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Access Research NetworkIntelligent Design (ID) is a scientific research program embraced by a relatively small but growing group of scientists and other academics (called ‘design theorists’) who argue that: ‘intelligent agency, as an aspect of scientific theory making, has more explanatory power in accounting for the specified, and sometimes irreducible complexity of some physical systems, including biological entities, and/or the existence of the universe as a whole, than the blind forces of. . . matter.’[1] That is, intelligent design is a better explanation for entities exhibiting complex specified information (CSI)[2] than are appeals to the inherent capacities of nature (i.e. chance and/or physical necessity). ID suggests that the world contains objects that exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected natural causes, and can only be adequately explained by recourse to intelligent causation. For example, according to biochemist Michael J. Behe:
it’s been the very progress of science itself that has made intelligent design plausible. Fifty years ago much less was known about the cell, and it was much easier then to think that Darwinian evolution was true. But with the discovery of more and more complexity at the foundation of life, the idea of intelligent design has gained strength. That trend is continuing. As science pushes on, the complexity of the cell is not getting less; on the contrary, it is getting much greater.[3]
Design theorists have claimed that intelligent design can be inferred from:
Philosopher Francis J. Beckwith reports that: ‘ID proponents have developed highly sophisticated arguments, have had their work published by prestigious presses and in academic journals, have aired their views among critics in the corridors of major universities and institutions, and have been recognized by leading periodicals, both academic and non-academic.’[9]
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Perhaps the best single volume introduction to intelligent design theory is Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (Ignatius Press, 2000), a collection of densely argued papers by leading design theorists biochemist Michael J. Behe, mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski & philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer. [Click on cover picture to purchase. Cover picture’s from www.amazon.co.uk] |
‘Intelligent design theory. . . says nothing about the Bible.’[11]
Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins lumps ID together with ‘creation science’, calling ID a ‘euphemism for creationists.’[12] Leonard Krishtalka notoriously slighted ID as ‘creationism in a cheap tuxedo.’[13] This rhetorical slight of hand is a consistent feature of Darwinian apologetics: ‘anyone critical of Darwinian evolution risks being stereotyped as a strict believer in biblical creation.’[14] Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that the only dissenters from macroevolution are ‘protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true.’[15] In reality: ‘some of the strongest critics of Darwin’s theory are scientists who happen to be non-fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, or Jews (as well as agnostics).’[16] As John Angus Campbell says:
The ID movement, comprising as it does academics, scientists, philosophers, humanist educators, and interested laypeople, is certainly not the same, except for purposes of histrionic exaggeration, as the young-earth, six-literal-days ‘creation science’ of the past. . . In the ambiance of ID’s ‘broad tent’. . . one will find persons of many philosophic perspectives and metaphysical commitments.[17]
Historian of science Ronald L. Numbers observes that proponents of evolution tend to conflate ID and creationism: ‘They see intelligent design as little more than gussied up creationism, despite the significant differences.’[18] However, as Dr. Benjamin Wiker observes: ‘intelligent design theorists who are Christians are very careful to distinguish themselves from creationists.’[19] This is not because design theorists necessarily accept Darwinist’s low opinion of ‘creationism’. Indeed, some design theorists are also ‘creationists’; just as some evolutionists are also atheists. However, ID is not ‘creationism’ (anymore than evolution, as opposed to naturalistic evolution or Darwinism, is inherently atheistic). The story told by ID:
veers away from the usual theistic evolutionary story (‘based on the evidence, theistic scientists are now concluding that God worked through evolution’) and from the classic creation science tale (‘scientists are recognizing that Genesis is literally true after all’).[20]
Hence the need to draw clear lines of demarcation and to avoid making criticisms of the former that, whether sound or unsound, could only apply to the latter.
Design theorist, philosopher and mathematician William A. Dembski is at pains to stress that ID is not ‘creationism’ as popularly understood:
the design theorists’ critique of Darwinism in no way hinges on the Genesis account of creation. . . The design theorists’ beef is not with evolutionary change per se, but with the claim by Darwinists that all such change is driven by purely naturalistic processes. . . the design theorists’ critique of Darwinism begins with Darwinism’s failure as an empirically adequate scientific theory, and not with its supposed incompatibility with some system of religious belief.[21]
Design theorist Professor Phillip E. Johnson stresses: ‘I am not a defender of creation-science. . . The essential point of creation has nothing to do with the timing or the mechanism the Creator chose to employ, but with the element of design or purpose.’[22] Johnson’s 1989 ‘Position Paper on Darwinism’ explains: ‘The truly fundamental question is whether the natural world is the product of a pre-existing intelligence and whether we exist for a purpose that we did not invent ourselves.’[23] Johnson points out that:
Creationists are not necessarily Genesis literalists or believers in a young earth, nor do they necessarily reject ‘evolution’ in all senses of that highly manipulable term. A creationist is simply a person who believes. . . that the living world is the product of an intelligent and purposeful Creator rather than merely a combination of [unintended] chance events and impersonal natural laws.[24]
In Johnson’s sense of the word, theistic evolutionists (who accept evolution as God’s method of creation via secondary causes) are creationists, and a creationist needn’t even be a theist. They certainly don’t need to accept any of the various interpretations of the Genesis creation story.[25] They simply need to accept the metaphysical hypothesis of design.
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In the influential bestseller Darwin on Trial (IVP, 1993), the Jefferson Peyser Emeritus Professor of law at the University of California at Berkley, Phillip E. Johnson, argues that the theory of evolution is based on faith in naturalism rather than upon sufficient scientific evidence. |
Design theorists additionally accept design as a scientific inference to the best explanation: ‘design theorists do not defend their position by appealing to esoteric knowledge, special revelation, or religious authority. They make philosophical and scientific arguments whose merits should be assessed by their soundness. . .’[26] Dr. Thomas Woodward, author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design, repudiates the claim that ID is motivated by religious premises:
hearing how key Design advocates came to their current view, it became clear that their entry into the movement stemmed from intellectual or scientific – not religious – reasons. . . Several of the founders frequently relate a vivid tale of how they previously had assumed the validity of Darwinian scenarios and were later shocked to discover major weaknesses in the case for Darwinism. Typically this intellectual epiphany leads to further reading and research, which cements the new radical doubt about the theory’s plausibility.[27]
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Professor Thomas Woodwood’s Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (Baker, 2003) is an excellent history of and introduction to the intelligent design movement, with a foreword by Phillip E. Johnson. |
ID suggests that the religiously unencumbered concept of intelligent design is a better and more fruitful explanation of certain biological and physical evidence than the hypothesis that natural regularities and chance (whether or not these causes are themselves created) are responsible.
‘ID is a research program whose inferences support, and are consistent with, some belief in a higher intelligence or deity; it is not a creed that contains belief in a specific deity as one of its tenets.’ – Francis J. Beckwith[29]
While a design paradigm has historically dominated cosmology and biology (from Anaxagorus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through to Newton and Paley), design arguments have also been a part of natural theology, the philosophical project of providing evidence for God’s existence. However, design arguments can only provide part of the evidence for God.[30] The ID movement recognizes this fact and insists upon distinguishing between arguing for intelligent design and arguing for divine design (a fact that critics of ID often obfuscate). Behe writes:
my argument is limited to design itself; I strongly emphasize that it is not an argument for the existence of a benevolent God, as Paley’s was. I hasten to add that I myself do believe in a benevolent God, and I recognize that philosophy and theology may be able to extend the argument. But a scientific argument for design in biology does not reach that far. Thus while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open. . . as regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton’s phrase, hypothesis non fingo.[31]
ID argues that there are natural entities that cannot reasonably be explained by chance and/or physical necessity, and only then infers, on the basis of experience, that the best explanation of these features of reality is intelligent causation (ID is not an ‘argument from ignorance’). Whether the intelligence in question is God is yet a further question: ‘detecting design. . . does not implicate any particular intelligence.’[32]
Failure to appreciate the distinction between intelligent design and divine design has contributed to the scientific establishment throwing out the design paradigm as essentially tied to belief in God when it was not. After all, one could accept intelligent design and attribute it to the activity of angels, demons, Plato’s finite god (the Demiurge), the gods of Egyptian, Greek or Norse polytheism, or to aliens, rather than to God (hence it is logically possible for an atheist to support ID[33]).
The plain truth is that ‘Intelligent design is not a form of natural theology’[34]; and while every design argument for God is an argument for intelligent design, not every argument for intelligent design need be viewed as an argument for God - at least, not without considerations from outside ID as a scientific theory being brought to bear: ‘intelligent design theory by itself makes no claims about the nature of the designer, and scientists currently working within an intelligent design framework include Protestants, Catholics, Jews, agnostics, and others.’[35] As Benjamin Wiker suggests: ‘from scientific evidence open to all, we can infer that nature has an intelligent designer. Further, we can extend these arguments philosophically, demonstrating that the intelligent designer is God.’[36]
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A good example of natural theology building upon intelligent design arguments is Journalist Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator (Zondervan, 2004), in which that author interviews a number of scholars associated with the ID movement (including William Lane Craig, Stephen C. Meyer, J.P. Moreland Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Richards & Jonathan Wells) as he builds a cumulative case for the existence of a Creator. |
ID obviously has much to contribute to natural theology, in that divine design is a plausible and independently supported candidate for the source of scientifically detectable intelligent design. Theologically speaking, it is interesting to note, given ID’s emphasis on the need to explain the origin of information that the Bible portrays God as creating through his Word or ‘Logos’ (Gen 1:3, John 1:1-3): ‘Of course God did not physically speak and produce sound waves’, writes theologian Terence L. Nichols, ‘But the point is that the word conveys information. Gods act of creating. . . involves the input of specifying information. . .’[37] Likewise, natural theology has much to contribute to ID. The two projects are mutually re-enforcing. On the one hand, ID furnishes natural theology with the basis for powerful new versions of the design argument. On the other hand, anyone who is already impressed by natural theology should be kindly predisposed towards ID.
