Intelligent Design Part I

For my entire life (or at least since I was 12 or so), I’ve believed in God, and I’ve also been very interested in science and mathematics. I remember hearing some well-meaning religious individuals say that you could believe in God or science but not both. And I remember and know of quite a few well-meaning atheists who say the same thing. But I have never felt this way. To me, the truth about the physical world, which is what science attempts to discern, and the truth about God and the spiritual world could not possibly contradict each other. But this was a feeling on my part, and I couldn’t claim to have scientific evidence that a higher intelligence existed.

Now, over the last few decades, more and more scientific evidence has come out that point to the existence of a higher intelligence. So much so, that one of the most prominent atheists of our time, Professor of Philosophy Antony Flew, became a deist after being a strong advocate of atheism for over 50 years. One of his guiding principles is to “follow the evidence” and in 2003, the evidence led him to believe in God. And that evidence was mainly the result of his studies of intelligent design.

So for me this is an exciting time. It could well be that in my lifetime, most scientists will come to believe in an Intelligence that created and guided the evolution of the Universe as well as creating and guiding the evolution of life on Earth. If this occurs it will signal the cohesion and convergence of science and religion, and will have untold positive ramifications for the future of humanity.

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This is part 1 of a 4 part series of articles about the controversial topic of intelligent design. It has been vilified by some scientists who feel that it is religion encroaching upon science, and it has been used by some who are religious to ‘prove’ that evolution is wrong. Intelligent design does neither of these, and so this, the first part of this series will deal with exactly what it means. Parts 2 and 3 will bring forth some of the scientific evidence that support the involvement of an intelligence in the creation of the Universe and in biology. Part 4 will deal with the implications of intelligent design upon both science and religion.

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In April 2007, at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, I had the good fortune of attending a two-day conference on intelligent design, sponsored by the Discovery Institute based in Seattle. Four very smart and well-spoken scientists made presentations all related to the thesis that there is compelling scientific evidence that various aspects nature and the Universe exhibit design by an intelligent agency or agencies.

Does this idea shock anybody? One wouldn’t think it would shock too many people since most people in the world, quite sensibly, believe this to be true, usually assuming the intelligent designer is God. One would be hard pressed to find a single thoughtful person in the world, scientist or not, who has not asked, how did the world get here?… how did life begin?… how did humans come about?… why are we here?… without considering that an intelligent agency might have been somehow involved. Moreover, since this is certainly a logical possibility, one would assume that it is therefore open to scientific inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, especially on college campuses.

But one would be quite wrong in that assumption! This is hard to believe but many professors at SMU were trying to get the conference banned. According to an article by Jeffrey Weiss, a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News, “Science professors upset about a presentation on intelligent design fired blistering letters to the administration asking that the event be shut down.” After the intelligent design group heard about this they asked the chairmen of the some of the science departments at SMU to send representatives to the conference to present their objections, but they all declined. In a formal statement by many of the science professors as SMU, one paragraph stated:

“We are, however, vehemently opposed to the deliberate deception of presenting politically motivated religious viewpoints as science. It is destructive and antithetical to the usefulness of science, and history has shown that similar politicizations of science have been incredibly destructive to our moral, ethical and material progress.”

Would you be surprised to find that this was written before the conference took place? At least these scientists could have actually attended the conference before criticizing it. And if they did, they would have found that no religious viewpoints were discussed, but rather all four scientists gave scientific evidence that an intelligent agency or agencies likely influenced nature in a variety of ways – from the creation of life, to the creation of cells, to the evolution of life, and to the creation of the Universe itself.

The quote above from the SMU scientists is typical of those who do not understand what intelligent design is, and those who, intentionally or not, misrepresent it. Hence, my intention in the first part of this series is to explain briefly what intelligent design is and what it is not.

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First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea. However, it is common for some religious people to cite intelligent design as a reason to oppose the teaching of evolution. This is misleading and they are wrong to claim this. Intelligent design proponents do not doubt that evolution occurred. Nevertheless, they do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the evolution and structure of life. In addition, intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.

