Rob Sheldon writes, in response to a reader who asked that question that it function as a way of getting rid of the idea of design in nature:
1. Dark Energy. Antithetical to ID, dark energy is a proposed, but completely speculative solution to the question of how the universe can appear to be so finely tuned. By invoking a free parameter that can substitute for a designer, the hope is that the fanciful name, the concept (anti-gravity), the impersonality of it all will discourage anyone from attributing intelligence or design to this fine tuning knob.
2. Dark Matter — the yet-unobserved proposed source of correctly observed gravitational attraction, this could be something as innocuous as comets, black-eyed peas, and sand, or as exotic as heavy neutrinos, super-symmetric sprotons, and primordial black holes. Guess which gets all the press. It’s major claim to fame is that we see its gravitational effects, but we can’t figure out how to put it into the “Big Bang Nucleosynthesis” computer model without messing up the “fine-tuned” solution that physicists have spent 50 years tweaking. This and other sociological reasons account for its popularity in justifying the search for “exotica” in physics.
How do suh concepts affect ID? Nothing directly, but indirectly by providing another character populating this “dark universe” which is the major defense against the ID argument from “fine tuning.”
See also: Rob Sheldon on dark matter as a “superfluid”: Physicists have become so convinced of the reality of exotic particular dark matter that they are willing to build entire castles out of their poker cards.
Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
and
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
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