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In Laws (Book X) the Greek philosopher Plato observed that:
‘all things do become, have become and will become, some by nature, some by art
[intelligent design], and some by chance.’[38]
ID constitutes a scientific paradigm based upon acknowledging all of the
explanatory possibilities listed by Plato and the existence of reliable
criteria legitimating evidentially motivated inferences to the explanatory
superiority of intelligent design (‘art’) in certain well-defined circumstances,
thereby freeing science to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
(Plato, from The School of Athens by Raphael[39])
The ‘open’ philosophy of science[40] adopted by ID is in stark contrast to the approach of those who work within the explanatory confines of metaphysical or even ‘methodological’ naturalism. According to Richard Dawkins: ‘The kind of explanation we come up with must not contradict the laws of physics. Indeed it will make use of the laws of physics, and nothing more than the laws of physics.’[41] Richard Lewontin openly admits:
It is not that the methods. . . of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the. . . world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our. . . adherence to material causes to create. . . a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying. . .[42]
But as William A. Dembski notes, here: ‘we are dealing with a naturalistic metaphysic that shapes and controls what theories of biological origins are permitted on the playing field in advance of any discussion or weighing of evidence.’[43] And as philosopher of science Del Ratzsch observes:
The scientific attitude has usually been characterised as a commitment to following the evidence wherever it leads. That does not look like promising ammunition for someone pushing an official policy of refusing to allow science to follow evidence to. . . design no matter what the evidence turns out to be. . . it commits science to either having to deliberately ignore major (possibly even observable) features of the material realm or having to refrain from even considering the obvious and only workable explanation, should it turn out that those features clearly resulted from [intelligent] activity. . . any imposed policy of naturalism in science has the potential not only of eroding any self-correcting capability of science but of preventing science from reaching certain truths. Any imposed policy of methodological naturalism will have precisely the same potential consequences.[44]
If philosophical naturalism is true, then a policy of methodological naturalism cannot possibly subvert the truth seeking intent of science; but perhaps philosophical naturalism is not true, and perhaps science should operate without making any assumptions that might force it to ignore reality.
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Science & It’s Limits: The Natural Sciences in Christian Perspective by Professor Del Ratzsch (Apollos, 2000) is a readable and comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of science. |
At the very least, the rule of ‘methodological naturalism’ should be stated so as to make a distinction between recognising intelligent design and supernatural design: ‘in science’, says Larry Witham, ‘the question is not between finding natural causes or supernatural causes, but between natural and intelligent ones.’[45] (It should be noted that this distinction – which I have called the distinction between ‘hard-line’ and ‘soft’ methodological naturalism – sidesteps the question of whether intelligence is by its very nature a supernatural reality.[46] Hence, one could think of this distinction as a methodological distinction allowing ID to stake out the broadest possible ‘tent’ by leaving the ontological nature of intelligence outside of its core commitments.)
Besides: ‘recent studies in the philosophy of science have confirmed. . . that philosophically neutral criteria that can define science narrowly enough to disqualify theories of creation or design without also disqualifying Darwinism and/or other materialistic evolutionary theories on identical grounds do not exist.’[47] And as philosopher of science J.P. Moreland points out:
some branches of science, including SETI, archaeology, forensic science, psychology and sociology, use personal agency and various internal states of agents (desires, willings, intentions, awareness, thought, beliefs) as part of their description of the causal entities, processes, events or actions cited as explanations for certain phenomena. . . Thus there is nothing non-scientific about appealing to personal agency and the like in a scientific explanation[48]
Indeed, many sciences depend upon detecting intelligence: ‘notably forensic science, artificial intelligence. . . cryptography, archaeology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence [SETI].’[49] ID simply suggests: ‘that we extend these insights, which have proved so fruitful in other fields, to the world of the natural sciences.’[50]
Darwinist Michael Ruse acknowledges that: ‘It would indeed be very odd were I and others to simply characterize “science” as something which, by definition, is based on (methodological) naturalistic philosophy and hence excludes [intelligent design].’[51] In a speech given at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993, Ruse conceded that: ‘philosophically one should be sensitive to what I think history shows, namely, that evolution. . . involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically.’[52] Little wonder, then, that: ‘A central claim of the ID movement is that if science education is to be other than state-sponsored propaganda, a clear and principled distinction must be drawn between empirical science and the materialist philosophy that drives contemporary Darwinian theories of biological origins.’[53]
According to design theorists, developments in information theory mean that there now exist ‘well-defined methods that, on the basis of observational features of the world, are capable of reliably distinguishing intelligent causes from undirected natural causes.’[54] Hence William A. Dembski defines intelligent design as: ‘the science that studies how to detect intelligence.’[55] Thus, according to Dembski, ID is properly formulated as a theory of information:
intelligent design is therefore not the study of intelligent causes per se but of informational pathways induced by intelligent causes. As a result intelligent design presupposes neither a creator nor miracles. . . it detects intelligence without speculating about the nature of the intelligence. . .[56]
As Geoscientist Marcus R. Ross explained in a presentation before the Geological Society of America: ‘ID is classified as a philosophically minimalistic position, asserting that real design exists in nature and is empirically detectable by the methods of science.’[57] It is this minimal metaphysical baggage that keeps ID firmly within the realm of science.
Scientists who allow a commitment to naturalistic explanations to predetermine their explanatory options when faced with empirical evidence of intelligent design are, to use an example from physicist Robert Kaita, like researchers stubbornly committed to finding a naturalistic explanation for ‘crop-circles’:
mysterious patterns were found in
wheat fields taking the form of large, distinct geometric patterns. . .
speculation ran from intelligent causes, such as ingenious pranksters, or the
perennial favorite, extraterrestrial beings, to natural phenomena. Finally a
couple of men admitted responsibility and revealed that their equipment
consisted of very large versions of the stylus and string that people have been
using to make geometric figures since antiquity. . . In spite of this unequivocal
evidence for design, some [people] persisted in suggesting highly improbable
natural causes.[58]
Kaita draws a moral from this episode: ‘We need always to keep in mind two separate questions: how well does the evidence support design? And, Are we predisposed to reject design apart from the evidence? The first is a scientific question. The second is a philosophical question.’[60] For those who wish to exclude the possibility of intelligent design a priori, ‘the motive is based not on “just the facts” but on philosophical prejudice’.[61]
Such philosophical prejudice frequently results in question-begging and circular arguments. Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer calculates that: ‘the probability of constructing a rather short functional protein at random [is] so small as to be effectively zero. . .’[62] If we ask Dawkins for the best explanation of the complex molecules of life he says: ‘Nobody knows how it happened but, somehow, without violating the laws of physics and chemistry, a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying – a replicator.’[63] If no one knows what happened, how does Dawkins know that what happened didn’t ‘violate the laws of physics and chemistry’? He simply begs the question. Here, at least, is a frank admission of ignorance: ‘I would have to be more of a chemist that I am to know how likely it is that you are going to get such molecules,’ says Dawkins, ‘I don’t know how difficult it would be to achieve that chemically.’[64] Consider how significant it is to find Dawkins, who accuses theists of blind faith and who exhorts people to always ask, ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’,[65] believing in what he calls the ‘sine qua non’[66] of evolution without empirical evidence! Benjamin Wiker comments that Dawkins’: ‘lapse into an irrational faith in the powers of chance to avoid [intelligent design]. . . is not evidence itself but a telling lapse into a materialist credo quia absurdum est’.[67] Dawkins is not alone in making this sort of leap of faith. Harvard biologist George Wald dismissed a design explanation for life but candidly admitted:
I will not believe that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation [that life arose from non-living matter] arising to evolution.[68]
Phillip E. Johnson complains: ‘The naturalistic evolution of life from prebiotic chemicals and its subsequent naturalistic evolution into complexity. . . is assumed as a matter of first principle. . .’[69] As G. A. Kerkut of the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Southampton writes, it is: ‘a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that biogenesis did occur. . .’[70] For scientists like Dawkins and Wald, who reject an ‘open’ philosophy of science, the hypothesis that life ‘just happened’ is a philosophical deduction entailed by the assumption of naturalism. To approach biology without begging-the-question like this does not mean excluding consideration of the theory of abiogenesis, or evolution (as Darwinians exclude consideration of intelligent design). Rather, it means letting the evidence speak for itself and following the evidence wherever it leads.[71]
Johnson observes that: ‘Darwinism is the answer to a specific question that grows out of philosophical naturalism. . . The questions is: How must creation have occurred if we assume that God [or other intelligent designer/s] had nothing to do with it?’[72] Design theorists are more than happy to confirm that neo-Darwinism is the best available answer to that question; but answering that question is not at all the same thing as answering this far more interesting, unbiased and important question: ‘How did creation actually occur?’
