What Is “Intelligent Design”?

The latest challenge to Darwinism is called Intelligent Design. Two decades ago, the phrase intelligent design (ID) usually was a compliment given to an engineer. Now adays it means something very different, and thousands of articles have recently appeared about this subject. There have also been over fifty scholarly books published by major presses, including Michigan State University Press, Cambridge University Press, Rowman and Littlefield, and Oxford University Press, about it. Why the movement has grown so fast (a couple of chat rooms that I am on—by invitation only—boost close to five hundred members, mostly University Professors or scientists), is of much interest today.

A major reason for the enormous growth of the ID movement is the molecular biology revolution. In Darwin’s day, it was thought that the cell was no more complex than a few chemicals mixed in a sac to produce an amorphous structure that, although it divided in half at times, seemed to do little else. The discovery of dozens of complex cellular mechanisms, each containing hundred of thousands or even thousands of millions of individual parts—all that must be manufactured to precise standards—has changed our view of the world.

Some of the many examples of these complex cellular mechanisms include apoptosis, (cell suicide, where cells are programmed to self-destruct unless they receive outside messages that delay the self-destruction), jumping genes (genes that can move around to other locations on the genome), dozens of complex cellular repair systems, a telomere clock, DNA replication, DNA translation, DNA transcription, molecular motors, complex structures such as ATP synthase, and thousands of others. One could easily spend a lifetime studying apoptosis alone—a growing area about which numerous books have been published, and several journals exist devoted solely to this topic, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of articles that discuss the topic. A search of one science index alone came up with over one hundred and twelve thousand articles on this one subject.

Lehigh University professor Michael Behe, in his best-selling book titled Darwin’s Black Box,showed the enormous difficulties in explaining the evolution of these nanomachines and systems. He introduced the term irreducible complexity to illustrate why these cellular machines could not evolve. The example he used was a mousetrap (which will not function unless it has a certain minimum number of parts), but a better example is a television system. A television

12

system must have a functional camera, a way of converting light into electrical signals, a method of broadcasting them into the atmosphere, a transmission receiver to pick up the signal, and a method to convert the electrical signals into an electron gun signal in a cathode ray tube that paints the picture on a fluorescent screen. The invention of the television by Philo Farnsworth illustrates the fact that this system is useless until every component is inverted and perfected to be able to function, which Philo spent much of his life doing. Likewise, life requires a certain level of complexity before it can live at all—and until it is living, it cannot do the things that life requires, including respirating and reproducing.

Viruses are simpler than the simplest cell, but are actually too simple to be alive. They are, in essence, gene machines that transfer genes from a container (the virus body) into a cell or from one cell to another. Only when the virus genes take over the cell can the virus reproduce. The scientific articles about cell design now run into the millions and, to objective observers, this research has made the idea of naturalistic evolution of the living cell more and more improbable.

A major focus of ID as a field is to detect evidence of intelligence, and achieving this dichotomy is critical to police work. For example, if a man dies it must be determined whether or not his death was due to intelligence or non-intelligence. Intelligence-caused death includes homicide and suicide. Non-intelligence causes include accidental death (such as a line worker whose safety belt malfunctions, a man struck by lightening, or a healthy man who died from an unexpected heart attack). Once it is determined that the cause was due to intelligence, it must then be determined whether it was due to suicide or homicide.

Another example of ID is the effort called SETI that detects signals from outer space to determine if manifest signs of intelligence exist in the signal. Examples would be a signal received from outer space that produced the formula for pie (3.14), a consecutive set of prime numbers, or similar signals. In spite of multimillions of hours of analyzed data, no clear evidence of intelligence has yet been received. Nonetheless, the field has developed many ways to ensure that if a signal is received that indicates intelligence, this can be determined. The knowledge from these fields can also be applied to life to determine if there exists evidence for intelligence in the origin of the biological world.

An important area of ID is called reverse engineering. Scientists endeavoring to understand the biochemistry and molecular biology of the cell often behave like companies evaluating their competitor’s product. They buy the product and disassemble it, constantly asking the question “How was this designed to function?” When I was doing molecular biology research at a medical university, we often asked this question (and usually found life to be more complex—and better designed—than we first expected). Evolutionists often phrase the same question as “How did evolution design this?” The question was the same for ID except that ID asked only “how was this designed?”

Some argue we should look only for naturalistic answers, and that ID allows researchers to escape into metaphysical solutions to the origins question. Actually, ID encourages looking for any solution that best fits the data. ID is useful not only to look for evidence of intelligence, but also helps to determine if an event is, in fact, clearly the result of naturalism. For this reason it cuts both ways, i.e., it can prove naturalism as well as support the conclusion that intelligence is involved in some phenomena, such as the origin of life. ID is a new approach that will open up many new avenues of research. It encourages asking new questions by encouraging exploration of all possible avenues for answers to the questions that have plagued humans since the beginning of history.

The detection of intelligent design is now a firm part of science. The problem is that naturalists and atheists want to confine it to the detection of human intervention in nature. It comes down to a question of evidence: If ID is wrong, it is just wrong. If Darwinists are wrong, they are stopping science from discovering important facts.

Although those that the late Steven J. Gould calls “Darwin Fundamentalists” may dispute this claim, many persons, a number of them scientists, have major problems with Darwinism. In my library I have several thousand books—many written by scientists—that discuss some of the many problems with Darwinism. Many of these scientists are evolutionists who feel that a totally new approach is required to understand the origin of life on the earth. Likewise, many scientists have concluded that only through intelligence could life originate. Towards this end, the Ohio Educational guidelines now stress that criticism of Darwinism is an important part of a good education. Only by questioning that which is now accepted will we be able to break through the barriers that can lead us to new breakthroughs of understanding. As the Wright brothers broke the barrier to flight by their application of the Bernoulli effect, so too, can breaking the Darwinistic monopoly in science open up potential new vistas of learning and understanding about the natural world.

The field includes a wide variety of scientists, although most are in the biological or physical sciences. Religiously, those involved range from atheists to fundamentalist Christians. World wide, a significant number are Muslims, Jews, and other religions. The atheists and agnostics involved believe that, even if evidence of intelligence exists, the source of this intelligence is open to question. Obviously, Christians believe the source is God, Jews G-d, and Muslims Allah. While it is true that some ID researchers are religiously motivated, many are not. It is also true that many people have become Christians through the study of ID. Historically, the study of nature has always been a major motivation in developing a religious world view.

One concern is ID has clear implications for the existence of an intelligent creator, and thus was outlawed recently in the public school classroom by Judge Jones in the Dover PA case. Conversely, as is evident from history, Darwinism also has major implications for theism. To rule out an avenue of research because it has implications for theism is pernicious to the extreme. In science, we should determine truth by the application of the scientific method, not by presuppositions—either of the theistic or atheistic kind.

As design implies a designer, so the ID field has been one of the first major challenges to atheism since Darwin's theory kicked God out of the universe. Where this field will lead and what its fruits will be only time can tell. Nonetheless, in the past decade many have been very encouraged both by where it is leading and its fruits for understanding and exploring life.

Jerry Bergman Ph.D.

For a period of fourteen hundred years, most of the great minds in Western civilization believed the sun, the moon, and the planets all revolved around the earth. Ptolemy formulated this teaching. It was not until the sixteenth century that a scientist named Copernicus first seriously questioned Ptolemy, but the theory was so entrenched that even seventy years later, when Galileo attempted to popularize the idea that the earth was not the center of the solar system, he found himself bitterly rebuffed. The more those astronomers studied the heavens, the more problems they had making their observations fit Ptolemy’s theory; yet society had been convinced it was a fact. Selected