I.D can explain more of the observed facts evolution can: how evidence works. [View all]

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Intelligent Design is capable of explaining more of the things we see than the theory of evolution can.

There are a great many questions which biologists have not answered yet, and many which they may well never answer. There are even some things which at first glance look seemingly paradoxical from an evolutionary PoV (counteradaptive display characteristics like the peacock's tail are a classic example, and there are some very ingenious suggestions as to how something like that evolved; genetic predisposition to homosexuality is another one).

By contrast, "God did it" is a perfectly plausible answer to every question, peacock's tails included. As a way of explaining why we *do* see what we *do* see, ID and similar supernatural theories are more powerful than any kind of science.

The reason evolution is both more plausible and more useful than supernatural theories is that evolution *couldn't* explain a great many things that we *don't* see. That means that it has predictive power, and can thus be used to develop technology and plan further experiments.

By contrast, the "God did it" theory can support and evidence you already have, but it doesn't help you at all when it comes to guessing what else God might do.

The definition of evidence for a hypothesis is *not* "an observation consistent with that hypothesis", its "an observation that would be more likely to occur if the hypothesis were true than if it were false".

The probability of the world being as it is under ID is low - God could make it this way, or he could make it any number of other ways. But only a small subset of those possibilities are compatible with evolution, and so seemingly being in one of those possibilities (or almost in it, if you accept seeming paradoxes as weak evidence against, which if you're being consistent you should) is evidence for the stronger hypothesis.