Thoughts in a Haystack

To make us question naturalism itself, ID creationists must do ... at least as well as Darwin and Wallace and their followers when they reinterpreted the history of life in the nineteenth century without recourse to a designer.

In fact, they must do better. With respect to naturalism, the case of the theory of natural selection is curious. Before the acceptance of that theory, the adaptation of organisms was beyond what natural law could explain: they were yet to be brought within the realm of science in the same way many aspects of our mental and cultural lives today are beyond what contemporary science can explain. ... What the theory of natural selection did was to draw adaptation into the realm of science. Now ID wants to reclaim complex adaptations from the scientists. But they are faced with the situation that naturalism works not only for the study of adaptations, but for all of the rest of science. So, ID creationists are faced with an even more difficult task than the one that confronted Darwin and Wallace. The founders of evolutionary theory were only establishing consistency between a recalcitrant domain (the study of adaptations) and the rest of science. ID creationists want to reject all of it. We should be impressed by the audacity of the project though ... some humility would have served the ID creationists better.

- Sahotra Sarkar, Doubting Darwin?: Creationist Designs on Evolution, p. 14-15