On a new episode of ID the Future, Stuart Burgess talks with Jacob Vazquez of the Truthful Hope podcast about Dr. Burgess’s book Ultimate Engineering. A couple of things stood out to me.
The stereotype of scientists as atheists is refuted by Burgess’s experience, where he meets colleagues who are largely agnostic about religion — but also, as they reveal to him in chats in the university “coffee room,” open to intelligent design. Vazquez, a cancer researcher with the specialty of bioinformatics, says that he finds much the same: the scientists he works with tend more toward New Age spirituality, not atheism. When he brings up arguments for intelligent design with them — he mentions the evidence brought forward by Michael Behe — they’ve never heard of it.
Billions of Years to Tinker
A possible objection to Burgess’s own case for ID might be that the apparent superb design of the human body is what you’d expect from evolution. Isn’t it? After all, evolution has had billions of years to tinker, to work on it and get things just right. The problem with that is that evolutionists themselves expect just the opposite, and they clearly tell you so: they expect poor design, almost seeming to hunger for it, which is why they write books like Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, by biologist Nathan Lents.
But in principle, what accounts for the difference in expectations between evolution compared and intelligent design? Dr. Burgess addresses the question, giving an excellent answer:
Intelligent design predicts ultimate engineering because of the following. If an intelligent designer has created the world out of nothing, then that intelligent designer would have a perfect knowledge of what he’s created.
Not just the materials, but the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry. And such an intelligent designer could therefore produce a perfect design because he has a perfect knowledge of what he’s created, unlike human designers who have a very imperfect design understanding of materials and the laws of physics.
And so what intelligent design predicts is ultimate engineering in biology and a level of sophistication which is above human technology. And that’s what we see.
In contrast, evolution predicts that biology should have a sophistication below human technology because evolution is constrained by many things: by step-by-step change, by “just good enough” design, by vestigial parts. It’s constrained by time.
Evolution is constrained by many things that human designers are not constrained by. And evolutionists themselves have admitted that if evolution is true, biology should be at a lower level than human technology, which is the opposite to the intelligent design worldview. But of course, what is so obvious in biology is that it’s far above human technology, exactly as intelligent design predicts.
If biological origins, whether guided or unguided, produce designs far above those of human technology, that’s a huge problem for atheist evolutionists like Dr. Lents, but it’s just what design scientists would expect. Listen to or download the podcast here.