The ID theory is the antithesis of such theories as biological evolution.
Evolution was developed from abstract ideas and imaginary extrapolations of poorly known laws of variation that occur in every living thing. Supporting evidence for evolution is nowhere to be found as real knowledge. Its concepts are not plausible and its tenants are not practical or testable. Without proofs, evolution is incomprehensible by objective standards of reason.
Evolution assumes that the similarity in living forms implies a common ancestry. Yet no evidence of transmutation exists. Evolution assumes that information molecules like DNA, which govern life, simply self-assembled and that self-emergence of tremendously complex information content through chance and error are typical of our experiences. It is not. It is common knowledge that information only arrives by intelligent beings directing the program.
Evolution once hinged its only empirical proof on fossils as a record for the demonstration of the genealogy of life. This idea has been abandoned for a lack of evidence. Popular science says that unknown chemical reactions occurred in an unknown broth of organic molecules and through rare but fortuitous and unexplainable events converted non-living substances into living substances by natural processes over great ages. These natural processes do not exist. They are therefore unnatural and this falls into supernatural chemical events. This is not science but scientism… the belief that science has all the answers; regardless of how absurd.
This is a far cry from anything simple, intuitive or of common experience and knowledge. Yet design theory was abandoned in the 19th century in the wake of the materialistic philosophical meanderings (Darwin’s evolution) that defied both reason and known mechanisms to explain what was obviously designed by forces that are not common to our daily experiences. The miraculous existence of that which is designed was abandoned because the idea of God revealing himself in the miracle of creation excluded man’s intellectual and sensual fulfillment and replaced miraculous explanations for irrational explanations and fantastic extrapolations that created a novel mythology called evolution. It does not matter today that the answers offered by design arguments back then were intuitively correct. We are the manifestation of miraculous intervention of an intellect. Our existence defies the laws of science. We are intelligently designed. We are not the product of a fortunate accident.
An introduction to the theory of intelligent design should include a historical perspective that reaches far beyond the arguments made by Paley (17th century) who reasoned that a designer must have made things that have design features. Paley used the watch as an example of the simplicity of using the obvious to explain the origin of things that are designed. A watch is more complex than a stone. It has moving parts requiring precise craftsmanship and a level of complexity that requires each part be placed in an arrangement, the order of which is necessary for the entire timepiece to keep time. The apparent design idea, Paley argued, requires an intelligent designer, i.e., a watchmaker! One with knowledge of time measurement would be foolish to suggest that a timepiece was the product of random metallurgical agents that through chance, time and natural selection fortunately arrived at a stage of irreducible complexity so that man can now keep time.
Or am I mistaken? Is it possible that for hundreds of thousands of years watches of intermediate stages of evolutionary development existed? Was it humanity that then adopted what we know of as the final version of nature’s creativity and since then have been manufacturing the device thus preserving the continuous existence of the watch by a synergistic relationship between the man and the watch? Did the watch achieve survival of the fittest by means of natural selection? Does the watch have only the appearance of design?
These are the kinds of scenarios in which evolutionary scientists engage when reasoning that living things have originated by means of natural selection. Evolutionists don’t argue on the details of evolution – there are none. They are not quite sure how the sprockets came to be or how the spring became coiled or how the glass came to be perfectly shaped to fit the face of the watch. They don’t explain how the face of the clock and its fortunate arrangement of 12 numbers set in a circular fashion came to be. This idea does not threaten the evolutionist’s belief that the watch came to be by means of natural selection. The details could be open to debate but why bother when we all believe the watch evolved from some ancient metallurgical process? The fact that the clock works at all is a kind of a miracle itself but isn’t it fortunate to have a complete understanding of how natural selection could have made the watch?
