User:HarrisR/Design Argument- Redesigned

Design Argument – Redesigned

Harris Ratnayake In 400 B.C., Socrates asked if we should admire the fact that the mouth is placed so near the nose and eyes as to prevent the unnoticed passage of inedible foods. He also asked whether this disposition of parts should be the work of chance, or, was it the work of some master plan.

Since Socrates, the design argument has been a powerful tool to prove the existence of God. C.S. Lewis presented a recent argument in God in the Dock: “An egg which came from no bird is no more ‘natural’ than a bird which had existed from all eternity. And since the egg-bird-egg sequence leads us to no plausible beginning, is it not reasonable to look for the real origin somewhere outside this sequence altogether? You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside Nature for the real Originator of the natural order?”

The design argument has been modified as mankind’s knowledge increased. In 1802, William Paley delivered the theist’s fundamental thesis: Suppose, a man hits his foot against a stone as he is walking and asks, How did the stone come into being? The answer could be that the stone was always there or it was placed there by the forces of nature. But on the other hand, if the man finds a watch and asks the same question, the response he gave for the stone won’t suffice. Why not? Because, Paley said, when you look closer you find that the multiple parts that comprise the watch were assembled for a purpose.

Paley’s argument was accepted until the time of Charles Darwin, who introduced natural selection. Darwin’s observation was that species adapt to change in the natural environment. Those species unable to adapt to the change eventually become extinct. This gave naturalists new ammunition in denouncing the design argument. They said a designer is not required since mutation and natural selection can perform the same job as an intelligent designer.

For example, in his book “The Blind Watchmaker”, Richard Dawkins argues that Darwin’s theory of natural selection can explain the existence of all life. Natural selection, according to Dawkins is an unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially nonrandom process. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, Dawkins concluded it is a “blind watchmaker.”

However, 150 years after Darwin, scientific findings have not explained the fundamental criticisms originally leveled against his theory. The theory requires numerous intermediate forms between species, genera, families, etc., but paleontology has not demonstrated this. In addition, we have found that even the simplest living cell is the product of extreme complexity and organization. Also, the immense difficulty in making the simplest of a replicating biological system is a formidable task even with all our human ingenuity and state-of-the-art scientific apparatuses. Let alone producing the amazing array of living beings we see today.

The design argument won’t go away. Even famous evolutionists and atheists must repeatedly remind us that we must not entertain design in the study of biology. For example, Dawkins says that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance (emphasis added) of having being designed and Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix, says that biologists must constantly remember that what they see is not designed but is evolved.

Order is apparent in the universe, from the tiniest cell to the vast galaxies; from the universal constants to the laws of physics; from animal instincts to human senses. The discoveries of modern biochemistry and cell biology demonstrate that the most infinitesimal biological unit, the cell, is endowed with a tremendous amount of order, an amount that dwarfs the order found in a supercomputer. In the February 1998 issue of the journal “Cell”, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that “the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of large protein machines.” He referred to these cells as machines because just like the human inventions, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts. The universal constants cannot differ by even 1 percent without the collapse of the universe. Coulomb’s law describes the forces that exist between charged particles and Newton’s law of gravity explains forces between any two bodies. These forces are inversely proportional to the square of the distance. It is not only the whole number 2 that is significant in these equations but the individual values themselves are important for the universe to exist. For example, if the mass of the proton was greater by 1/1000th of its current value, the formation of hydrogen gas is impossible. More on this later.

There are only two possibilities for this order. Either it was put there by an outside source or it is inherent in the universe. Modern-day design theorists argue that scientific discoveries of the last 200 years have clearly shown that order seen in the universe, specifically in biological systems, have not risen from natural forces inherent in the universe. Two prominent scientists who’ve argued this case are biochemist Michael Behe and mathematician William Dembski. In “Darwin’s Black Box” Behe argues that as science probes deeper into biological systems it becomes evident that all living things are comprised of highly complex machines. Says Behe: “The cumulative results show with piercing clarity that life is based on machines – machines made of molecules! Molecular machines haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along highways made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes, and pulleys to hold the cell in shape. Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves. Manufacturing machines build other molecular machines, as well as themselves. Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, and ingest food with machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.”