To understand what design theorists mean by CSI, imagine a game of scrabble. A long string of random letters drawn from a scrabble bag is complex without being specified - that is, without conforming to a non ad hoc pattern that we haven’t simply read off the object or event in question. A short sequence of letters like ‘this’ or ‘that’ is specified (it conforms to a non ad hoc, independent pattern) without being sufficiently complex to outstrip the capacity of chance to explain this conformity (letters drawn at random from the scrabble bag will occasionally form a short word.) However, this article is both specified (conforming to the independent functional requirements of grammatical English language use) and sufficiently complex (doing so at a level of complexity that makes it unreasonable to attribute this match to dumb luck) to trigger a design inference. It would be unreasonable to suggest that I produced this article by randomly drawing tiles from a scrabble bag!
Philosopher William Lane Craig explains the logic the design inference with a simple illustration:
Bob is given a new car for his birthday. There are millions of license plate numbers, and it is therefore highly unlikely that Bob would get, say, CHT 4271. Yet that plate on his birthday car would occasion no special interest. But suppose Bob, who was born on 8 August 1949 finds BOB 8849 on the license plate of his birthday car. He would be obtuse if he shrugged this off with the comment, ‘Well, it had to have some license plate, and any number is equally improbable. . .’[73]
Bob’s car having the first license plate was complex (unlikely) but it wasn’t noteworthy because it wasn’t specified. Bob’s car having the second license plate was noteworthy because in addition to being complex it was also specified (it matched the independently given pattern of Bob’s name and birth-date). Hence, according to William A. Dembski: ‘given an event, object, or structure, to convince ourselves that it is designed we need to show that it is improbably (i.e. complex) and suitably patterned (i.e. specified).’[74]
It is popularly thought that ‘if you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare’, but there is a real world limit to the number of ‘monkeys’ available and the time in which they can type. Indeed, I heard about a zoo that put a typewriter in their monkey cage: the monkeys defecated in the typewriter and hit the same key over and over again!
(Monkey picture from ‘Monkey Shakespeare Simulator’[75])
To take the point less literally, the online ‘Monkey Shakespeare
Simulator’ uses logged-on computers to simulate an ever-increasing population
of ‘monkeys’ randomly typing (on simplified keyboards, at a rate of one day’s
typing per second), and compares the results to Shakespeare’s works.[76]
As of October 2004, the best result was twenty ‘letters’ (if one includes
spaces and full stops) from Coriolanus, after 462,060,000,000 billion
billion ‘monkey-years’![77] Getting better results is clearly
going to take a lot more monkey-years; but as Dembski would point out,
we can’t simply keep giving ourselves free ‘monkey-years’. ‘Just where the
probabilities cutoff is can be debated,’ says Dembski, ‘but that there is a
probabilistic cutoff beyond which chance becomes an unacceptable explanation is
clear.’[78]
As Richard Dawkins affirms: ‘We can accept a certain amount of luck in our
explanations, but not too much.’[79]
In fact, limiting the explanatory capacity of ‘chance’ is crucial to the
integrity of science: ‘If we allow ourselves too many “wildcard” bits of
information. . . we can explain anything be reference to chance.’[80] Allowing ourselves too
many ‘wildcard bits of information’ commits the inflationary fallacy: ‘the
problem inherent in the inflationary fallacy is always that it multiplies
probabilistic resources in the absence of independent evidence that such
resources exist.’[81]
Postulating unlimited probabilistic resources makes it impossible to warrant attributing anything to design. Is Dawkins a good writer or does he simply move his hands over his computer keyboard in the right way by luck? Dawkins’ books could happen by chance, if we assume the existence of sufficiently large probabilistic resources: ‘Unlimited probabilistic resources make bizarre possibilities unavoidable on a grand scale.’[82] Dembski calculates a stringent probability bound of 10-150 based on the number of elementary particles in the universe, the duration of the observable universe and the Plank time.
In Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins draws a distinction between objects that exhibit evidence of being designed and objects that give the superficial impression that they exhibit evidence of being designed but on closer inspection do not, which he calls ‘designoid’.[83] Dawkins illustrates the concept of being designoid with a hillside that suggests a human profile: ‘Once you have been told, you can just see a slight resemblance to either John or Robert Kennedy. But some don’t see it and it is certainly easy to believe that the resemblance is accidental.’[84] Dawkins contrasts this Kennedy-esque hillside with the four president’s heads carved into Mt. Rushmore in America, which ‘are obviously not accidental: they have design written all over them.’[85]
Although Dawkins defines biology as ‘the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose’,[86] he believes that appearances are deceiving. All biological things that appear to be designed are designoid: ‘Designoid objects look designed, so much so that some people – probably, alas, most people – think that they are designed. These people are wrong. . . the true explanation – Darwinian natural selection – is very different.’[87]
Teasing apart Dawkins’ rhetoric is a rewarding hobby. His original illustration of a designoid is of something that gives the superficial impression that it exhibits evidence of being designed. People have to have the resemblance between the hillside and Kennedy pointed out to them, some people ‘don’t see it’[88], and ‘it is certainly easy to believe that the resemblance is accidental.’[89] However, Dawkins wants to convince us that although some biological objects give such a strong appearance of design that ‘most people’[90] intuitively think that they are designed, they are merely designoid. On the face of things, Dawkins’ design/designoid distinction actually supports the majority opinion that life is the product of design. Some natural objects are surely more analogous to Mt. Rushmore than they are to the Kenney-esque hillside. In which case, how does Dawkins justify his confident, universal negative claim (the hardest sort of claim to prove) that absolutely no biological objects are designed, and that any biological object giving the appearance, however strong, of design, is merely ‘designoid’? Indeed, if the paradigm ‘designoid’ object is the Kennedy-esque hillside, then such a broad application of the concept is surely inappropriate. The meaning of Dawkins’ flagship term shifts from ‘things that give the superficial impression that they exhibit clear evidence of being designed, but on closer inspection do not’, to ‘things that give every appearance of being designed, but are not’, thereby exhibiting the logical fallacy of ‘equivocation’.[91]
If Dawkins’ hypothesis is simply, as Alan Keith suggests, that ‘some things that appear to be designed are not in fact designed’[92], what justification does he give for thinking that life only appears to be designed? It’s easy enough to tell design and designoid apart as Dawkins’ introduces the distinction; but how are we to tell design from designoid given his implicit re-definition of these terms? We cannot! Dawkins applies the first distinction on the basis of observational features of the objects in question, but he applies the second distinction on the basis of his commitment to metaphysical naturalism. A consistent, non-question-begging understanding and application of Dawkins’ design/designoid distinction seems to support the conclusion that life is the product of design, and hence of purpose.
Reviewing this criticism of the design/designoid argument[93], Massimo Pigliucci[94] and the members of his graduate class on evolutionary thinking at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville respond that this objection to Dawkins ‘is partly right’.[95] According to Professor Pigliucci et al: ‘Dawkins did choose a bad example, and for fundamentally wrong reasons’[96] when he illustrated the concept of a ‘designoid’ with a hillside that looks a bit like a Kennedy from the right angle. The problem with Dawkins’ analogy, according to Pigliucci et al, is that: ‘The resemblance of the cliff outcropping to a human face is the result of entirely random causes. . . while biological organisms are the outcome of two processes: mutation (which is indeed random) and natural selection (which is anything but random).’[97] Of course, whether or not everything about all biological organisms is the outcome of nothing but these natural forces, one random (mutation) and one non-random (natural selection), is the very point at issue. Pigliucci et al agree with me that ‘Dawkins’ designoids don’t cut it’, but argue that this is because his original illustration provides a poor analogy for the organism producing forces at work in evolution:
Dawkins’ fundamental point can be rescued by simply using a better analogy. There are natural, non-biological, processes that convey the impression of intelligent design and provide us with a more closer parallel to evolution. For example, on many rocky beaches, pebbles are sorted by size going from the waterline towards the interior, in a distinctly non-random pattern. This is not because somebody got all the pebbles out of the ocean, carefully weighed them, and then constructed the beach. Rather, the pattern was created by the joint action of two processes: the (random) action of waves and the (non-random) effects of gravity.[98]
Is this new analogy for ‘designoid’ any better than Dawkins’? No. If anything, it is a worse analogy, because people don’t intuit the presence of design when observing beaches! The sorting of pebbles on a beach simply does not ‘convey the impression of intelligent design’, whereas Dawkins’ Kennedy-esque hillside does at least convey the initial impression of design. Hence Dawkins’ hillside analogy, while it may be a worse analogy for the process of evolution, is the better illustration of the concept of a ‘designoid’, and the pebble-sorting of Pigliucci et al, while it may be a better analogy for evolution, is a worse illustration of the concept of a ‘designoid’! Like Dawkins’, Pigliucci et al provide an illustration that tends to reinforce the intuitive conclusion that the appearance of design in nature is not deceptive.[99]
Philosopher Robert C. Koons observes that: ‘The Western philosophical tradition has bequeathed us two competing metaphysical models: one in which everything is to be explained ultimately in terms of blind and purposeless forces (the materialistic model); and one in which purposefulness is a fundamental and irreducible reality (the teleological model).’[100] The most important question ‘from an epistemological point of view’[101], writes Koons, is this: ‘where should we locate the presumption of truth, and where the burden of proof?’[102] Koons argues that:
There are compelling grounds for placing the burden of proof on the materialistic model. Even stalwart Darwinists like Richard Dawkins admit that the defining task of biology is to explain the existence of things that appear to be designed. Cicero, in On the Nature of the Gods, Book II, reports Aristotle’s cave analogy: if a group of people had spent all of their lives underground and then emerged on the surface, they would be bound to think of the biologically rich world they discovered there to be the product of intelligence. Only familiarity dulls our sense of wonder at the craftsmanship of nature.
