Talking with a friend the other day, I offered this simple argument for intelligent design: “To NOT believe in intelligent design, you have to believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into computers, jet airplanes, and nuclear power plants.” I referred him to a video, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” based on my Mathematical Intelligencer article of the same name. In the article, I imagined a gigantic computer model that attempts to simulate the effect of these forces on Earth.
Way to Go, Unintelligent Forces!
My friend was not impressed. He said, “No one is saying that unintelligent forces created computers and jet airplanes. Intelligent humans did that, of course.” I responded, “But if you believe that we humans are the result of entirely unintelligent forces, you essentially do believe that unintelligent forces are responsible for creating computers and smart phones.” Then I tried showing him another video which uses a little humor to make my point.
“Well, we know that humans evolved from lower primates over millions of years,” he said. “You surely don’t believe God would need a couple of million years to turn this into that,” and he showed me a picture of a skull dated to about two million years ago beside a skull of a modern human. The skulls were only modestly different in shape and size. “Those are just the skulls,” I protested. “The outside of my 1980s PC looks pretty similar to the frame of my new HP computer. It still took a lot of intelligent design to evolve the new PCs from the old models. And I can’t help noticing that you are talking to me from inside one of the new skulls. Can you explain how we got inside these skulls?”
What God Would Do
“Well, God would have created all species at once. He wouldn’t have to create them gradually over millions of years,” my friend replied. I referred him to another video of mine, “Why Evolution Is Different,” which points out that the “evolution” of life was actually quite similar to the “evolution” of automobiles, software, or other human technologies. It proceeded more or less step-by-step, but not really gradually. “Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large,” wrote Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. The major advances in the evolution of life, like the major advances in the evolution of automobiles, occurred in large, sudden jumps, for the same reasons: gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would have required the development of new, but not yet useful, features. Natural selection cannot look ahead and guide the development of useful features through their initial useless stages. Only intelligence can do that.
“Maybe humans have to create step-by-step, but God shouldn’t have to,” my friend opined.
“In fact,” I said, “we not only have no idea how species evolved more complex new structures, we really have no idea even of how they are able to pass their current complex structures on to their descendants, generation after generation.” And I referred him to an article, “The Paradox of Biological Reproduction,” which shows why we, with all our advanced technology, are still not close to creating any self-replicating machine. When you add technology to such a machine to get closer to the goal of reproduction, you only move the goal posts, because now you have a more complicated machine to reproduce.
Reproduction as a “Miracle”
“But we see living things reproduce themselves all around us. You surely wouldn’t argue that reproduction is some sort of miracle, when we see it happen every day,” he countered.
“But how did life on Earth arise in the first place, through random, unintelligent, chemical processes?” I asked. In answer, the best he could do was, “If we can explain how the first life evolved into humans, surely how the first simple living thing arose is a relatively minor problem, even if no one really knows how that could have happened.”
He observed, “But even if God has to create step-by-step, for the same reasons we do, and even if he needed millions of years to create humans, it still seems like God could surely have found some way to make doubt impossible, doesn’t it? You almost have to believe he is deliberately hiding from us. You don’t believe that, do you?”
A Hidden God
I had to admit that I’ve often wondered about this also, and that is in fact one of the main questions my book Christianity for Doubters tries to address. “Why does God remain backstage,” I asked in the last chapter of that book, “hidden from view, working behind the scenes while we act out our parts in the human drama?” I tried to answer this by imagining what life would be like for us if God did “walk out onto the stage and take on a more direct and visible role,” and doubt became impossible. That would cheapen our greatest accomplishments, for one thing.
Georges Lemaȋtre, one of the two key scientists behind the Big Bang theory, wrote in the original draft of his famous 1931 article in Nature (though he removed this sentence before submitting it, see p. 120 of The Big Bang Revolutionaries): ”I think that everyone who believes in a supreme being supporting every being and every acting, believes also that God is essentially hidden, and may be glad to see how present physics provides a veil hiding the creation.”
There are many things about the history of life on Earth that seem, to our modern minds, to suggest natural causes. But it seems to me that our Creator has left us plenty of evidence, even if he didn’t create things the way we think he should have. So, I’m not sure that we really have to believe he deliberately “remains backstage, hidden from view.”
But in any case, the strongest argument for intelligent design is still the same. To NOT believe in intelligent design you have to believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent, forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into nuclear power plants and smart phones. And no one has any plausible explanations for how they could have done that.