Biological units, Behe says, have numerous systems that can’t be assembled in the step-by-step manner suggested by Darwin. Among his examples are bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting system and the immune system. Just like a mouse trap cannot function without its basic components (platform, hammer, spring, catch and holding bar) present at the same time, systems such as flagellum can’t function unless several of its components are present at once. That’s a feat that defies the law of probability if it were to evolve randomly. Behe calls this phenomenon “irreducible complexity”, meaning these biological systems cannot be reduced to a series of steps that would be built by adding one component at a time.

Similarly, Chandra Wickramasinghe, who testified in the Arkansas trial on Creation in 1981, illustrates the impossibility of forming the basic unit of life, the cell, by natural means. He said the probability of forming a cell from chemicals is 10 to the 40,000th power (the total atoms in the universe is estimated to be less than 10 to the 80th power). When asked how he accounted for life on earth, Wickramasinghe, a Buddhist (who are non-theists, if not atheists) answered that life from another planet must have somehow seeded life on earth.

The counter argument that naturalists bring forth is the following: The chance of anything happening is an extremely rare event but something has to happen and it just so happened that what happened is what we are experiencing. This argument is valid only if natural systems favor that which happened as an equivalent probability to any other event. For example, suppose there is an explosion within a room full of chairs. There are a number of possible ways in which the chairs inside the room will be arranged (or disarranged). If we create similar explosions on different days we will get different arrangements each time, but each such arrangement will have an about equal chance of forming.

If you arrive shortly after the explosion and see chairs neatly stacked on top of each other you will never conclude that the explosion caused it. You’ll deduce that someone came after the explosion and arranged it that way. The reason is that the probability of a random explosion causing such an arrangement is billions of times smaller than the other arrangements. While there are many other arrangements that are extremely unlikely, such as chairs facing each other in pairs, the chance of any of those arrangements occurring is billions of times smaller than the random arrangements. Of course, you can think of arrangements where the probability is only a hundred times smaller than the random arrangements. These arrangements will occasionally happen during an explosion. If you come into the room and see only two chairs neatly stacked you cannot be certain whether it was caused by the explosion. But when the chance of something happening naturally is millions or billions of times smaller, we can conclude that it has been designed.

In fact, this is what sciences of criminal investigations, such as forensic medicine and insider trading, are based on. Investigators want to know whether the events occurred naturally or whether they were caused by humans. The criteria hinge on the chance of this event occurring naturally. If the chance is extremely small investigators will conclude that a human caused the event.

The arrangement of stones at Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England, is another example of how we discern patterns and conclude intelligent design. The unusual arrangement of these mammoth upright stones could have been formed by the action of erosion, hurricanes or tidal waves but no serious investigator pointed to these methods for this precise arrangement. The reason is the clear patterns that are evident from the arrangement, strongly suggesting that intelligent beings are behind it.

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) scientists look for radio signals from outer space that have patterns different from the random radio signals that come from distant stars. If radio astronomers receive a series of electromagnetic radiation signals in the form of prime numbers (2, 5, 7, 11, etc.), they will strongly suspect the signal was sent by an intelligent source from space.

How do we discern whether a particular arrangement of matter is the result of a natural process or the result of an intelligent source? The answer is the probability of forming patterns. A random arrangement of a set of objects could be either. It is not possible to conclude that any arrangement results from natural forces since any arrangement (as long as it is physically possible) can be made by an intelligent source. For example, a random arrangement of a set of numbers can be made by a natural process or it could be made by an intelligent being. As the arrangement shows increasing specificity (such as a sequence of 1,2,3,4, etc.), we will gain confidence that the arrangement is designed. At what point do you rule in favor of design? There is no hard answer. You may look at a particular arrangement and decide its pattern is not specific enough to be designed, but someone else may conclude otherwise. However, there is a point at which you must have blind faith in nature if you always think nature has overcome the odds and made these highly organized living things that humans cannot make despite our giant leaps in technology.