So what exactly is intelligent design? It is an inference, based upon scientific evidence, that some object, event, or series of events was caused or influenced by an intelligent agent or agencies.

Note that this definition says nothing about the intelligence involved. Indeed, the intelligent agent could be human, an animal, an alien life form, or a non-physical intelligence.

Let’s start with a relaxing example. Go to your window and look outside at the nearest mountain that you see. Perhaps it looks like this:

If someone asked you if this mountain had been designed, you’d have to be honest and say that it didn’t appear to have been designed, and that you assumed that its shape was the result of numerous factors such as wind, rain, erosion, plate tectonics, etc.

But suppose instead you saw this mountain:

If someone asked you if this mountain had been designed, you say, “Of course it was designed. It’s Mount Rushmore. Those are carvings of the faces of four of the most important men in our county’s history.”

Even if an alien civilization came to Earth sometime in the future and saw Mount Rushmore, they would immediately conclude that it had been designed.

How can we reliably distinguish such cases, so that the conclusion that something was the result of an intelligence was based upon sound scientific evidence?

The best explanation as to how one can make an intelligent design inference comes from the mathematician, Dr. William A. Dembski in his book, The Design Revolution. I use some of the ideas from his book, in particular his idea of an ‘explanatory filter’, which is used to determine if something has an intelligent cause.

In order to conclude that an object or event is the result of design, it must pass through a 3-stage explanatory filter. The first stage is that the event must be ‘contingent’. This means that its outcome is not completely predetermined by one or more natural laws. For example, if you let go of a handful of pennies and all of them fell to the ground, and you asked, “Did all of these pennies fall to the ground as a result of an intelligence?” Of course, you would say no - they all fell to the ground due to gravity. So you would not get past the first stage, because the pennies ‘had no choice’ - their falling to the ground was necessary, not contingent. Since we didn’t get past the first stage of the explanatory filter, we stop and do not conclude that this event had an intelligent cause.

On the other hand, if you came home and there were 500 hundred pennies on your kitchen table, all heads up, since there is not one or more natural laws that would require these 500 pennies to be heads up, this event is contingent – there were lots of possibilities for the pennies, and thus this event passes the first stage of the explanatory filter, and we go on to the second stage.

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The second stage of the explanatory filter is that the event being studied must have an exceeding low probability of occurring.

For instance, if you came home and there were 3 pennies on the kitchen table, and they were all heads up, you wouldn’t feel compelled to assume that one of your children intentionally placed the pennies heads up. Maybe he or she did, but you still couldn’t conclude it, because there is a 1/8th chance that 3 pennies on a table would be face up, if they were put there at random. Thus, this example would not pass the second stage of the filter, since the probability isn’t low enough.

How low must the probability of an event be for it to pass the second stage of the explanatory filter? There can be no definitive value, but probably the safest one to choose would be 1 in 10150. For those with not much of a math background, this is a very small probability. It’s about equivalent to the same person winning the Texas Lottery twenty-four times in a row.

Here’s another example of an extremely low probability event. You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I checked the math myself. Suppose someone who obviously had excellent reflexes were to throw 500 pennies on a table at random, and he did this a trillion times every trillionth of a second, and he did this since the Universe began around 14 billion years ago. The odds are exceeding small that he would ever get all heads. Then, if he were persistent enough to keep up at this rate, the odds are much greater that the sun would burn out (which will occur about 5 billion years from now) before he got all heads. If you’re interested in the actual value, the probability is about 1 in 10 billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion – billion that you would get all heads before the sun burned out. Better stock up on lots of candles if you’re going to continue until you get all heads. (If you’re interested in the exact computation, e-mail me and I would be happy to provide it).

One might think that showing that an event had an extremely low probability was enough to show that it had an intelligent cause, but this is not the case. Consider again the example of the 500 pennies, and to make it easier to picture, consider the pennies arrayed in 10 rows of 50 pennies each. Now flip each penny at random so that you have a sequence of 500 heads and tails. Record this sequence, and then do the experiment described in the previous paragraph. The results would be the same. You could flip the 500 pennies a trillion times every trillionth of a second and it is very likely the sun would burn out yet again, before you obtained the sequence you recorded. In fact, every person on Earth could be doing the same thing, and our poor sun would almost certainly exhaust its supply of energy before someone got your sequence.