In his essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid cites the capacity to recognize the signs of intelligent agency as part of the basic equipment of the human mind. . . When this basic faculty of intelligence-recognition considers the machinery of living things, the clear answer it delivers is yes, there is intelligence and purposefulness displayed in such machinery.[103]
While ‘the natural deliverances of our sense of intelligence can be defeated’[104], says Koons, ‘there is an undeniable burden of proof that must first be assumed.’[105] Question-begging assertions like those made by Dawkins, Lewontin and Wald fail to defeat the presumption of truth that should be accorded to belief in design.
Ironically enough, Dawkins’ discussion of the design/designoid distinction actually illustrates intelligent design methodology. Dawkins argues that while ‘a rock can weather into the shape of a nose seen from a certain vantage point’,[106] [cf. figure 2] such a rock is designoid (i.e. it is not clearly the produce of intelligent design, because it is easy to believe that ‘the resemblance is accidental.’[107]) Mt. Rushmore [cf. figure 1], on the other hand, is obviously not designoid: ‘Its four heads are clearly designed,’[108] argues Dawkins, because: ‘The sheer number of details [i.e. the amount of complexity] in which the Mount Rushmore faces resemble the real things [i.e. the complexity fits four independent specifications] is too great to have come about by chance.’[109] In terms of mere possibility, says Dawkins: ‘The weather could have done the same job. . . But of all the possible ways of weathering a mountain, only a tiny minority would be speaking likenesses of four particular human beings.’[110] Hence: ‘Even if we didn’t know the history of Mount Rushmore, we’d estimate the odds against its four heads being carved by accidental weathering as astronomically high. . .’[111]
Figure 2. An accident of nature: President John F. Kennedy’s profile formed by shadow cast by a large rock in Hawaii.[112]
In other words, Mt. Rushmore is obviously the product of intelligent design because it exhibits what information theorists call specified complexity, whereas the hill-side is not obviously the product of intelligent design because it does not exhibit specified complexity: ‘it is certainly easy to believe that the resemblance [i.e. the hill’s conformation to a specification] is accidental [i.e. is not complex].’[113]
The significant point here is that Dawkins’ own design detection criteria is obviously a pre-theoretic version of the design detection criteria elaborated by William A. Dembski in such books as The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1999) and No Free Lunch, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Mathematician & Philosopher Professor William A. Dembski has broken new ground in information theory with his work on the design inference from ‘specified complexity’. Among the most scholarly presentations of this work are: The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1999), where Dembski explicates his ‘explanatory filter’ & No Free Lunch (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) which applies the insights of The Design Inference within biology.
Returning to the beach example suggested by Pigliucci et al, let us ask the question: ‘How could pebbles on a beach convey clear evidence of intelligent design’? A random spread of pebbles would not do the trick. Such a distribution of pebbles may be complex, but it lacks specificity. Nor would having the pebbles ‘sorted by size going from the waterline towards the interior, in a distinctly non-random pattern’ do the trick. Such a distribution of pebbles is specific (‘distinctly non-random’) but not particularly complex. What definitely would tip us off to the presence of design is if the pebbles were arranged to spell out a message such as: ‘Hello and welcome to the seaside. We hope that you will enjoy this beach.’ Such an arrangement, which exhibits an independent specification at very low probability, would obviously imply intelligent design. Such an arrangement of matter not only ‘looks a bit like it might be designed at first glance’, like Dawkins’ hillside, but gives every appearance of being designed. If one cannot infer design from such an arrangement of matter, then matter simply cannot be arranged in a way that clearly signals design! Only a dogmatic commitment to design-free explanations would prevent one from saying that such a pattern was the result of design.
It’s all very well to observe that some things that don’t require explanation in terms of design can give the superficial impression that they do require such an explanation (e.g. Dawkins’ Kennedy-esque hillside), to call such things ‘designoid’, and to draw the moral that we should take care about saying that something requires explanation in terms of design. It is quite another thing to observe Mt. Rushmore, or pebbles on a beach that spell ‘We hope you enjoy this beach’, and to assert that this pattern is ‘designoid’! And yet, in effect, that is what Dawkins does with the evidence for design.
However it is illustrated, the meaning of the key term in Dawkins’ argument surreptitiously evolves under our noses. It begins life meaning ‘something that gives a superficial impression of design’ and ends up meaning ‘a thing that gives every indication of being the product of design, but isn’t.’ Dawkins needs ‘designoid’ to carry this latter meaning because he accepts that: ‘When a biologist looks at particular organs or organisms. . . what he sees is a machine, which has every indication of being designed for a purpose.’[114] However, such an equivocation turns a useful distinction into an empirically vacuous concept that begs the question by smuggling in the metaphysical assumption that intelligence is incapable of outperforming the design-producing resources of nature in such a way as to leave reliable, empirically detectable indicators of its activity. Yet when Dawkins is not concerned with design-proofing biology, he holds that intelligence is capable of outperforming the design-producing resources of nature in such a way as to leave reliable, empirically detectable indicators of its activity. Indeed, he employs a version of Dembski’s ‘Design Filter’, motivating the inference to design in the presence of specified complexity.
The ‘Design Filter’ elaborated by Dawkins and Dembski is only a positive test for design. Suppose an artist carefully sculpts a hillside by cleverly mimicking natural weathering so as to produce a profile vaguely like that of a man. The design filter would not detect the activity of intelligence in that hillside. As far as the filter is concerned, the hillside is, at most, designoid. It might be the product of design, it might superficially look like objects that the filter would attribute to design, but the filter gives us no reason to think that it is the product of design because the hillside, while complex, is not specified. On the other hand, if the hillside in question were carved into a detailed (i.e. specific) picture of four American presidents, then the filter would detect design, because such a pattern is both complex and specified. The filter can’t rule design out, but it can rule it in.
The basic physical laws of nature are ‘finely tuned’, or specified, in the sense that if they were only a little different that they in fact are, then the existence of intelligent life would be impossible. This is a fact that many scientists and philosophers take to indicate design - even if they feel uncomfortable with such an implication. As Stephen Hawking once admitted: ‘The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the big bang are enormous. . . I think clearly there are religious implications. . . But I think most scientists prefer to shy away from the religious side of it.’[116] Shying away from a conclusion supported by evidence is hardly a scientific attitude to adopt.
According to Massimo Pigliucci: ‘Should we conclusively determine that the probability of existence of our universe is infinitesimally small, and should we fail to explain why physical constants have assumed the quantities that we observe, the possibility of a designed universe would have to be considered seriously.’[117] Hence, in discussing the fine-tuning of the cosmos, Pigliucci lays down what amounts to a pre-theoretic version of Dembski’s explanatory filter, which infers design when an independent specification (e.g. the set of physical laws required by a life sustaining universe) is exhibited at sufficiently low probability. Pigliucci and design theorists differ on whether we can infer that our universe is the product of design, but at least there would appear to be agreement on the criteria for making such a judgement. Settling the question one-way or the other is a matter of evidence.
Richard Dawkins fails to make the connection between specified complexity as a hallmark of intelligent design and the issue of cosmic fine-tuning, but as has already been observed, he clearly accepts the same design-detection criteria as Pigliucci and Dembski. Moreover, in establishing CSI as a hallmark of intelligent design, Dawkins provides an excellent analogy for understanding cosmic fine-tuning: ‘Of all the unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, positions of the combination lock,’ observes Dawkins, ‘only one opens the lock. . . The uniqueness of the arrangement. . . that opens the safe, [has] nothing to do with hindsight. It is specified in advance.’[118] According to Dawkins, the best explanation of an open safe is not that someone got lucky, but that someone knew the specific and complex combination required to open it. But isn’t the ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe discovered by cosmologists analogous to Dawkins’ example of a cracked combination lock?
