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What is the scientific evidence for intelligent design?

23 Comments

This article summarizes three types of evidence for intelligent design.

They are:

  1. Fine-tuning of the laws of physics to allow for advanced life
  2. Information in life
  3. Irreducible complexity

(Not discussed in the article are three other mainstream scientific arguments against naturalism, from the origin of the universe, habitability-observability convergence and the sudden origin of body plans in the fossil record)

Recall that intelligent design is based on the notion of specified complexity. A sequence of symbols is complex if it is composed of a large number of symbols. It is specified if it conforms to an independent pattern. If it is large and conforms to a pattern, then it exhibits specified complexity. Sequences that exhibit specified complexity are designed.

Examples:

  • Neither complex, nor specified: “AB”
  • Complex, not specified: “AB KN IH KML NIFCS YDH HOEHS KFSA”
  • Specified, not complex: “The”
  • Complex and specified: “Obama is the worst president ever”

Now you know more about intelligent design than 99.9% of journalists who bash intelligent design.

Here’s a snap shot of each of three basic arguments for intelligent design:

Fine-tuning

The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry to allow for advanced life is an example of extremely high levels of CSI in nature. The laws of the universe are complex because they are highly unlikely. Cosmologists have calculated the odds of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance are less than one part in 1010^123. That’s ten raised to a power of 10 with 123 zeros after it! The laws of the universe are specified in that they match the narrow band of parameters required for the existence of advanced life.

The Origin of Life

Studies of the cell reveal vast quantities of biochemical information stored in our DNA in the sequence of nucleotides.  No physical or chemical law dictates the order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA, and the sequences are highly improbable and complex. Moreover, the coding regions of DNA exhibit sequential arrangements of bases that are necessary to produce functional proteins. In other words, they are highly specified with respect to the independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis.

Irreducible complexity

One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can tested and discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function.  When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. This method has been used to detect irreducible complexity in a variety of biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum.

Now you know what the word “intelligent design” really refers to. Notice that it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, in much the same way as atheism nothing to do with science.

23 thoughts on “What is the scientific evidence for intelligent design?”

  1. I’m sure if I’m wrong on this, you can help point me to this…

    If you’re talking to someon who assumes philosophical naturalism, then isn’t fine tuning a particularly weak place to start? Under that assumption, what ever life arose from random chance, would logically only be life that could exist and survive in the conditions that it exists in, otherwise it would not have arisen and would not have survived.

    I dig the fine tuning thing a lot. It shows the great care, delicacy, power, and wonder with which God created us and the place and time in which we live.

    I just don’t think it’s going to wow someone who still holds the assumption that life can follow random chance and the right conditions.

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    1. No, it’s not weak, because naturalists are pressed into hopeless positions by the evidence.

      E.g. –
      # the universe popped into being uncaused out of absolute nothing
      # there is an unobservable multiverse filled with universes not fine-tuned for life
      # unobservable aliens evolved somewhere else and seeded the earth with life
      # we will discover a gradual tree of precursors for the Cambrian-era fossils, but not right now
      # the progress of science tomorrow will overturn all the God-friendly evidence we have today
      # computers will eventually become sufficiently complex to become conscious and act freely

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  2. Oh yes, I agree with all of that, and it’s why I rejected philosophical naturalism myself. So I’m certainly not saying that philosphical naturalism is tenable.

    BUT

    For the person who holds that view, how can fine tuning be persuasive, for the reasons I list above? My question is really only concerning fine tuning.

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    1. Well, the actual measurements and requirements for life are not in dispute. What the naturalist would doubt is that the best explanation is an intelligent designer of the universe. The facts are not in dispute for any of these arguments.

      Instead of saying that the cosmic constants are set by a designer, they would just appeal to billions and billions of demons unobservable universes, that are not finely-tuned.