This facetious example is the same reasoning used to argue biological evolution. Apply this thinking to a biological system which is some 10 trillion trillion trillion times more complex and you have in essence the kind of delusional thinking that is the mainstay of evolutionary scientists. It does not matter that there are no known chemistry or known materialistic mechanisms that temporarily suspend the laws of the universe so that life is created with its enormous complexity and diversity. Yet evolution is somehow a better argument than the simplicity of admitting that all of our known sciences fail to account for the presence of living things. Science must go beyond the materialistic explanations and admit that design is real. Ever since the first humans we have all known that a blueprint for living exists. Denying it will not make it go away.
Long before Paley made his argument, as a response to the growing atheism of his day, Ptolemy in the second century understood that the simplest argument should lead to the Cause. “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.” And long after Ptolemy, Thomas Aquinas (13th century) made it clear that “it is superfluous (unnecessary) to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many”. Many other philosophers have said that the obvious use of the simplest explanation to understand a thing’s existence is consistent with reason.
Natural science did not deviate much from this position until the 19th century when hypotheses of extravagant and often unknowable mechanisms and un-testable ideas became acceptable means of explaining a thing. How could something living be ascribed to unknown chemistry, working through endless ages, against all probabilities, violating the laws of the Universe to achieve the order of complexity that now exists, without some intelligent or even super-intelligent input? Why should one adopt unseen and unknowable events to ascribe the present land surfaces to billions of years of continental submersion in the oceans while ignoring what is even now concluded to be the result of catastrophic global flood event(s)? Why did men of the 19th and the 20th century yield to improbable random events as explanations for complex and wondrous creatures like human beings, the blue whale, and the butterfly instead of holding fast to what was obvious; the world and all that is in it is a product of deliberate intentions and therefore requires a Creator?
In graduate school, one of the common principles of critical thinking in ecology and the use of statistics to build and test hypotheses about ecosystems is the law of parsimony; yes…Law of Parsimony. It simply states that given multiple hypothetical explanations for the existence of a phenomenon, the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one. Parsimony should be used as the starting point in the analysis of data. The eventual cause might not be the simplest answer but in an effort to seek the truth about a reality, start with the simplest explanation first. In effect the law of parsimony is a general “rule of thumb” in most practical sciences and vitally important to some of the greatest discoveries of our time. This applies to working out mathematical problems, for instance in the use of calculus or in the choice of the steps in organic chemical reactions that lead to drug design.
Some of the greatest minds of our time such as Einstein and Newton understood the logic of parsimony. To quote Isaac Newton, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes.” This idea of using known realities, such as gravity, sunlight, watchmakers, in the construction of inferences about those things we need to explain holds great meaning, even to the reasoning of small children. However, both Einstein and Newton understood that some natural effects do not have a natural cause. While neither a theist nor an evolutionist, Einstein understood the difference – he called it the “Gulf” between sensory knowledge, concrete realities, and ideas or concepts.
We have the habit of combining certain concepts and conceptual relations (propositions) so definitely with certain sense experiences that we do not become conscious of the gulf—logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts and propositions.
Applied to biology, knowing the difference between a fish and a salamander is real knowledge. Supposing that some genealogical ancestry relates them is a concept. Bridging the gap between what can be known and what cannot be known is science. There is nothing real that links the concept of evolution with the similarities (or the differences for that matter) between the fish and the salamander. My argument, my bridge across the gulf, would have to fall under the area of faith. Faith in a designer answers my scientific proofs that life proceeds only from life, that living kinds reproduce after their own kind and that genetics have fixed laws of inheritance that limit variation. Like life itself, only intelligence much higher than my own could bring life into existence or transform one kind of life form into another. Since evolution and God are the only two possibilities and both require miracles, both require faith, the simplest hypothesis must be the correct one. God must be the answer.
This use of parsimony has another name called Occam’s Razor. Occam was a real person. He influenced the Roman Catholic Church in areas of philosophy and lived in the 14th century. He argued for the use of simple hypotheses in order to “shave” the layers of reality down to an understandable level. While Occam’s Razor is used in biology, for example in the classification of living things, looking at the similarity of their forms and features, a classification system results from an assemblage of creatures that share common traits. For instance humans are placed in the category of the Great Apes. Classification places the millions of living things into a library by which to study and define species. We benefit from the classification by making volumes of data more manageable. Our studies of physiology, anatomy, chemistry, and habitat of such an orderly array of life in the world becomes a little easier and we can assign meaningful names to each kind. Classification is a practical use of parsimony.
