Considering Intelligent Design
I never thought I would say the words, “I’m interested in intelligent design.” The title I used here, with the non-committal word, considering, I hope prevents my friends and readers from cancelling my Substack posts, and from them suggesting I’m in need of an intervention.
Inquiry on the Bayesian scale is supposed to never reach zero or one hundred. In other words, conclusions based on probability should always have at least a very slight margin of possible error. We’ve been fooled before into thinking the answers, once delivered, were signed and sealed. The stable universe Einstein at first accepted was changed by the Big Bang, the recent discovery of the megalithic structures of Gobekli Tempe, carbon dated at around 12,000 years ago, change the view of hunter gatherers, Shakespeare didn’t in fact write the plays, it was Edward DeVere - these once bedrock notions have a nasty habit of disappearing overnight, as Paul McCartney so wisely said.
So here we are with this idea of intelligent design again, only presented in a much more scientifically sophisticated manner. Stephen Meyer, Ph.D in philosophy of history and of science, has authored a book called Return to the God Hypothesis, which presents a theistic view of the universe and evolution. Meyer is himself a Christian, but approaches the subject from a strongly scientific viewpoint. There’s mathematics involved, in the fine tuning of the universe itself and in biology, the astronomical numbers necessary for usable new DNA code sequencing coming out of mutations that isn’t pure gibberish. Think a million monkeys typing to come up with Shakespeare. The knowledge of the complexity of even single cells was unavailable to Darwin, of course, and has, in fact, surfaced only in recent decades. Meyer’s book, along with two previous ones, Signature in the Cell, and Darwin’s Doubt, challenge not the whole, but aspects of evolution, as well as the outlook of materialism, which many current scientists adhere to, best described in the perfectly stated words of Richard Dawkins. “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
It’s not a particularly uplifting viewpoint. That’s been the millstone science has been dragging along for some time now - science is cold, impersonal, mechanistic, stuff just happens because that’s how it is. Science can explain many of the mechanisms of why the cosmos and the natural world behave as they do, but there’s conundrums. This wasn’t lost on Darwin, who said, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...”
I watched a documentary about the life cycles of monarch butterflies, how they go from caterpillar to pupa to emerging to fly to the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve in Mexico on what is a multi-generational journey - that is, individuals only make it part way - they die, and the next generation takes over. Watching it, especially with regard to the intricacy of the metamorphic process, I kept saying out loud (alone, not to anyone) “That’s impossible! No, that can’t be true!” It’s a mind-blowing number of stages where, one after another, the intricacy seems too complex not to be somehow engineered.
This is the argument. How can the vast complexities found in biological life be simply explained by time, mutation, adaptation, and natural selection. Another strange aspect of evolution is that some creatures cease evolving, and have remained essentially the same for millions of years. Why do the mutations stop? As to the eye, Darwin answers his own doubts, saying, “Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.” The key word Darwin uses here is insuperable. It’s meaning is impossible to be overcome. Darwin admitted that the evolutionary evidence of seeing evolutionary progression in eye structure couldn’t exist, since there could be no fossil record, but can be seen looking backward. Yet, he’s still troubled by the complexity. He’s saying it could happen, it could be as he says, but, like any good scientist questioning his theory, it gives him pause.
So, let’s take a step back, keeping our Bayesian postulate number in the single figures, and say, “What if there is some kind of design at work?” Embryologists have been known, after some time at their job, to develop difficulty in maintaining belief in the mechanistic model. The wonder of the natural world doesn’t inspire a reverence for the process of random chance.
I would say that the largest objection I’ve had regarding intelligent design has been its association with the god of the Old Testament. The Essenes regarded Yahweh as the demiurge, a kind of lower, nasty, god of the earth. A god frequently very much like the pathologically sadistic narcissist in Randy Newman’s God’s Song (Why I Love Mankind). Innocent babies are slaughtered, God and the Devil mercilessly torture Job to settle a bet, Lot’s wife gets turned to salt for the very human act of looking back. I suppose this sort of god could explain scorpions, Blake’s tiger, mosquitos and rodents, but I could never equate any sort of intelligent, in the best sense of the word, mind to him. Yahweh is to me a mythological figure, much like the Greek gods, multi-authored at various times with varying viewpoints, a literature created to impart lessons to non-scientific people. At one time, a wrathful and powerful god who protected his people against oppression was undoubtedly an encouraging, inspirational idea, but those notions have now longer have any relevant place in modern discourse. The Old Testament also, alternately, contains timeless wisdom and beautiful, profound poetry, such as found in the Psalms. Jesus is a whole other story, but suffice it to say, I’m confident he was a wandering preacher with no aspirations to be God. The wrath of Yahweh has been grafted onto Paul’s figure of The Christ, especially as seen in the blood-soaked Book of Revelations, written by John of Patmos, John the Revelator, a paranoid hermit whose writing exhibits signs of schizophrenic visions, sent into exile on the island of Patmos by Roman authorities.
I would grade whatever suppositions I have about what or how a superintelligence existing within life and the universe would operate as quite low on my Bayesian scale. I’ll state them, however. Let us say Plato’s forms exist not just for the circle and square, but for single cells, eyes, ears, arms, legs, tree limbs, leaves - digital blueprints for millions on millions of creatures and plants, the bulk of which we’ve never even seen. An embedded intelligence that isn’t disembodied or transcendent, but rather inseparable from matter, like Lucas’ great creation, the force, coursing within and without, parceling itself in proportion to whatever degree the different aspects of matter is able to contain, filling the vessel to the brim with whatever it needs and can hold. In some cases, things go over toward the dark side, hence scorpions. In other cases, we get the majesty of the monarch.
If such a thing as my idea were so, how they got made into such an extraordinary blueprint, I haven’t a clue. Likewise, how it would work mechanistically, in practical application, ditto. However, when it comes to the large a priori questions of origin and explanation for the order of the universe as well as irreducible complexity in biology, naturalist science, or mechanism, stands at the same indistinguishable impasse. If everyone, science especially, could just honestly admit to not knowing, without any conditions, and empty the room of ideas, new ones might be allowed in.
What I do know for certain, if science has taught us anything, is that the answer will be a lot more complicated than anything anyone has figured out so far.
No matter what they tell you, no matter how many degrees.