If you've ever read anything about intelligent design (ID) online, you're sure to have noticed that it is dismissed by many elites as "pseudoscience." Wikipedia has a terrible track record of shoehorning this term into every article that mentions ID.
Why? A big part of it, as far as I can tell, is that ID does not adhere to methodological naturalism (MN). Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer, one of ID's architects, defines MN in this way: "a principle that specifies that scientists must explain all events by reference to materialistic (non-intelligent) causes whatever the evidence."
ID breaks the rules of MN by inferring an intelligent source from things like the irreducible complexity (i.e., you take one piece out of the system, and it won't function anymore) of bacterial flagellum or the biological information contained in DNA. The main idea that drives ID is that complex systems and information have an intelligent cause.
Now perhaps I can see the appeal of MN. It's parsimonious in its ontological commitments, as it only makes room for material things.
Suppose we accept MN. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to classify ID has a scientific-philosophical research program, instead of as a purely scientific one.
But the criticism that ID is a "pseudoscience" could just as well be levelled against neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, who writes in his book The Blind Watchmaker that "Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view."
Dawkins steps outside the boundaries of MN here. While ID theorists infer a designer from information encountered in the natural world, Dawkins infers that no such designer exists, all while providing an anti-metanarrative for natural selection. This is not just methodological, but also ontological, naturalism.
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