James Pinkerton offers a transhumanist critique of ID at Tech Central Station titled “The Real Intelligent Designers.” Transhumanists believe in enhancing the human person through technology (for some the goal is to upload the human to a more efficient technology, thereby dispensing entirely with our current wetware).
Pinkerton’s critique of ID follows a predictable path: ID is bad when it comes to explaining how we came to our present physical state, whose emergence is in his view better captured by conventional evolutionary theory; but thereafter ID becomes good, as soon as we are the designers and take charge of our destiny, no longer leaving it to evolution.
What I find fascinating about this transhumanist critique of ID is that it commits one to as severe a dualism as one is likely to encounter: evolution qua chance and necessity rule everything up to one point, and thereafter it’s all design. Unnatural dualisms like this usually revert to one pole of the duality or the other. And since transhumanists look for salvation in technologies that will enhance us — and therefore explicitly to design — it is not hard to imagine that transhumanists may be turning increasingly to ID.
To see that I’m not just making this up, consider that ID was represented at the 2003 Accelerating Change Conference, a transhumanist conference held at Stanford (go here). Michael Denton and I were both speakers at this event. Moreover, John Smart, the conference organizer, was clearly sympathetic to ID, even praising my book No Free Lunch.