engleski

Intelligent Design and the Argument from Improbability

According to the Intelligent Design theory, some characteristics of the existing biological organisms would be fantastically improbable on the assumption that they are merely the product of natural selection. Therefore, it is concluded that the standard evolutionary theory is false and that Intelligent Design, as the only plausible alternative explanation, must be accepted. Most philosophers of science argue that this kind of probabilistic reasoning is logically fallacious because it tries to establish the truth of Intelligent Design without deriving any testable predictions from that theory itself. I try to show, however, that this particular methodological criticism is not convincing. In particular, I claim that there is no logical fallacy in the general idea underlying the main argument in favor of Intelligent Design (the argument from improbability) that observation O could in principle favor Intelligent Design (ID) over evolution (E), if O is extremely improbable given E, and despite the fact that the probability of O given ID is completely unknown. I very much doubt that such observation O would ever be found, but again this only shows that the argument from improbability has a false premise, not that it contains any fatal logical flaw.

Intelligent Design; Evolutionary Theory

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