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, thought he had a knockdown response to the ‘fine-tuning’ argument, likening it to a puddle of water arguing that, since the dip in the ground it inhabited seemed to fit it so well, the dip must have been created with its existence in mind: ‘This is. . . an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’[119] While this analogy makes for a nice piece of humour, as a rebuttal of the fine-tuning argument it is deeply flawed. Water will fit any shape hole – the fit between the hole and the water can be explained wholly by reference to the nature of water. However, life will not fit just any old environment. The fit between our cosmic environment and life cannot be explained wholly by reference to the nature of life: ‘In reviewing the physical laws and the numerical values of fundamental constants, one encounters a remarkable precision in these values such that only small changes in the fundamental constants. . . would yield a universe without galaxies, starts, atoms or even nuclei, and consequently, without the capacity for life.’[120] As Moreland and Craig note: ‘An observer who has evolved within the universe should regard it as highly probable that he will find the basic conditions of the universe fine-tuned for his existence; but he should not infer that it is therefore highly probable that such a fine-tuned universe exists at all.’[121]
Moreland and Craig illustrate the sense in which the fine-tuning of the universe is a highly improbable fact:
Take a sheet of paper and place upon it a red dot. That dot represents our universe. Now alter slightly one or more of the finely tuned constants and physical quantities which have been the focus of our attention. As a result we have a description of another universe, which we may represent by a new dot in the proximity of the first. If that new set of constants and quantities describes a life-permitting universe, make it a red dot; if it describes a universe that is life prohibiting, make it a blue dot. Now repeat the procedure arbitrarily many times until the sheet is filled with dots. One winds up with a sea of blue with only a few pin-points of red.[122]
The hypothetical question of whether or not universes are possible that have wholly different physical variables but are life permitting is irrelevant to the fine-tuning argument. Imagine a fly resting on a large, blank area on a wall:
A single shot is fired, and the bullet strikes the fly. Now even if the rest of the wall outside the blank area is covered with flies, such that a randomly fired bullet would probably hit one, nevertheless it remains highly improbable that a single, randomly fired bullet would strike the solitary fly within the large, blank area. In the same way, we need only concern ourselves with the universes represented on our sheet in order to determine the probability of the existence of a life-permitting universe.[123]
In the case of Dawkins’ cracked combination lock what calls for a teleological explanation is not merely that an event of small probability has taken place (other sequences of number dials are equally improbable), but the fact that this small probability event is specified (as the sequence that opens the lock). Likewise, in the case of cosmic fine-tuning, what calls out for explanation in terms of design is not merely that an event of small probability has taken place (the existence of a particular set of physical laws), but the fact that this event is specified (as the set necessary for a life sustaining universe). Indeed, the fine-tuning of the universe is like cracking a safe with multiple combination locks, one lock for each cosmic parameter: The matter-anti-matter balance ‘had to be accurate to one part in ten billion for the universe to arise.’[124] The expansion rate of the universe from the big bang had to be accurate to one part in 1060, while the force of gravity itself required fine-tuning to one part in 1040.[125] If the strong nuclear force were 2 percent weaker protons and neutrons wouldn’t stick together. If it were 0.3 percent stronger hydrogen (a crucial component of biological systems) could not exist.[126] Oxford physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the original phase-space volume required such exact fine-tuning that the ‘Creator’s aim must have been [precise] to an accuracy of one part in 1010(123).’[127] Penrose was only speaking poetically of the ‘Creator’s aim’, but this sort of data is in fact best explained by the existence of a real Creator. Finely tuned improbabilities compound one another until the overall improbability of cosmic fine-tuning being a fluke becomes unimaginably high. Don N. Page[128] of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., calculates the odds against the formation of our universe at one in 10,000,000,000124! As Fred Hoyle complained: ‘A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.’[129]
Some cosmologists attempt to avoid this conclusion by positing the existence of a large number of universes (perhaps an infinite number), each with a different set of laws. However, what guarantees that all these universes have different laws is a mystery. Stephen Clark comments:
It is a mark of desperation that some atheistical materialists have chosen to believe in infinite arrays of universes. . . rather than believe instead that this well-adapted world is founded on intelligence. . . explaining away this world by saying that all worlds happen (which does not follow anyway merely from there being, we fantasize, an infinite array of worlds) merely enlarges the problem – and destroys the basis of all explanation (since we could not, on those terms, be right to be surprised at anything, including Pratchett’s Discworld).[130]
The ‘many worlds hypothesis’ commits the inflationary fallacy, of multiplying our explanatory resources without an independent reason for doing so, on a grand scale. The best explanation of cosmic fine-tuning is that an intelligence took careful ‘aim’ with the purpose of producing a life-sustaining universe. When we submit the scientific evidence of cosmic fine-tuning to the design-detection criteria accepted by scientists like Dawkins and Pigliucci we find that the evidence supports the hypothesis of intelligent design.
Within biology, ‘intelligent design is a theory of biological origins and development.’[131] Design theorists claim that the current dominance of neo-Darwinian theory is a function of the pool of live explanatory options being artificially restricted by an unjustified methodological constraint, namely, the philosophical presupposition that natural sciences should only explain things in terms of the inherent capacities of nature (whether or not those capacities are themselves designed). Design theorists argue for a more ‘open philosophy of science’, and insist that the important question is not whether neo-Darwinism is the best explanation given a ban on mentioning intelligent agency, but whether it is the best explanation, full stop. Design theorists argue: ‘that once hypotheses positing Intelligent Design are allowed into the pool of live options, then the explanatory superiority of the neo-Darwinian theory is no longer apparent. On the contrary, its deficiencies, particularly in the explanatory power of its mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection, stand in stark relief.’[132]
When we examine the chemical basis of life we find highly complex contingent arrangements of matter that are specified by their biological functionality. According to Dawkins: ‘Complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone. In the case of living things, the quality that is specified in advance is. . . the ability to propagate genes in reproduction.’[133] These complex systems cannot be explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution, for the simple reason that they must exist before anything can evolve. As Dawkins says: ‘[For evolution to occur] you need raw materials that can self-replicate. . . The sine qua non [that without which]. . . is self-replication.’[134] Pigliucci et al correctly observe that ‘what is needed for a naturalistic theory of origins is that the first replicators were simple enough to originate randomly.’[135] On the naturalistic hypothesis the first replicators have to be simple enough to originate randomly because natural selection cannot explain the origin of anything that is a precondition of natural selection – and replicators are a pre-condition of natural selection.
In a telling letter to Philosophy Now magazine (August/September 2004) Antony Flew discussed ‘the limits of the negative theological implications of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.’ Quoting from Darwin, Flew notes that the theory of evolution by natural selection does not account for the origin of life, and observes that ‘Probably Darwin himself believed that life was miraculously breathed into that primordial form of not always consistently reproducing life by God. . .’[136] Flew also notes that:
the evidential situation of natural (as opposed to revealed) theology has been transformed in the more than fifty years since Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.[137]
The idea that the pre-requisites of evolution could simply ‘arise’, perhaps from some ‘warm little pond’ of chemicals as Darwin hypothesized, is known as abiogenesis, from the Greek a (without), bios (life) and ginomai (to form). The concept is popularly known today under the rubric of the hypothetical ‘primal soup’, and simply means the supposed naturalistic origin of life from non-life. For example, Isaac Asimov confidently asserts: ‘molecules in the ocean grew gradually more complicated until, eventually, some molecule was somehow formed that could bring about the organization of simpler molecules into another molecule just like itself. With that, life began. . . gradually evolving to the present state of affairs . . .’[138] The way Asimov presents it, the naturalistic origin of life sounds like established history. But as Flew’s comments indicate, it isn’t. A recent New Scientist cover story on ‘The 10 Biggest Mysteries of Life’ (New Scientist, 4th September 2004) included the question ‘How did life begin?’ as one of the ‘biggest unanswered questions’ in biology. As Alan Hayward says of abiogenesis: ‘It all sounds so simple, and so plausible – as long as you know nothing about microbiology.’[139]
The concept of abiogenesis was originally held by ancient Greek thinkers such as Anaximander and Aristotle, and was revived in the mid-twentieth century when Stanley Miller and Harold Urey recreated in the laboratory what they believed to be an accurate representation of the early earth’s atmosphere, and managed (whilst mostly producing oils and tars) to produce some amino acids by passing an electric spark through their mixture of gases. If the extrapolation from this experiment to the viability of the naturalistic origin of life from non-life were sound, one could still ask: ‘What accounts for the existence of a “primal soup” with the correct ‘recipe’ for life?’ The answer, as Benjamin Wiker points out, would track back to the finely tuned laws of nature, and hence track back to design: ‘Since biological evolution depends on stellar evolution . . . the necessity of fine-tuning for biological evolution has already been proven. Even now, Darwinism cannot claim to be designer-free.’[140] A finely tuned ‘primal soup’ suggests an intelligent ‘Primal Cook’! However, ‘The “prebiotic soup hypothesis,” popularized by Miller’s experiment, came under withering criticism from chemists for ignoring the role of competing and destructive cross-reactions. . . that would be expected in any hypothetical ocean or pond.’[141] Moreover, ‘Miller and Urey’s experiment only works as long as oxygen is absent and certain critical ratios of hydrogen and carbon dioxide are maintained.’[142] As Dean L. Overman explains: ‘The presence of even a small amount of oxygen, assiduously avoided in the laboratories of these experiments, would prevent the formation of amino acids and nucleotides. . .’[143] Of course, if oxygen were not present, the molecules of life would have been unprotected from deadly ultraviolet radiation: ‘What we have then is a sort of “Catch 22” situation. If we have oxygen we have no organic compounds, but if we don’t have oxygen we have none either.’[144] Scientists now think that oxygen was present in the early earth’s atmosphere, and that ‘the atmosphere of the early earth was mostly made up of carbon dioxide and ammonia [meaning that the Miller-Urey] experiment was not relevant to origin of life scenarios.’[145] Hurbert P. Yockey comments: ‘The “Warm little pond” scenario was invented ad hoc as a materialistic reductionist explanation of the origin of life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will remain ad hoc until such evidence is found.’[146]
