehensive logical progression of thought we’d like to have.
Thus it appears that ID is restricted in its power to explaining only why certain things don’t, can’t, won’t, or never did happen.
But then neither can Darwinism explain how things come to be for instead of an intelligent designer (which intuitively makes sense) it offers random mistakes filtered by natural selection which is just another layer of randomness (which makes no sense at all). The details of why random mistakes would show up in a useful progression such that tremendously complicated structures get built up are never provided, nor explained, nor quantified in any way that science demands. Nor is it at all clear how each mistake could provide instant benefits even though a fully functional transformation remains in the distant future.
But wait— it gets worse. Darwinism (unlike ID) doesn’t even exclude anything. It allows for convergent evolution (statistically impossible), stagnant evolution (you mean to tell me that for 500 million years there could be no improvement to the horseshoe crab?), punctuated evolution (everything stays the same for a real long time and then evolution kicks into high gear and it all happens so fast there’s no record of it having happened at all), neutral evolution (the blueprints for marvelously useful structures get created in unexpressed DNA by random shuffling, until one day voila, the gene is turned on and the structure appears fully formed). In evolution anything goes and contradictions live in happy harmony with one another. This is science? It’s not even a sound religion.
Well, if Karl Giberson is any example, Darwinism is an unsound religion