In “Intelligent Design”, mathematician William Dembski said he had calculated what he believes is the point at which we can confidentially say that the system is designed. The reliable criterion for detecting design is what he called “specified complexity” or “complex specified information.” He says that if the chance of such specified information occurring has a probability of 10 to the power -150 we can conclude that design is involved. Of course, depending on the situation, we will use less stringent criteria. For example, if a magician selects, out of 25 boxes, the only box containing an object – a probability of 0.04 – we will immediately conclude that trickery instead of chance was used to determine the correct box. Dembski’s probability of 10 -150 is an outside limit, which he calls “universal probability bound.”

The design argument also focuses on the elegance, simplicity and near perfection of patterns found in natural systems. As mentioned previously, Coulomb’s law that describes the forces that exist between charged particles and Newton’s law of gravitational attraction deals with forces that are inversely proportional to the square of the distance. F = cQ1Q2 or F = KG1G2 D2 	    D2 The superscript 2 in these equations is exactly 2. It is not 2.1 or 2.05. It has been measured up to at least 16 decimal places in the case of Coulomb’s law (2.0000000000000000) and up to at least four decimal places in Newton’s law (2.0000).

Another simple and famous equation involving the number 2 is Albert Einstein’s E = mc2. In fact most of the key equations that describe the universe exhibit this simplicity and can be written on a single sheet of paper.

DNA is another example of simplicity and elegance. It holds the secret of inheritance and contains a code that determines the profile of each organism. While now a household name, the discovery of the structure of DNA and how it is used in inheritance occurred after the birth of nearly a third of the U.S. population. DNA has given fodder to theists to reformulate the design argument since it is not just another molecule in living things. It is a molecule that carries enough information to create human beings who subsequently can discover this DNA and its code! DNA’s code is more complex than any human code. Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, in “The Soul of Science”, said to construct a code, we need more than a material medium, chemical paper and ink. We also need a linguistic convention - a dictionary to link meaning to symbols, and rules of grammar to link symbols into meaningful sequences. We don’t find this anywhere in the natural world. The only system similar to this is in the world of human language. Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that the DNA code originated from a cause similar to that of human intelligence. In addition, the capacity of DNA to store information eclipses the capacity of any human system. DNA codes have been discovered that contain at least two codes. There is a virus where mRNA - the messenger that carries the DNA code to ribosomes to make proteins - starts from one end of the DNA to read one message and then starts one letter down to read a different message. This is equivalent to reading a book the normal way and then re-reading the book by shifting every letter to the left to get an entirely different book!

Critics often dismiss proof of God by the “god of the gaps” argument. They point out that our ancestors lacked knowledge of how things worked or why things happened and attributed it to a god. However, as natural causes were discovered this god of the gaps was becoming smaller and smaller. Thus critics argued that in due time naturalists will discover the cause of things like the DNA code. The argument from design, however, is completely different from filling the unknown with a “god of the gaps.” The modern design argument rests not on what is unknown but on what is known. What is known about the natural world is that it doesn’t make functional complex systems but instead breaks down these systems. When we see complex functional systems in nature we can always find an intelligent source behind it. Therefore, it is most reasonable to conclude that the amazingly complex living systems have an amazingly intelligent source behind it. The god of the gaps argument may work for a question such as, How does the mind arise from the brain? Or How do golden plovers fly over the ocean to Hawaii from Alaska in the winter and then find their way back in the spring. But it does not work for what we already know through studying nature.

Another example of design is the connection between mathematics - a purely human construct - and the real world. An example is the Fibonacci numbers, a pattern discovered by the Italian Leonardo Fibonacci around A.D. 1200. Each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers in the series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc). This has an incredible connection to the real world. First, when the larger of any two adjacent numbers is divided by the smaller number the ratio approaches 1.618. This ratio is called the “Divine Proportion” or the “Golden Ratio.” Renowned artists used this ratio in designing their works because it offers a mesmerizing view.

The value Pi is another example. It is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and appears in mathematical formulas that have nothing to do with circles and diameters. Why this connection between mathematics and the real world? Could it be that the God who designed the world also created humans in a way to understand this world?

The famous mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was asked the following question: If God were to ask you when you die why you didn’t believe in Him what would you say? Russell replied that his response to God would be, “You didn’t give me enough evidence.” I have a feeling that God would have a response for Russell. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. – Romans Chapter 1, Verse 20