These problems aside: ‘The information filled molecules of life are much more complex and structured than previously thought.’[147] Denyse O’Leary reports how: ‘Darwin thought that the world under the microscope consisted of simple jellies and crystals that could easily form randomly. He could not have been more wrong. It was only with the dawn of biochemistry in the 1950’s – when scientists were able to look into cells deeply and in detail – that they realized how wrong he was.’[148] Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Beadle reports that DNA ‘was believed by many to be a rather monotonous polymer built of four kinds of nucleotide units arranged in segments of four that were repeated manifold’.[149] According to fellow Nobel winner Max Delbruck: ‘it was believed that DNA was a stupid substance.’[150] However, we now know that DNA is very far from being a monotonous polymer, but is in fact an exceedingly complex and ‘clever’ substance. The products of tightly controlled and unrealistic laboratory experiments fall far short of the complex protein molecules required for life: ‘Miller’s optimism has now all but evaporated, as experiments based on his model have failed to produce a number of components essential to life.’[151] Varghese reports: ‘Miller acknowledges today that the real problem is making polymers – like proteins – from simple chemicals like amino acids, something that still eludes experimentalists.’[152] Mark Shea remarks:
it has always struck me as odd to point to the immense concentration of intellect, will, technology and energy it has taken to do relatively small things in the extremely specialized conditions of the lab (which nature allegedly did without benefit of any of this) and argue that this product of white-hot focus of ultra-controlling human intelligence is clear evidence that absolutely no intelligence was involved in the production of the rest of the vastly more complex life we see around us. It’s like taking years to build a tiny house of cards and then using this feat to say, ‘There! This accomplishment shows the Capitol Dome was therefore obviously the product of a hurricane in a marble quarry.’[153]
As Chemist Jonathan Sarfati writes: ‘the very roots of the alleged evolutionary tree are in very bad shape’.[154]
‘Today it takes a great deal of faith to be an honest scientist who is an atheist.’ - Walter L. Bradley[155]
What is the best explanation for the amazing molecules of life? Dawkins offers the following: ‘Nobody knows how it happened but, somehow, without violating the laws of physics and chemistry, a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying – a replicator.’[156] Here, at least, is a frank admission of ignorance: ‘I would have to be more of a chemist that I am to know how likely it is that you are going to get such molecules,’ says Dawkins, ‘I don’t know how difficult it would be to achieve that chemically.’[157] Can we consider for a moment how significant and amazing it is that Professor Dawkins, who regularly accuses theists of blind faith and who exhorts people to always ask, ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’,[158] should believe in what he calls the sine qua non of evolution without a shred of evidence?[159] As Johnson complains: ‘The naturalistic evolution of life from prebiotic chemicals and its subsequent naturalistic evolution into complexity. . . is assumed as a matter of first principle. . .’[160] Benjamin Wiker comments that Dawkins’ ‘lapse into an irrational faith in the powers of chance to avoid [intelligent design]. . . is not evidence itself but a telling lapse into a materialist credo quia absurdum est’.[161] In fact, there doesn’t appear to be anything like sufficient evidence for abiogenesis, for as Walter L. Bradley observes: ‘the origin of a sophisticated system that is both rich in information and capable of reproducing itself has absolutely stymied origin-of-life scientists’.[162]
Not only does naturalistic science lack an explanation of how life is supposed to have arrived on the cosmic scene, it actually lacks any evidence that life ‘just happened’. As G. A. Kerkut of the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Southampton writes, it is ‘a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that biogenesis did occur. . .’[163] That abiogenesis ‘just happened’, as Dawkins’ comments make clear, is a philosophical deduction entailed by the assumption of naturalism. It is, as chemist Robert Shapiro writes: ‘mythology rather than science’.[164]
Manfred Schidlowsky argues that: ‘the very fact that life sprang up on earth constitutes conclusive proof of a primary reducing environment [i.e. one like the Miller-Urey experiment used] since the latter is a necessary prerequisite for chemical evolution and spontaneous origin of life’.[165] But as Overman comments: ‘This is a good example of. . . circular reasoning. . . in which evidence is ignored in order to maintain a myth, and the conclusion is set forth in the premise.’[166] While theists and agnostics have a healthy bias in favour of naturalistic explanations when these are adequate, they cannot treat such a circular deduction as the unquestionable and absolute certainty that it must be for Dawkins. Rather, they will be open to following the evidence.
Stephen C. Meyer calculates that: ‘the probability of constructing a rather short functional protein at random [is] so small as to be effectively zero. . .’[167] In other words, not only does naturalistic science lack an explanation of how the chemistry of life arose, or evidence to show that life ‘just happened’, it also flies in the face of evidence that life didn’t ‘just’ happen! As Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen note: ‘a slowly emerging line or boundary has appeared which shows observationally the limits of what can be expected from matter and energy left to themselves’.[168]
Dawkins, who affirms that ‘We can accept a certain amount of luck in our explanations, but not too much’[169], admits that the chance origin of life theory ‘may seem like a big stroke of luck’;[170] but he seeks to mitigate against this admission by saying: ‘it had to happen only once. . . it may have happened on only one planet out of a billion billion planets in the universe’.[171] But this is mere optimistic hand waving. The universe ‘probably contains no more than one planet for every thousand stars’,[172] and ‘it is unlikely that there are many, if any, other earth-like planets in the universe’[173] able to sustain life.
Benjamin Wiker relates some of the finely tuned conditions that permit life on earth:
Our sun is not a typical star but is one of the 9 percent most massive stars in our galaxy, and is also very stable. Further, the sun hits the Goldilocks mean for life – neither too hot (like a blue or white star) nor too cold (like a red star) – and its peak emission is right at the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum – the very, very thin band where not only vision is possible but also photosynthesis. Earth just “happens” to have the right combination of atmospheric gases to block out almost all the harmful radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum but, strangely enough, opens like a window for visible light. Jupiter is deftly placed and sized so that it not only helps to balance the Earth’s orbit but also acts as a kind of debris magnet keeping Earth from being pummeled. Our moon is just the right size and distance to stabilize earth’s axial tilt so that we have seasonal variations but not wildly swinging temperature changes.[174]
Astronomer Hugh Ross lists 200 parameters required for a life-bearing planet. Comparing the chances of a planet falling within these parameters by chance alone with our best estimate of the total number of planets in the universe (1022) he estimates that there is ‘less than 1 chance in 10215’ of even one habitable planet existing in the universe ‘without invoking divine miracles’.[175] Elsewhere, Ross writes that: ‘fewer than a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent of all stars will have a planet capable of sustaining advanced life. Considering that the observable universe contains less than a trillion galaxies, each averaging a hundred billion stars, we can see that not even one planet would be expected, by natural processes alone, to possess the necessary conditions to sustain life.’[176] Astrobiologists Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee conclude that: ‘If some god-like being could be given the opportunity to plan a sequence of events with the express goal of duplicating our “Garden of Eden”, that power would face a formidable task. With the best intentions, but limited by natural laws and materials, it is unlikely that Earth could ever be truly replicated.’[177]
For another thing, according to Meyer, to generate a single functional protein of 150 amino acids exceeds: ‘1 chance in 10180, well beyond the most conservative estimates for the small probability bound. . . it is extremely unlikely that a random search through all the possible amino acid sequences could generate even a single relatively short functional protein in the time available since the beginning of the universe. . .’[178] In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins simply says: ‘Given enough time, anything is possible.’[179] But there simply isn’t enough time available to sustain the plausibility of abiogenesis. Professor of Mathematics at Cardiff University, Chandra Wickramasinghe, concludes: ‘Living systems could not have been generated by random processes, within a finite time-scale, in a finite universe.’[180]
Dawkins’ blithe, hand waving ignorance of the evidence against the naturalistic origin of life from non-life surely shows, as Michael Behe comments, ‘the need to treat Darwinian scenarios. . . with a hermeneutic of suspicion’.[181] Behe goes on to observe: ‘Some scientists believe so strongly in Darwinism that their critical judgments are affected, and they will unconsciously overlook pretty obvious problems with Darwinian scenarios, or confidently assert things which are objectively untrue.’[182] The evidence seems to point in quite another direction. Keith Ward takes stock of the implications of the improbabilities of life ‘just happening’: ‘It seems hugely improbable that, in the primeval seas of the planet earth, amino acids should meet and combine to form large molecular structures capable of self-replication. . . The motive for positing some sort of intelligent design is almost overwhelming.’[183]
Likewise, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe conclude:
the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. . . cannot in our view be generated by what are often called ‘natural’ processes. . . There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible. . . The correct position we think is. . . an intelligence, which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous life. . . This is tantamount to arguing that carbonaceous life was invented by noncarbonaceous intelligence. . .[184]
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe stop short of making the philosophical identification of their ‘noncarbonaceous intelligence’ with God, but note:
It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner. . . Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.[185]
Dembski’s explicit formulation of the criteria for design detection used by Dawkins naturally leads us to agree with Dawkins about Mt. Rushmore being designed. However, if we apply the very same design-detection criteria to DNA, for example, we get the very same conclusion: Design. Yet philosopher Norman L. Geisler follows the evidence while Dawkins will not:
suppose I come upon a round stratisfied stone and were asked how it came to be such. I might plausibly answer that it was once laid down by water in layers which later solidified by chemical action. One day it broke from a larger section of rock and was subsequently rounded by the natural erosional processes of tumbling in water. Suppose then. . . I come upon Mount Rushmore. . . Even if I knew nothing about the origin of the faces, would I not come immediately to believe it was an intelligent production and not the result of natural processes of erosion? Yet why should a natural cause serve for the stone but not for the faces? For this reason, namely, that when we come to inspect the faces on the mountain we perceive – what we could not discover in the stone – that. . . they convey specifically complex information. . .[186]
Thus far Dawkins agrees, and for the same reasons; but he begs-the-question in order to avoid extending that agreement to Geisler’s consistent conclusion:
Suppose also that in studying the genetic structure of a living organism, we discover that its DNA has a highly complicated and unique information code, distinguished by its specified complexity. . . would we not conclude that it most probably took intelligence to produce a living organism?[187]
To substitute the terms in Dawkins’ own argument: undirected natural causes could have done the same job. But of all the possible ways of arranging amino acids, only a tiny minority would match the biological specification for functionality. Hence, even without knowing the history of DNA, we’d estimate the odds against its occurrence by natural processes as astronomically high. But if natural processes didn’t do the job, what did? Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer has the answer:
Our experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source. . . As Quastler (1964) put it, the ‘creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.’ (p. 16). Experience teaches this obvious truth.[188]
The evidence argues for intelligent design, but Dawkins allows the philosophical dogma of naturalism to trump the evidence and shoehorn it into the naturalistically acceptable category of ‘designoid’, even though doing so requires an ad hoc redefinition of his own term that ignores his own design detection criteria.