However, the presumption that life evolves from other things into other things confuses the simple convenience of the classification system with the idea of physical relationships of shared ancestry. Therefore the assumption that evolution occurs is believed to be supported by the classification system and this without proving that the concept of evolution is true. Strangely, the classification system while of use to taxonomy (naming living things) is neither a proof of evolution nor can it be shown to be a product of the same.
It is only in studying the history of how the evolutionary theory was first derived and then popularized that we can judge whether classification by the simplest of means (by parsimony) has anything to do with the validity of Darwinian evolution. For the most part biological evolution was never a logical deduction of the simplest hypothesis available. The historical facts surrounding the development of evolution’s theoretical ability to transmutate living things from one form to another was and remains hypothetical. The theory was at first an inductive hypothesis. It later proved itself, not a derivative of any attempt at parsimony, but a prejudice against the only remaining possibility; God. Evolution was neither scientific, nor simple but a derivative of extrapolations of processes that no one could prove, let alone test. This in itself made the theory a speculative concept and based on faith – in this case blind faith. So while students of the biological sciences are taught to reason through the logical deductions of known processes and obvious associations, good science continues to be attributed to the fraud that Darwin was right. Without proof or substance, test or known mechanisms, the myth of biological evolution remains unquestioned.
Today a new theory, or is it a rediscovery of an old theory, called intelligent design is challenging Darwinism. The tools of science are being applied correctly and finding what is obviously designed should be assessed from that framework, putting forth hypotheses that if the simplest proof is most likely the correct one then certain expectations should hold fast in the exploration of living systems. For example, if the simple cell is the result of design we should expect to find blueprints for creating and sustain life processes. We should hypothesize that the visibly coordinated function of the cell is based on those instructions. That code, such as we have found in DNA, should have means to be decoded, and the instructions implemented in a highly efficient and controlled manner with feedback loops and alternate pathways to make the most of the products given from the instructions. We should find little waste in the coded instructions especially as we look at larger and even more complex living systems. Tissues, organs, organ systems and the highly integrated features of multicellular organisms, like ourselves, ought to have precision and coordination for development of structure and function. Complexity should be specified if our hypothesis is correct. For all these initial considerations we have found that life meets the criteria predicted based upon the design theory.
Who the designer is and what purpose he had for creation is a matter that falls outside the science of biology. Psychology, philosophy and theology play a huge role in matters and aid in the quest for the purpose of human life. A common understanding of what is right and wrong for all human beings should be easily derived and a predictable necessity from the design perspective. Mental illness should be the product of either organic disease or of departing from the Creator’s blueprint for conscious beings like ourselves. Philosophies that benefit the whole of the planet as an organismal habitat should recognize universal and timeless truths as the paradigm for living in peace. Evil should have a universal understanding among humans and those outside the limits of these truths should be recognize as doing harm… they do not fulfill their destined purpose for living.
This is my introduction to intelligent design. Allowing our reason to work to its logical end permits explanations that are resolved by design theory. Whether the design agent is super-natural may or may not be the conclusion but the exclusion of this possibility is no longer science. It is scientism or the belief that materialism answers all questions. Making up accounts for the origin of the solar system, the Earth, life’s existence, and the structure of the Universe; avoiding the requirement for information content, design specifications, and complexity creates an illusion of reality. When it is taught as scientific fact it results in a delusion of reality. Believing a lie is not scientific.
This is what this website is dedicated to; the scientific evidence as proofs that demand a designer? Not because I am religious. Not just because I am a disciple of Christ. But because I believe that truth is real. That science is good. And that the only legitimate answer to the questions we ask are going to be found in God.