The Contemporary Argument For Design: An Overview
THE CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENT
FOR DESIGN: AN OVERVIEW
Jay W. Richards
For over fifty years the British philosopher Antony Flew was the English-speaking world's most intellectually serious public atheist. He first engaged Christian apologist C. S. Lewis at Oxford in 1950 and continued to pursue scholarly defenses of atheism for over five decades. His basic argument was always the same: there just wasn't enough evidence to believe in God. Then, at age eighty-one, he changed his mind.
So what did it for Flew? It wasn't a religious conversion. In a 2004 interview with philosopher Gary Habermas, Flew attributes his new view not to any religious text but to scientific evidence, in particular, evidence of intelligent design: “I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.”1 In an interview with the Associated Press (9 December 2004), Flew said his ideas “have some similarity with American ‘intelligent design’ theorists.”
Flew's change of mind may be the most visible result so far of the work of the intelligent design (ID) movement. It's also a microcosm of the changing state of the debate over the contemporary design argument. Hanging in the balance is the status of the materialist worldview that has dominated the commanding heights of culture for over a century. This is good news for anyone interested in Christian apologetics.
The Materialist Legacy
Science left the nineteenth century with a simple view of the universe. Too simple, as it turns out. The official materialistic gloss on natural science went something like this: (1) The universe has always existed, and so we need not address the question of its origin. (2) Everything in the universe, large and small, submits to a few well-understood, deterministic laws. (3) Life initially turned up as a result of luck and chemistry. (4) Cells, for their part, are basically little blobs of Jell-O. (5) Virtually all those complicated adaptations of organisms result from a starkly simple process called natural selection: this almost miraculously creative process merely seizes and passes along those minor, random variations within a population that provide a survival advantage.
The positivist interpretation of science (and of knowledge generally) provided indispensable support to this picture of the world. Positivism, a program designed to purge metaphysics from science, forbade scientists from appealing to an intelligent agency when trying to explain either the features of the natural world or the natural world itself. Such a stricture obviously applied to a divine agent, but it eventually became clear that it applied to agents in general. Everything, at bottom, was thought to be reducible to the impersonal interactions of matter following predictable patterns, and nothing else mattered. In fact, many senior physicists had concluded that physics was basically a complete science. There was little left to do except tidy up here and there.
But almost as soon as this Procrustean bed was made, the real world began to kick out. The startling revelations of the quantum realm suggested that the world was not as submissive as the materialists had expected. Then astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was redshifted, indicating that the universe is expanding. This and other details suggested the universe had come into existence in the finite past—that it has an age. This flatly contradicted the earlier picture of an eternal and self-existing cosmos.
Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, physicists began to notice that the universal constants of physics, such as the forces of gravity and electromagnetism, seemed to be “finely-tuned” for the existence of complex life. To astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle, this suggested the activity of a “superintellect.”2
Then there is the niggling problem of the origin of biological information, which stubbornly transcends its chemical medium in the same way the letters and sentences of a book transcend the chemistry of ink and paper. We see this starkly in molecular biology where the presence of information encoded along the DNA molecule look suspiciously like an extraordinarily sophisticated computer code for producing proteins, the three-dimensional building blocks of all life. Move up a level, and we find complex and functionally integrated machines that look inaccessible to the Darwinian mechanism. Moreover, such structures look much like the systems produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function and bring it into being.
Then there is the three-dimensional complexity of animal body plans, which so outstrips our understanding of the informational systems present at the lower levels. Finally, there are human agents themselves, which are so unexpected in materialist terms, that many actually try to deny their existence—another deliverance of materialist reasoning that has obvious logical problems.
Add to this evidence the philosophical problems with positivism itself. Perhaps the most severe one was this: positivists claimed that only statements that can be verified by the senses are meaningful or at least scientific. That statement, however, cannot itself be verified by the senses. This means that, by its own accounting, it's meaningless or at least unscientific. At the same time any criterion liberal enough to avoid contradiction and accommodate actual scientific practice let metaphysics in as well. Such problems eventually led to the demise of the entire positivist enterprise. The positivists themselves openly admitted this. For instance, in a BBC radio interview, Brian McGee asked A. J. Ayer, the father of logical positivism, what the main defect of positivism was. Ayer replied that the main problem was that it was “nearly all false.”3
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we look out at an utterly different world from that envisioned by the materialistic science of the late nineteenth century. It is a world charged with design, a cosmos that points beyond itself to a transcendent and intelligent cause. But the word is not out! On the contrary, the materialistic definition of science inherited from the nineteenth century still prevents us from considering this new evidence. The problem is so acute that some scientists are willing to posit an infinite panoply of unobservable universes, just to explain away the fine tuning in our universe.
This strange situation led Phillip Johnson in the 1990s to ask a singularly pregnant and subversive question: if the materialistic definition of science and the scientific evidence are in conflict, should we go with the definition or the evidence? To ask the question, as they say, is to answer it. Scientia means “knowledge.” The essence of natural science is the search for knowledge of the natural world. Knowledge is an intrinsic good. If we are properly scientific, then we will seek to be open to the natural world and not decide beforehand what it's allowed to reveal.