So something else is needed other than a very low probability of an event, before we can infer that it had an intelligent cause, and that something is usually called specificity; it means that the event conforms to some independently given pattern.

Referring to the penny example, each time you flip 500 pennies, you get a sequence that has a very low probability of ever occurring again (through random flipping). However, notice that we started with a particular sequence that we recorded, and then tried flipping coins until we matched this recorded sequence. This original recorded sequence was what was specified – it was the independently given pattern that we were trying to match.

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Thus, the third and last stage of the explanatory filter is that the event being studied must be specified in some manner, before we can conclude that an intelligent cause was involved. Here’s another good example of what being ‘specified’ means. Let’s say that you started your word processor on your computer, a blank document came up, and you left for some reason. When you came back, the document was no longer blank. Instead, it had the letters: “aedgtuhjkklylpmmkiplpgpbhlu”. Immediately, you know what happened. Your beloved cat, Puffy, walked over the keyboard in a successful attempt to irritate you. In particular, you did not attribute the sequence of letters to an intelligent cause – it met no specification.

Now go back in time a few minutes (a small flux capacitor should do) and let’s say that this time when you came back the document had the letters: “Daddy, I need help with my physics homework.” Again, you immediately know what happened. Your beloved daughter is requesting help with – you guessed it – her physics homework. And this time you did attribute the sequence of letters to an intelligent cause – it met the specification that the sequence of letters was a grammatically and semantically meaningful sentence.

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If an object or event passes through all three stages of the explanatory filter, we say that it exhibits specified complexity, and we can reasonably conclude that it had an intelligent cause.

To summarize, if

1) an object or event is contingent – it didn’t have to be a certain way due to the laws of nature; and if

2) the object or event has an exceedingly low probability of occurring, and if

3) the object or event is specified – it conforms to some independently given pattern, we then say that it exhibits specified complexity, and thus conclude that it had an intelligent cause.

We know of many examples of specified complexity, and in every case, we attribute the object or event to an intelligent cause. We mentioned the faces on Mount Rushmore, but how about a cell phone, or a cardinal’s nest, or a house, or even a mousetrap. All of these exhibit specified complexity, and indeed, we know in every case, who or what the intelligent cause was.

But we need not know the identity of the intelligence in order to conclude that an event did indeed have an intelligent cause. For example, there’s a program called SETI, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The Center for SETI Research has developed signal-processing technology that it uses to search for signals from advanced technological civilizations in our galaxy. It takes these signals and tries to match them with signal patterns that we have specified as those that might be sent by an extraterrestrial intelligence. For example, one pattern might be a sequence of the first 100 prime numbers. Since no law of nature would cause such a signal, and since this sequence is specified, and, additionally, the probability of receiving this sequence at random is exceedingly low, it exhibits specified complexity, and we would rightfully conclude that it was sent by intelligence. But we would have no idea as to the identity of the intelligence (although my guess would be that it’s the Klingons).

The idea that one can infer an intelligent cause from an event exhibiting specified complexity doesn’t seem so controversial, does it? Indeed, in every instance where specified complexity is present, and the cause is known (e.g. we know that humans carved the faces on Mt. Rushmore), we have found that the event was designed. So what’s all the fuss about? The fuss comes about because a number of scientists are now finding evidence of specified complexity in such things as the constants of the Universe, the structure and evolution of life, and even in the creation of life itself. And if they are correct, that would mean an extremely intelligent Intelligence was involved. This makes some (but certainly not all) scientists very nervous because it reminds them of the ‘G’ word, and we can’t have that now, can we?

However, what is the evidence that an intelligence is involved in such things?

Check out Intelligent Design - Part 2 to find out (forth coming).

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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. The opinions expressed in this monograph are his and do not necessarily reflect those of Beverly Hall Corporation. You are welcome to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.

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