When examined closely within the context of philosophy, biology and mathematics, the popular arguments for intelligent design seem to fall apart, Sahotra Sarkar said Monday night in a lecture in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.

Sarkar, a professor of philosophy in the section of integrative biology and director of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Texas-Austin, said that arguments put forth by widely read intelligent design proponents such as Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson and William Dembski not only include logical fallacies, but also ignore real-world falsifications and only thinly veil religious motivations.

“This is a revival of creationism under a new guise called ‘intelligent design,'” Sarkar said. “Old-fashioned creationism died because of some court rulings around 1980 or so, and it took about 20 years before a resurgence happened.”

This resurgence, Sarkar said, met another major defeat in December 2005 with the ruling against the Dover, Penn. school board who wanted to include intelligent design material in its high school science curricula.

The main arguments posed in popular intelligent design literature involve the supposed incompleteness of the theory of evolution, as well as the appearance of irreducible complexity in natural systems, from the biological to the cosmic. For instance, Sarkar said Dembski’s “explanatory filter,” a schema for determining whether an event is due to regularity, chance or design, can mistakenly credit design for cosmic phenomena such as pulsars that are now known to be caused by regular factors.

Sarkar also questions the religious motivations of many intelligent design proponents, and accused some of attempting to turn the theory of evolution into a belief system by use of the term “Darwinism.”

“Routinely, as a rhetorical ploy, what these people will do is keep on calling evolutionary theory Darwinism to suggest that this is not science, but some sort of a doctrine dependent on an individual, as if it were a religious doctrine or something like that,” Sarkar said. “You don’t call relativity theory ‘Einsteinism’.”

Throughout Sarkar’s heavily technical and information-dense speech, he used a philosophical and mathematical approach to point out a large number of critical flaws in the arguments.

“ID has been a long exercise in futility,” Sarkar said.

Hector Avalos, associate professor of religious studies, said the speech had a high level of technicality and made very solid arguments which he would like to see intelligent design proponents address.

“The problem still is that the people who are pro-intelligent design will not appear in forums jointly with the people against intelligent design,” Avalos said.

Andrew Schmitz, sophomore in agricultural engineering and treasurer of the Political Science Club, said the speech required a bit of technical knowledge to grasp, but was very insightful.

“You can tell he knows what he’s talking about,” Schmitz said.

“I thought it was really interesting. There were a lot of things in his presentation that made sense.”