The materialistic definition of science is no mere philosophical trifle. It dictates what may be discussed, funded, and published, at least within official circles. This cultural and institutional power makes materialistic science look like an unyielding structure, extending invincibly into the clouds like Jack's Beanstalk. But if the evidence is as I have described it, then that monolith must surely have its weak spots. So it must and does, just where it doesn't fit the natural world. This suggests that the design argument at the beginning of the twenty-first century has a new set of evidence on which it rests.
The Broadening Case for Intelligent Design
Some of the best-known “signs of design” are information-rich molecules like DNA, and tiny molecular machines, such as the bacterial flagellum, which biochemist Michael Behe immortalized in his best-selling 1996 book, Darwin's Black Box.4 Behe argued that the flagellum and many other molecular machines are “irreducibly complex.” They're like a mousetrap. Without all of their fundamental parts, they don't work. Natural selection can only build systems one small step at a time, by traversing a path in which each step provides a present survival advantage. It can't select for a future function. Only intelligent agents possess such foresight.
But not all of the important work is in natural science per se. Some of the work is conceptual. Materialism, after all, is a philosophy, even if its contemporary purveyors try to confuse it with science. Thus, the modern design argument has both scientific and philosophical parts. Much of the work involves dismantling the bankrupt philosophy of materialism.
For most of Western history, detecting the activities of intelligent agents has been a mostly intuitive enterprise. Books such as The Design Inference5 by philosopher William Dembski have dramatically strengthened the case for design by bringing it into the publicly accessible realm of objective argument and empirical evidence, and out of the murkier realm of intuition.
A New Design Argument
Still more recently, growing evidence in astronomy has revealed that even in a finely tuned universe many local things have to go right to build a single habitable planet. (And even once you have an environment suitable for life, you don't get life automatically.) Guillermo Gonzalez and I argue in The Privileged Planet6 that, suspiciously, those requirements for habitability also provide the best overall conditions for making scientific discoveries. In other words the places compatible with complex observers like us are the same places that provide the best overall conditions for observing. You might expect this if the universe were designed for discovery but not if you were a card-carrying materialist. Let me explain this in a bit more detail.
Read any book on the history of scientific discovery, and you'll find magnificent tales of human ingenuity, persistence, and dumb luck. What you probably won't see is any discussion of the conditions necessary for such feats. A discovery requires a person to do the discovering and a set of circumstances that makes it possible. Without both nothing gets discovered.
Although scientists don't often discuss it, the degree to which we can “measure” the wider universe from our earthly home—and not just our immediate surroundings—is surprising. Few have considered what science would have been like in, say, a different planetary environment. Still fewer have realized that pursuing that question systematically leads to unanticipated evidence for intelligent design.
Think of the following features of our earthly home: the transparency of Earth's atmosphere in the visual region of the spectrum, shifting crustal plates, a large moon, and our particular location in the solar system, and our solar system's location within the Milky Way Galaxy. Without each of these assets, we would have a hard time learning about the universe. It is not idle speculation to ask how our view of the universe would be impaired if, for example, our home world were perpetually covered by thick clouds. After all, our solar system contains several examples of such worlds. Just think of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's moon, Titan. These would be crummy places to do astronomy.
We can make similar comparisons at the galactic level. If we were closer to our galaxy's center or one of its major, and dustier, spiral arms, for instance—the extra dust would impede our view of the distant universe. In fact, we probably would have missed one of the greatest discoveries in the history of astronomy: the faint cosmic microwave background radiation. That discovery was the linchpin in deciding between the two main cosmological theories of the twentieth century. Underlying this debate was one of the most fundamental questions we can ask about the universe: is it eternal, or did it have a beginning?
The steady state theory posited an eternal universe, while the big bang theory implied a beginning. For a few decades there was no direct evidence to decide between the two. But the big bang theory predicted a remnant radiation left over from the earlier, hotter, and denser period of cosmic history. The steady state theory made no such prediction. As a result, when scientists discovered the cosmic background radiation in 1965, it was the death knell for steady state. But that discovery could not have been made just anywhere. Our special vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy allowed us to choose between these two profoundly different views of origins.
In The Privileged Planet we discuss these and many comparable examples to show that we inhabit a planet privileged for scientific observation and discovery. But there's more to the story. Not only is the Earth a privileged place for discovery; it is also a privileged place for life. It is the connection between life and discovery that we think suggests purpose and not dumb luck.
I mentioned above that physicists and cosmologists began realizing decades ago that the values of the constants of physics—features of the universe that are the same everywhere—must be close to their actual values for life to be possible. As a result, they began talking about the universe being fine-tuned for life. And some have even begun to suggest that fine tuning implies a fine-tuner.
It's only more recently that astrobiologists began learning that even in our fine-tuned universe, many other local things must go just right to get a habitable planetary environment.