According to Professor Richard Norman, Darwin’s core argument goes like this: Variations exist within existing populations of domesticated plants and animals. Human breeders have intelligently selected which set of characteristics get to breed, such that ‘small variations can be accumulated over many generations to produce, say, a new breed of sheep of a new variety of rose.’[189] Darwin argued that an analogous process of selection happens in nature: ‘what he calls “the struggle for existence” functions as a mechanism of selection comparable to selection and breeding by human beings.’[190]
Darwin’s analogy between intelligent and natural selection implies that a non-intelligent process is analogous to a process requiring the involvement of intelligent agents, that a process in which the offspring are exposed to harsh environmental conditions is analogous to a process in which offspring are protected from the environment, and that a process in which offspring can interbreed in the wild is analogous to a process where the breeding of offspring is carefully orchestrated. This strains credulity in itself.
Since there is ‘no clear divide’ between varieties and species, the gradual accumulation of modifications can presumably produce changes that are not just new varieties, but new species, etc. Hence, ‘continued over vast periods of time’, this process of natural selection ‘is sufficient to account for the gradual emergence of all the species of living things which have existed’.[191] As Carl Zimmer asserts: ‘If you accept microevolution, you get macroevolution for free.’[192]
To quote Professor Norman’s summary of Darwin’s argument:
The argument appears to be logically valid. Premise one is above reproach; as is premise two (in that we know changing environmental conditions can alter the proportional representation of pre-existing variations within a population of organisms). However, premise three (which really needs to go further than the level of species, and I will take this extension as read in order to avoid attacking a straw-man) is a very large and therefore inherently shaky extrapolation from premise two. As mathematician David Berlinski writes:
The most ardent creationist now accept micro-evolution as genuinely Darwinian events. They had better: such are the facts. But the grand evolutionary progressions, such as the transformation of a fish into a man, are examples of macro-evolution. They remain out of reach, accessible only at the end of an inferential trail.[194]
The further one extends an inferential trail, the less solid it becomes. Our knowledge of ‘micro-evolutionary’ changes does little to support belief in full-blown ‘macro-evolution’ (evolution beyond the level of species, and/or the evolution of new organs and body-plans). For example, after a 1977 drought in the Galapagos islands, scientists found that the surviving finches had beaks that were 4% longer and 6% deeper than the average pre-drought beak. Then, after a period of very wet conditions, scientists found that the average beak size of the surviving finches was about 1% narrower than before the drought! This is a good example of ‘micro-evolutionary’ change: ‘The change in average beak size is an example of minor variations being selected from genetic information already present in the gene pool.’[195] (Note that the change was cyclical and not in a uniform direction.) To extrapolate from such examples of minor variations within a pre-existing gene pool to the belief that ‘There is no reason why the process of natural selection which produces new varieties may not, over sufficiently long periods of time, also produce varieties so different as to constitute new species [and more]’, is rather like arguing that since an Olympic runner can cover a mile in four minutes there is no reason that he may not cover sixteen miles in sixty-four minutes! Obviously not. There are limiting factors that mean this extrapolation is unrealistic:
Think of an archer shooting an arrow. Let’s say that the arrow travels at about 150 MPH. So, in half an hour, it should be able to hit a target 75 miles away, right? Obviously, that won’t happen. There are limiting forces like friction and gravity that dramatically slow the speed of the arrow after the first 50 yards or so.[196]
Simply assuming that there are no limiting factors does not prove that there are none! There is reason to believe that evolution might account for speciation (this hypothesis is the smallest and hence most secure extrapolation from the evidence of observed micro-evolution, and there is some circumstantial evidence in its favour[197]). However, evidence for more extensive macro-evolutionary change, especially change involving the appearance of new organs and/or new body plans, is lacking. And as David DeWolf, Stephen C. Meyer and Mark E. DeForrest observe:
Evidence from developmental biology suggests clear limits to the amount of evolutionary change that organisms can undergo, [hence there is evidence of limiting factors] casting doubt on the Darwinian theory of common descent and suggesting a reason for morphological stasis in the fossil record.[198]
‘As an illustration of the fossil record, the Tree of Life is a dismal failure. But it is a good representation of Darwin’s theory.’ – Jonathan Wells[199]
The fossil record does little to endorse Darwinian gradualism, as Robert C. Koons observes:
the fossil record of the family tree of evolution is so gappy that it consists of a great deal more gap than tree. This is especially true where the record is most complete, as in the case of the invertebrates. The missing links that have been found, like the Archaeopteryx or Australopithecus, are better described as mosaics: re-combinations of adaptations found in what are assumed to be related families. Given that the forms of life found in the fossil record are more numerous and variegated than those we find alive today, it is not at all surprising that we should find fossil forms that are ‘intermediate’ in some vague sense between living forms. What we don’t find is the kind of continuous, seamless web of transformation of adaptive structures that would be needed to confirm the truth of Darwinism.[200]
Robert F. Dehaan and John L. Wiester report that: ‘each phylum is self-bounded. Indeed, there are no transitional forms between them, as predicted by Darwinian theory.’[201] David B. Kitts writes that:
Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of seeing evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.[202]
Kitts concludes: ‘The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record’[203], but this is to argue from the assumption of macroevolution to an ad hoc explanation for the poor fit between theory and evidence, and to accept the fact that the fossil record fails to verify Darwin’s theory. The fossil record has become something for evolutionary theory to explain away rather than something that provides positive support for macro-evolution.
Moreover, according to Luther Sunderland: ‘The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing ever wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to the imperfection of the fossil record.’[204] With around 250 million catalogued fossils, representing some 250,000 species, ‘the problem does certainly not appear to be an imperfect record. Many scientists have conceded that the fossil record is sufficiently complete to provide an accurate portrait of the geologic record.’[205] For example, Niles Eldridge writes: ‘The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history – not the artefact of a poor fossil record.’[206] University of Chicago Professor of geology David Raup says:
we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil records has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.[207]
A study published in the February 26th 1999 issue of Science indicates that ‘the fossil record is virtually complete in what it has to reveal.’[208] The study combined data analysis of hundreds of mammal fossils with a mathematical model of evolutionary branching patterns in an attempt to determine the completeness of the fossil record prior to 65 million years ago:
The researchers concluded that the fossil preservation rate is high – high enough that the probability that modern mammals existed more than 65 million years ago without leaving fossils is just .2 percent (two tenths of one percent). Study author Christine Janis, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, proclaimed, ‘The fossil record for that period is good enough for us to say that those species would most likely have been preserved if they had been there.’[209]
Phillip E. Johnson summarises the fossil situation:
the fossil evidence is very difficult to reconcile with the Darwinist scenario. If all living species descended from common ancestors by an accumulation of tiny steps, then there once must have existed a veritable universe of transitional intermediate forms linking the vastly different organisms of today, such as moths, trees, and humans, with their hypothetical common ancestors. From Darwin’s time to the present, palaeontologists have hoped to find the ancestors and transitional intermediates and trace the course of macroevolution. Despite claims of success in some areas, however, the results have been on the whole disappointing. That the fossil record is in important respects hostile to a Darwinist interpretation has long been known to insiders as the ‘trade secret of palaeontology.’ The secret is now coming out into the open.[210]
The fossil record not only fails to support Darwinism, it actually contradicts Darwinism. This particular Darwinian skeleton is out of the fossil cupboard! As Johnson’s comments indicate, the evidence is not uniformly inimical to macro-evolution, but even in those cases where evolutionists can claim to find evidence for macro-evolution, things are not open-and-shut. Consider Niles Eldridge’s comments, made in the context of the famous ‘horse sequence’ of fossils, where it turns out that ‘the species that were supposed to align in an evolutionary lineage actually persist unchanged and co-exist in the fossil record’[211]:
There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example. . . is the exhibition on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in text-book after text-book. Now I think that this is lamentable, particularly when people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff.[212]
Hence, while some fossil evidence might be made to fit the assumption of macroevolution, when taken as a whole, the fossil evidence can hardly be said to support turning that assumption into a conclusion.
Steve M. Stanley, professor of paleobiology at John Hopkins University, confirms that ‘The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phylitic evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.’[213] Gareth Nelson, a senior zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History, likewise admits that ‘evidence, or proof, of origins. . . of all the major groups of life, of all the minor groups of life, indeed of all the species – is weak or nonexistent when measured on an absolute scale.’[214] Robert Carroll observes that as our knowledge of the fossil record has increased over the past century is has only emphasised: ‘how wrong Darwin was in extrapolating the pattern of long-term evolution from that observed within populations and species.’[215] Indeed, Mark Hartwig points out that:
According to Darwinism, new phyla are produced by the gradual divergence of species. As species split off from each other over time, they eventually become so dissimilar as to constitute a whole new body plan. Therefore, we should see new species slowly appearing over time, followed by the much slower appearance of new phyla – what Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould called a ‘cone of increasing diversity.’ Instead, the cone is upside down.[216]
Not only is Darwin’s extrapolation inherently risky given its small evidential base, the fossil record contradicts it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ‘Cambrian explosion’.
