Intelligent Design became an informal “movement” about twenty-five years ago. In 1990, the lawyer and Darwin-skeptic Norman Macbeth unexpectedly received in the mail a manuscript from the U. C. Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson. He questioned Darwinism in much the same way that Macbeth had in his bookDarwin Retried. Not long after that, Johnson’s manuscript was published asDarwin on Trial(1991). It’s convenient to think of the intelligent design [ID] movement as beginning with that book.
Some of ID’s leading researchers soon joined Phillip Johnson and gave him their full support. Here are seven, in alphabetical order: Michael Behe, William Dembski, David Klinghoffer, Stephen Meyer, Paul A. Nelson, Richard Sternberg, and Jonathan Wells. Today, many more names could be added. Discovery Institute also opened its doors in 1991.
Others say that claims about intelligent design began earlier—in the 1980s. The (atheist) astronomer Fred Hoyle used the term in 1982, and in 1984, three scientists, Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, publishedThe Mystery of Life’s Origin. They argued for an “intelligent cause” behind the origin of the information in DNA.In 1861, Charles Darwin referred to intelligent design, but in a way that Richard Dawkins surely would have liked and admired. Here’s Darwin:
One cannot look at this Universe with all living productions & man without believing that all has been intelligently designed; yet when I look to each individual organism, I can see no evidence of this.1
And here’s Dawkins: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”2InThe Origin of Species, Darwin did not address the problem of how life began, beyond saying that it was “breathed” into some primordial form. Later, in an 1871 letter to his friend J. D. Hooker, he said that life may have begun in a “warm little pond.” Darwin’s allies have basically accepted that because they don’t have anything better to offer.
To this day, the origin of life remains a mystery. No one has been able to create life, whether in a warm little pond or in a test tube—but not for lack of trying. Nita Sahei, a professor at the University of Akron and an origin-of-life researcher, listed some of the types of molecules that would have to be coordinated to form life, including (as she put it) “four nucleotides, twenty amino acids, a few lipids… several clays and other minerals.”3In a 2014 lecture entitled “The Origins of Life: From Geochemistry to Biochemistry,” she called the task of getting just the right components to form life in a lab “a combinatorial nightmare.” Then she said: “We need to use intelligent—not intelligent design…”4Oops, she almost invoked the forbidden theory. She was quickly rescued by another professor who told her to say “careful selection.” So she changed the wording: “We need to carefully select which nucleotides to start with, which amino acids and minerals…”5
As this intervention suggests, “intelligent design” has become unmentionable in biology departments, except as something to deny, disdain, or attack. I shall say more about biologists’ hostility to the very idea of intelligent design later in this chapter.
Meanwhile, it is more than reasonable to maintain that the origin of life did indeed require “intelligent design.” No one yet has been able to explain that origin without design. When Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins in the movieExpelled: No Intelligence Allowedhow life began, Dawkins said that he had no idea, and neither did anyone else.
Late in the Day
ONE MIGHT say that, for those who dispute Darwinism, intelligent design theory came along late in the day. One explanation is that an effective critique of Darwinism can be mounted without relying on intelligent design, just as Macbeth did inDarwin Retried. Furthermore, ID in its recent incarnation has largely depended on the discovery of DNA and its details, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Nonetheless, intelligent design adds considerably to the case against neo-Darwinism. It confronts the theory with huge improbabilities that Darwin himself could not have foreseen. Random DNA change is the only mechanism at the Darwinists’ disposal, so they must either abandon their creed or accept that highly improbable events routinely occur within the cell.
Recall that Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex a cell is. Today it is sometimes compared to a high-tech factory. But a cell is far more complex than that. For one thing, factories can’t replicate themselves.
Meanwhile, we are repeatedly told that ID can’t be right because Darwinian evolution “is a fact.” But we can search in vain for facts that establish the truth of the theory. Natural selection? It cannot create new species. Instead, it works in the Darwinian mind as a magic wand that makes problems disappear as easily as a magician’s props.
Further, natural selection is not available as a mechanism until the first replicating cell has appeared. Common descent is a deduction from Darwin’s theory, but it has never been demonstrated. Homology is a fact of nature, but it is also common in human design. Organisms are observed to vary about a mean, but never to “depart indefinitely from the original type.” And so it goes.
But one philosophy has attached itself like a limpet to Darwinism. That is the philosophy of materialism, or naturalism, and it does seem to support the theory. But it turns out that philosophical materialism severely restricts the possibilities of science. In fact, science was long promoted by Christians without any reliance on materialism. InThe Genesis of Science(2011) James Hannam elaborates on his thesis that the Christian Middle Ages launched the scientific revolution. Later, Isaac Newton, a theist, saw that design was necessary in explaining the origin of the Solar System’s planetary orbits.
ID as an Inference
INTELLIGENT DESIGN is not a deduction from a philosophy but an inference from observed facts. In everyday life we make inferences to design all the time. The philosopher William Lane Craig put it this way: “A beachcomber who comes upon a sand castle recognizes that it’s not the result of the action of the waves and the wind, but of intelligent design.”6An archaeologist excavating a site can tell the difference between a human artifact, such as a statue, and an object misshaped due to erosion. Sometimes it can be difficult to make that distinction, as with an early hand axe, but the occasional difficulty does not render the distinction itself invalid.Inferences to design are often made long after the designer has departed from the scene, or whose identity may never be known. Anyone who tried to argue that the image of four U.S. presidents on Mount Rushmore was a product of wind erosion would be judged insane. We know that they were designed, and we know that without necessarily knowing the name of the designer, the number of his assistants, or when or how the carving was done. Stonehenge? We know it was designed thousands of years ago, although we don’t know by whom. As for its purpose, that is still uncertain and debated.
We have no problem, then, in inferring human design. After all, humans design things every day. But an inference to design in nature, and biology in particular, is contrary to the unwritten rules of contemporary science. Allowing that organisms are designed would take us into forbidden territory. That reminds us of the materialist philosophy that currently presides over science, even though its role is often inexplicit.
In a purely materialistic universe design is impossible. In such a world, all we have are colliding atoms and molecules. Matter, on a materialistic theory, creates mind. Phillip Johnson once allowed that “evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you’re using naturalistic terms,” or materialistic philosophy.7Why should our everyday judgments about design be suspended in the case of living organisms? Because admitting design in biology would immediately overthrow Darwin’s theory. Its whole thrust from the beginning was to eliminate the need for a designer—to persuade us that nature could construct organisms without any “input” from a designer. That is precisely what natural selection was supposed to have achieved. But of course it didn’t.
“In order to find out what or who its designer is,” said Thomas Woodward, a historian of intelligent design, “one must go outside the narrow discipline of biology.”8
From; Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debatesby Tom Bethell
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