Image from evolutionnews.org.

Wesley J. Smith’s latest post on Evolution News and Views complains of “The Arrogance of ‘Doctor Knows Best’” when it comes to end-of-life care. I find complaints about the arrogance of doctors ironic in light of the fact that each of Howard Glicksman’s posts on the same website begin with the following editor’s note:

Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that’s because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body.

So it’s arrogant for doctors to make the kinds of decisions they have been trained to make, but not for doctors to explain evolutionary biology to people who spend their lives studying it.

Glicksman’s posts make up a series called “The designed body” (logo from ENV above), which basically consist of describing how complex the human body is, sometimes concluding with an explicit argument from ignorance, for example,

Although medical science remains in the dark about such evolutionary mysteries, this does not stop some biologists from telling the public and teaching children otherwise. It takes a lot of imagination to believe that the ultra-complex and delicately balanced process of hemostasis came about by chance and the laws of nature alone. Advocates of intelligent design, who see the design seen in nature as real rather than an illusion, are on firmer ground, supported by what is already known about what it takes for life to survive under the laws of nature.

It’s too bad there’s no natural process that can explain complex structures and processes. If there were such a process, arguments like this would be vacuous.