      At this point, you just have to mock them for believing in demons unobservable universes. You know my atheist commenter Jerry? He actually thinks that the cause of the creation of the universe and the fine-tuning is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I’ve been threatened numerous times with being smited by his noodly appendage if I don’t repent. I am not making this up! (By which I mean, I am, but it’s funnier this way)

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  3. Intelligent design allows the religious masses to gain the credibility of science without being bound to its naturalist and empiricist methodology. The religious view science not as a tool of discovery, but as a source of insolvable puzzles

    One of the main premises of fine tuning is that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than life-permitting ones; but how much more probable and how do you prove that assertion is true? You also assume that because something is conceivable that it’s also probable – another fatal assumption in your arguments. Also, how do you prove that life of a different form couldn’t evolve under a different set of values/constants (we’re just finding life at the bottom of the ocean living in 400 degree water and feeding on sulfur – up until it’s discovery a decade or so we didn’t believe that was possible) (and I’m not talking about the constants that would prohibit molecule creation, etc – if those constants are even possible/probable).

    And why would a designer put us in such a precarious situation – drop the concentration of oxygen just a little and we have trouble breathing/suffocate, increase it a little more and we get poisoned from toxicity (similar concepts apply to CO2) – why would a designer create a system so delicate that it’s almost gauranteed we go extinct (like 99.9% of the animals/creatures before us)?

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    1. I totally agree; this universe and earth does not have any semblance of design. Over 70% of the original species are extinct, and this planet is doomed to burn up in the sun. We’ve discovered destroyed universes outside our solar system…does this sound like a designed universe? Do you want God to take credit for this?

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      1. Wait, is it 99% or 70% of those species?

        There’s destroyed universes?

        Ultimately it still doesn’t actually address the design argument. It’s a way of saying, “I wouldn’t have designed it that way.”

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        1. The huge expanse of useless space and massive extinctions are intuitively incompatible with a loving, efficent God.

          But it’s not a rigorous disproof, since there is no tangible, testable reason to believe that God needs to to what we think he needs to do. In fact, I would go further and say that being quirky might be NECESSARY in order to give people emotional space to reject him. They wouldn’t really have an ARGUMENT, but there would be something they could point to on an emotional level and say “that’s why I’m an atheist”.

          This is important because God doesn’t want to be coercive. He wants to be chased by people who are genuinely interested in him, enough to expend time, money and effort pursuing him.

          No ad hominem is intended against Jerry, I am just stating my own experience with this.

          I do this same trick when I lend people books and DVDs. I want a relationship – I don’t want the constant burden of having to make people happy. I would rather that they find happiness in who I really am, instead of forcing me to entertain them with a fake me.

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  5. but the flying spaghetti monster appeared in my food last night when I went to the italian restaurant…I was gonna auction him off on ebay like the jesus grilled cheese, but I’m selfish (because according to wintery I lack morals) and kept him all to my self!!:)

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    1. I too have had appearances of the flying spaghetti monster in my food.

      I never said you lacked morals, I said you lacked a rational basis for acting morally. Look, Christianity is true, and so objective moral values and obligations exists whether atheists like it or not. And since Christianity is true, you’ve got a conscious mind, moral accountability to God, moral significance in the after-life and free will, etc. My point is only that the more you believe in atheism, the more you doubt that these things are real, and the less rational justification you have for doing the right thing when it goes against your self-interest.

      Morality for us is totally different. When I do the right thing against my own self-interest, it matters. God applauds. That is a huge difference between Christianity and atheism. Being good matters on the one view – it matters because we were designed for moral greatness and honor. You should see the brother of the girl I had dinner with on Friday. His entire room was set up like a castle room and he had Edmund Blair-Leighton’s “The Accolade” on his wall. (I am trying to see if I can get him a print of Edmund Blair-Leighton’s “Godspeed” to go with it!) This guy was a Christian and his conception of moral values was as real and concrete as the rims on my car. There is a difference.

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  6. Speaking of assumptions… there’s other universes? That’s not an assumption?

    Glad you mentioned molecule creation. Can you tell me about amino acid (“basic building blocks of life” to use evolutionary text book language) formation in nature, what left hand and right hand chains are, and why that’s important?

    God has put us in exactly this situation for the same reason that He revealed Himself clearly to us through history, nature, and most importantly, the person of Jesus Christ: because He loves us.

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  8. Your post is a great example of what I previously said:

    “Intelligent design allows the religious masses to gain the credibility of science without being bound to its naturalist and empiricist methodology. The religious view science not as a tool of discovery, but as a source of insolvable puzzles”

    http://web99.arc.nasa.gov/~astrochm/aachiral.html
    Talks a bit about it – it also has a link to meteorites having a lot of left handed amino acids – wasn’t there a guy who proposed life was seeded by aliens? Maybe he was talking about rocks there were alien to Earth – meteors with all of their left handed amino acids.