‘Darwinism cannot explain the Cambrian explosion. . . we need a new theory.’ – Dr. Jun-Yuan Chen, palaeontologist, Nanking Institute of Geology.[217]
The contradiction between Darwinian theory and the fossil evidence is hardly surprising when one considers the fact that: ‘empirically derived estimates of mutation rates in extant organisms suggest that the kind of large-scale morphological changes that occurred in the Cambrian would have required far more time than the duration of the explosion. . .’[218] Francis J. Beckwith reports how:
evolutionists admit that the record does not reveal gradual development from simple to more complex species, as predicted by Darwin. Rather, in what is called the ‘Cambrian explosion’ the record reveals the sudden appearance at differing times of information-rich organisms within a hierarchical diversity of species with apparently no precursors. Their body plans with their improbable arrangement of parts including the information content of their DNA. . . exhibit the characteristics of specified complexity, intelligent design. Hence, some design theorists employ the facts of the Cambrian explosion in their arguments for ID. . .[219]
For example, in a paper on ‘The Origin of Biological Information and The Higher Taxonomic Categories’, published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (volume 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239), a peer-reviewed biology journal published at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.[220], Dr. Stephen C. Meyer treats ‘the problem of the origination of the higher taxonomic groups as a manifestation of a deeper problem, namely, the problem of the origin of the information. . . necessary to generate morphological novelty.’ Meyer observes that an animal ‘form’ represents: ‘a highly specific and constrained arrangement of material components (among a much larger set of possible arrangements).’ This understanding of ‘form’ reveals a link with ‘the notion of information in its most theoretically general sense. . . producing organismal form by definition requires the generation of information.’ Applying these insights to the Cambrian explosion, Meyer notes that:
The Cambrian explosion represents a remarkable jump in the specified complexity or ‘complex specified information’ (CSI) of the biological world [because] Functionally more complex animals [as appeared in the Cambrian] require more cell types to perform their more diverse functions. New cell types require many new and specialized proteins. New proteins, in turn, require new genetic information. Thus an increase in the number of cell types implies (at minimum) a considerable increase in the amount of specified genetic information.
Studies of modern animals suggests the sponges which appeared in the late Precambrian would have required just five cell types: ‘whereas the more complex animals that appeared in the Cambrian (e.g. arthropods) would have required fifty or more cell types.’ Meyer argues that:
whether one envisions the evolutionary process beginning with a non-coding region of the genome or a pre-existing functional gene, the functional specificity and complexity of proteins impose some very stringent limitations on the efficacy of mutation and selection. In the first case, function must arise first, before natural selection can act to favor a novel variation. In the second case, function must be continuously maintained in order to prevent deleterious (or lethal) consequences to the organisms and to allow further evolution. Yet the complexity and functional specificity of proteins implies that both these conditions will be extremely difficult to meet. Therefore, the neo-Darwinian mechanism appears to be inadequate to generate the new information present in the novel genes and proteins that arise with the Cambrian animals.
Moreover:
Mutations in genes that are expressed late in the development of an organism will not affect the body plan. . . Thus, events expressed early in the development of organisms have the only realistic chance of producing large-scale macroevolutionary change. . . Yet recent studies in developmental biology make clear that mutations expressed early in development typically have deleterious effects.
This is because: ‘processes of development are tightly integrated spatially and temporally such that changes early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream.’ J.F. McDonald has called this problem ‘a great Darwinian paradox’:[221]
McDonald notes that genes that are observed to vary within natural populations do not lead to major adaptive changes, while genes that could cause major changes – the very stuff of macroevolution – apparently do not vary. In other words, mutations of a kind that macroevolution doesn’t need (namely, viable genetic mutations in DNA expressed late in development) do occur, but those that it does need (namely, beneficial body plan mutations expressed early in development) apparently don’t occur. According to Darwin natural selection cannot act until favourable variations arise in a population. Yet there is no evidence from developmental genetics that the kind of variations required by neo-Darwinism – namely, favourable body plan mutations – ever occur.
Given the inadequacy of evolutionary explanations of the CSI increase represented in the Cambrian explosion, and given our every-day experience of intelligent agents as sufficient causal explanations for such increases in CSI, Meyer concludes that: ‘experience-based analysis of the causal powers of various explanatory hypotheses suggests purposive or intelligent design as a causally adequate – and perhaps the most causally adequate – explanation for the origin of the complex specified information required to build the Cambrian animals and the novel forms the represent.’
In their paper ‘The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang’[222], Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien observe that:
When we compare the pattern of fossilization in the actual fossil record to the expected pattern given the neo-Darwinian mechanism, we encounter significant dissonance. Neither the pace nor the mode of evolutionary change match neo-Darwinian expectations. Indeed, the neo-Darwinism mechanism cannot explain the geologically sudden origin or the major body plans to which the term ‘the Cambrian explosion’ principally refers. Further, the absence of plausible transitional organisms, the pattern of disparity preceding diversity, and the pattern of phyla first appearance all run counter to the neo-Darwinian expectations. Although. . . the newer punctuationist model of evolutionary change appears more consonant with some aspects of the Cambrian/Precambrian fossil record, it too, fails to account for the extreme absence of transitional intermediaries, the top-down pattern of diversity, and the pattern of phylum first appearance. . .[223]
They note how ‘These problems underscore a more significant theoretical difficulty for evolutionary theory generally, namely, the insufficiency of attempts to extrapolate microevolutionary mechanisms to explain macroevolutionary development’[224], and go on to argue that:
we see in the fossil record several distinctive features or hallmarks of designed systems, including: (1) a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information; (2) a top-down pattern of innovation in which large-scale morphological disparity arises before small-scale diversity; (3) the persistence of structural (or ‘morphological’) disparities between separate organized systems; and (4) the discrete or simultaneous emergence of functionally integrated parts within novel organizational body plans. . . in other words, intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation of the specific features of the Cambrian explosion. . .[225]
‘I have no theological problem with random mutation as the vehicle of evolution; it still leaves open the need for a source of nature and its laws. Similarly I have no problem with the existence of unicorns. I just find both beliefs to be equally fanciful.’ – Roy Abraham Varghese[226]
Phillip E. Johnson argues that none of the examples of microevolution: ‘provides any persuasive reason for believing that natural selection can produce new species, new organs, or other major changes. . .’[227] Darwin’s bold extrapolation from observed micro-evolutionary change to the hypothesis that macroevolution accounts for all organic variation simply assumed that there are no limiting factors analogous to the limiting factors that came into play in the story about the Olympic runner or the story about the archer; hence Professor Norman is building a house on sand when he asserts that: ‘the Darwinian explanation shows how . . . these mechanisms can account for the emergence of species [and more]’.[228] By way of contrast, biologist Keith Thompson of Oxford University says that: ‘no one has satisfactorily demonstrated a mechanism at the population genetic level by which innumerable very small. . . changes could accumulate rapidly to produce large changes: a process for the origin of the magnificently improbable from the ineffably trivial’.[229]
At best, the Darwinian explanation suggests how the observed mechanism of natural selection might account for the emergence of species (and more) if there are no limiting factors that invalidate what is at any rate a risky extrapolation from the available data. As David L. Hull of the University of Wisconsin observes: ‘The leading philosophers contemporary with Darwin, John Herchet, William Whewell, and John Stewart Mill, were equally adamant in their conviction that the Origin of Species was just one mass of conjecture.’[230] They were right. As Nancy Pearcey and Charles Colson comment: ‘It was a bold speculation, but no one should be misled into thinking it was more than that. . . It is a conjecture, an extrapolation going far beyond any observed facts.’[231]
Darwin’s ‘risky’ hypothesis (to borrow a term from philosopher of science Karl Popper) was a good scientific hypothesis that was well worth checking out, but 150 years of checking have indicated that Darwin was at best only partly right: ‘Yes, small-scale evolution is a fact’, writes molecular biophysicist Cornelius G. Hunter, ‘but there is no reason to think it is unbounded. In fact, all our data suggests that small-scale evolution cannot produce the sort of large-scale change Darwinism requires.’[232] On the basis of the fossil record, Dehaan and Wiester conclude: ‘The Darwinian mechanism of selection and variation does provide a plausible explanation for minor variations among species, such as the variations of shapes in finches’ beaks. But this mechanism plays no discernable part in the formation of major innovations’[233] As Roger Lewin stated in his summary of the Chicago ‘Macroevolution’ conference in 1980:
The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At risk of doing violence to the position of some people at this meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.[234]
Today, Cornelius G. Hunter reports that:
if one looks in the research journals, one finds that evolutionists are unsure whether small-scale evolution could possibly account for the needed large-scale change. . . From genetics to palaeontology and other disciplines, the message is that evolution’s necessary large-scale change does not appear to be a simple case of small-scale change extrapolated over time.[235]
Hence Jonathan Well’s argues that:
common ancestry is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy. When you get to the level of phyla, the major animal groups, it’s a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say it’s disconfirmed. The evidence just doesn’t support it.[236]
The extrapolation from observed microevolution to an explanatorily sufficient macroevolution (based on the assumption that there are no limiting factors) is contradicted by our knowledge of mutation rates, developmental biology, and the fossil record. Macro-evolution just doesn’t seemed to have happened. As Johnson comments:
Claims that natural selection is a force of stupendous creative power, which is capable of crafting the immense complexity of biological structures that living creatures possess in such abundance, are not supported by experimental evidence or observation. . . Observational evidence (e.g. the famous peppered moth study) shows mainly cyclical changes in the relative frequency of characteristics already present in the population. There is circumstantial evidence pointing to somewhat more impressive changes (e.g. circumpolar gulls, Hawaiian