If you were a cosmic chef, your recipe for cooking up a habitable planet would have many ingredients. You would need a rocky planet large enough to hold on to a substantial atmosphere and oceans of water and to retain internal heat for billions of years. You would need the right kind of atmosphere. You would need a large moon to stabilize the tilt of the planet's rotation on its axis. You would need the planet to have a nearly circular orbit around a main sequence star similar to our sun. You would need to give that planet the right kind of planetary neighbors within its star system. And you would need to put that system far from the center, edges, and spiral arms of a galaxy like the Milky Way. You would need to cook it during a narrow window of time in the history of the universe … and so on. This is a partial list, but you get the idea.
This evidence is becoming well-known among scientists interested in the question of life in the universe. Researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), for instance, are especially interested in knowing what life needs. That knowledge would allow them to determine their chances of finding another communicating civilization. Unfortunately for SETI researchers, the odds are not looking promising. Recent evidence favors the so-called Rare Earth hypothesis (named after a book written by Donald Brownlee and Peter Ward in 2000).7 The theory posits that planets hosting simple life may be common, but planets with complex life are rare.
We do not yet know if we are alone in the universe. The universe is a big place with vast resources. Astrobiology research has not yet matured to the point where we can assign precise probabilities to all the factors needed to make a planet habitable. We cannot yet state with certainty whether they exhaust all the available resources. Perhaps the universe is big enough that at least one habitable planet would have emerged by chance—or perhaps not. In the meantime, it's difficult to make a strong case for intelligent design based merely on the conclusion that habitable planets are rare.
That said, we do think there is evidence for design in the neighborhood. For, as we argue in The Privileged Planet, there is a suspicious pattern between the needs of life and the needs of science. The same narrow conditions that make a planet habitable for complex life also make it the best place overall for making a wide range of scientific discoveries. In other words, if we compare our local environment with other, less hospitable environments, we find a striking coincidence: observers find themselves in the best places overall for observing.
For instance, the atmosphere that complex life needs is also an atmosphere that is transparent to the most scientifically useful “light.” The geology and planetary system that life needs is also the best overall for allowing that life to reconstruct events from the past. And the most habitable region of the galaxy and the most habitable time in cosmic history are also the best place and time overall for doing astronomy and cosmology. If the universe is merely a blind concatenation of atoms colliding with atoms and nothing else, you wouldn't expect this pattern. You would expect it, on the other hand, if the universe is designed for discovery. By itself, this argument is quite suggestive. But add it to the evidence for design from other fields of science, and you have the ingredients for a powerful and contemporary argument for design.
The Design Argument and Apologetics
Some might think this is all of merely academic interest since at best this is an argument for mere design rather than for Christianity per se. Some Christians have argued that intelligent design arguments “don't go far enough.” For them the case of Antony Flew might look like exhibit A. When Flew says he believes in “God,” he doesn't mean he's put his trust in the God and Father of Jesus Christ. He's referring to the generic “God of the Philosophers”—a First Cause, postulated on the basis of evidence and rational argument. Although he says he remains open to the possibility of a special revelation, he certainly hasn't undergone a full conversion to Christianity. So the critic might ask, what good is the design argument for Christian apologetics?
I think this concern, though understandable, is mistaken. Certainly none of the arguments for intelligent design can establish that God became incarnate in Jesus, died to save us from our sins, and was raised from the dead. That's because we don't learn these things by studying natural science. These are historical claims so evidence for them will have to be drawn from history. But it doesn't follow that design arguments are problematic. Contemporary intelligent design arguments appeal not to the book of Scripture or even historical evidence but simply to the book of nature. They appeal to publicly available evidence from the natural world, especially the natural sciences. The Bible itself tells us that the natural world reveals some things about God (Ps 19:1-4, Rom 1:20). That doesn't mean that nature reveals everything.
Nevertheless, the modern design argument still has profound apologetic value, if only as a ground-clearing operation. Success for the design argument would mean defeat for what is surely the chief obstacle to Christian belief in the modern world: scientific materialism. Just imagine how much easier apologetics would be if it were widely taken for granted that the materialist worldview was defunct.
More strongly, I think one can make a cumulative case argument for theism based on the evidence for design in biology, astronomy, physics, and cosmology. In fact, it was just such a case that persuaded the world's leading atheist, Antony Flew, that there is a God. And, to state the obvious, to move from atheism to theism is to move toward Christianity. For apologetics, that's a move in the right direction. From there the Christian apologist can introduce other lines of argument, such as a historical defense of Christ's resurrection. Surely such a defense is easier to make if God's existence is granted.
The case for intelligent design can't establish everything Christians believe in. But it's a valuable first step. If you're interested in apologetics, then you should recognize the progress made on the design argument for what it is: very good news.
1 “My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: A Discussion between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas,” Philosophia Christi 6/2 (2004): 197—211. See this interview in “Atheist Becomes Theist: Exclusive Interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew,” http://www.biola.edu/antony-flew/.
2 Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science (November 1981): 8-12.
3 B. McGee, ed., Men of Ideas (London: BBC, 1978), 131.
4 Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996).
5 William Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
6 Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004).
7 Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Springer, 2000).