    But getting away from spaghetti monsters, this link:
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080406114742.htm
    talks about the prevelance of L-handed AA – there’s even left handed radiation too.

    Imperial college shows how certain chemical reactions would show how the prevelance of L-handed (or right) would com about:
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040709084055.htm

    so not everything stays a question for too long!

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    1. Great comment! This is fascinating… but life can’t form in space or on meteorites. It needs liquid water and lots and lots of time. And as soon as you get on the surface of the earth where the water is, you are back to a mess of left and right handed amino acids! Even one right handed amino acid is enough to ruin a chain that the Flying Spaghetti Monster may be in the progress of building, so he would have to be clever to keep those right-handed ones out of the chain he’s working on.

      BUT, this comment is good enough for me to put it to some of my friends who are scientists to see what they think of it. I had heard about the moon of Titan on Jupiter also have natural processes that filtered for chirality, but the problem there is that the other conditions are no good for life.

      It’s a great challenge though! See, now we’re all playing in the same field at least.

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  9. Even if someone were to somehow explain the L vs R amino acid problem, it would be far too generous to think this would solve the dilemma.
    The ‘L’ amino acids are only one small piece of the puzzle. Every bond that links the amino acids must be a peptide bond (which, when they bond in nature, occurs about 1/2 of the time), and they also need to be in a precise order so that it can fold together in a meaningful structure. So with that, to form a 100 amino acid long protein you go from .5^100 to (.5*.5*.05)^100. And that’s just ONE protein. Cells have many, many proteins. The information is staggering; even moreso when you consider the digital code embedded in DNA to assemble them (which you also would have to explain).

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  10. Right Robb,

    Don’t forget that the bonding and order of those DNA chains can’t be explained by any natural process, like crystalization, only by design and random chance, and that’s where it goes from, “really small probablility” to “no way in heck this could ever have happened by chance.”

    Especially while figuring that we’re not on an infinite timeline. The universe we’re in had a beginning point.

    This causes the mental gymnastics to come up with a multi-verse theory, for which there is no evidence, and ultimately has the same problems with some fantasy coating.

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  11. If there is a multiverse consisting of an infinite ensemble of universes, then there is a universe out there somewhere in which I am the President of the milky way galaxy, and Optimus Prime is my vice president…and Optimus likes to wear pink lederhosen–but ONLY on Tuesdays.

    Oh…actually there would be an infinite number of THOSE universes too.

    Okham’s Razor, anyone? :)

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    1. but this gets back to another portion of my post – just because it’s conceivable doesn’t mean it’s probable and allows the religious masses to gain the credibility of science without being bound to its naturalist and empiricist methodology (ID – we can’t explain it yet, so toss in god) and view science not as a tool of discovery, but as a source of insolvable puzzles…man Wintery is going to regret publishing my comment because it provides so much insight into the religious arguments.

      And it’s 99%, not 70%:
      http://www.scientistsolutions.com/t7274-over+99_+of+species+that+ever+lived+are+now+extinct.html

      or

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event (I know, it’s wikipedia, but they list all of their references to journals at the bottom)

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      1. Jerry–I’m not sure I understand what you are getting at…are you saying that ID is conceivable, but not probable? If so, what would it take, in your mind, for it to become probable? I think it is far more probable than you think, for a number of reasons. You make inferences to design all the time, but in this case you seem to be uncomfortable with making the leap to God. If so, THAT is understandable. But Intelligent Design alone does not make the leap to God; it merely provides a means to detect the result of intelligence. Who or what the designer may be is irrelevant (although obviously it is reasonable for one to make the conclusion that the designer is God).

        Let me ask you this: why is it ok to accept the concept of design detection in forensics, SETI, and archaeology, but not ok to apply the same principles to biology and physics? Is it because you don’t think it’s scientific? What if we called it something like ‘deductive methodology’ instead of ‘science’; would it then, based on terminology, be considered a viable possibility? Do you think that there are some things that are explained apart from natural sciences? What would you consider to be good grounds on rejecting the capability for naturalism to explain the origin of biological information and the first living cell?

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      2. “ID – we can’t explain it yet, so toss in god”

        Strawman… No ID proponent claims that. That’s just something that people who haven’t bothered to examine ID themselves say because they read it somewhere. :p

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