This is part of an email exchange between my father and I on the subject of Intelligent Design.
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My Father's Note
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My Father's Note
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I must admit I was a little disappointed with your answer to my "What takes more faith" question. The reason for my disappointment is that when we met at Dunkin Donuts you were very clear that you believed in God and were struggling with the Christian proposition that Jesus was God and that he was the only way to heaven. Now it appears that you are no longer on a quest to find out "Who is Jesus" but "If there is a God at all" It is easy to conclude this from your statement "I agree with facts 2,3, & 4. I think that claiming that there is a God assumes a whole lot of things that I am not ready to concede at this point."
You made this statement in your first reply "So the first goes to his assumption that just because something looks designed, it must be designed." Let me ask you another question. Suppose you look at a large tree in front of a house. Do you look at that picture and say wow look one seed grew into a tree and the other grew into a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house. The answer is of course not. It is clear that the house was created by an intelligent mind the tree did not grow that way. Or suppose you look on your desk at your computer do you say "Wow look what i dug up at the computer garden. Again the answer is a clear NO. The reason is simple it is clear that the computer was made by an intelligent mind and did not just "grow" that way. I realize that good science would have to say (if they did not know how the house or computer were made) We have no "proof" that these things were created by an intelligent being (because they can only say that with things they can prove or recreate). However, to everyone else who is not a scientist we can say it is clear to us that the house and computer did not just grow that way without having to determine exactly how they were made.
To deny that there is a God would be to literally deny the testimony, of I would dare say, billions of people throughout recorded history. The Bile says you want to know if there is a God "look around" He has revealed Himself through all of nature. He then came and walked among us and did things 2000 years ago that modern science and modern medicine are not even attempting to do today, i.e.; raising people dead for days and commanding the weather what to do.
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My response
You made this statement in your first reply "So the first goes to his assumption that just because something looks designed, it must be designed." Let me ask you another question. Suppose you look at a large tree in front of a house. Do you look at that picture and say wow look one seed grew into a tree and the other grew into a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house. The answer is of course not. It is clear that the house was created by an intelligent mind the tree did not grow that way. Or suppose you look on your desk at your computer do you say "Wow look what i dug up at the computer garden. Again the answer is a clear NO. The reason is simple it is clear that the computer was made by an intelligent mind and did not just "grow" that way. I realize that good science would have to say (if they did not know how the house or computer were made) We have no "proof" that these things were created by an intelligent being (because they can only say that with things they can prove or recreate). However, to everyone else who is not a scientist we can say it is clear to us that the house and computer did not just grow that way without having to determine exactly how they were made.
To deny that there is a God would be to literally deny the testimony, of I would dare say, billions of people throughout recorded history. The Bile says you want to know if there is a God "look around" He has revealed Himself through all of nature. He then came and walked among us and did things 2000 years ago that modern science and modern medicine are not even attempting to do today, i.e.; raising people dead for days and commanding the weather what to do.
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My response
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The conversation we had at Dunkin Donuts was in the begininning stages of this process for me, so I was still unsure of what exactly I was feeling and less sure of how to articulate it. As I have been reading, thinking, and discussing this more, I have begun to understand what my true feelings are. When we spoke, I was throwing out examples about different religions (how can you be sure? how can you claim to be a member of the 'right' religion? etc) because these were the lines of reasoning that were driving my thought processes at that point. As I matured in this process, I began to realize that my instinctual resistance to religion is rooted in a fundamental doubt in the supernatural. I will be honest and say that the more I contemplate, the more confident I am in my instincts. This is not to say that I am convinced that I am right, but it does give context to my current state of mind (much like your religious beliefs bring context to yours).
The conversation we had at Dunkin Donuts was in the begininning stages of this process for me, so I was still unsure of what exactly I was feeling and less sure of how to articulate it. As I have been reading, thinking, and discussing this more, I have begun to understand what my true feelings are. When we spoke, I was throwing out examples about different religions (how can you be sure? how can you claim to be a member of the 'right' religion? etc) because these were the lines of reasoning that were driving my thought processes at that point. As I matured in this process, I began to realize that my instinctual resistance to religion is rooted in a fundamental doubt in the supernatural. I will be honest and say that the more I contemplate, the more confident I am in my instincts. This is not to say that I am convinced that I am right, but it does give context to my current state of mind (much like your religious beliefs bring context to yours).
With respect to design, I stand by my assertion. I am not so obtuse as to say that a scientist would need 'proof' that an ordinary desk was intelligently designed. The scientist would, just like any of us, make a judgment based off of their experience. The problem is that you cannot take this kind of personal observation and extend it to the complexities of the natural world. The law of parsimony, also known as Occam's razor, states that "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best" (paraphrased). Let's apply this law to your examples to see what happens when you move from the ordinary (a desk) to the rare (complex organic life):
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Example 1: The Desk
How did the desk come into being? (I can think of two possibliities)
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Random Self Assembly (inanimate objects cannot evolve) - This would require the random quantum assembly of an enourmous numbers of particles arranging and bonding themselves to create a fully funcitoning desk. I will just assume that the chances of this happening all at once are statiscually low enough to say that it has never and will never happen.
Law of parsimony test - requires an expansive and increasingly complex explaination
Created by an Intelligence (presumably human) - I know humans beings can make desks, I have seen many desks and they are a very common object. Human beings have proven themselves capable of gathering the materials, forging them into parts, and then assembling them together.
Law of parsimony test - requires a reductive and logical explaination
How did the desk come into being? The law of parsiomy says that the desk was built by a human being because that explanation is the simplest.
Example 2: Human Beings
How did human beings come into being? (again, I can think of two possibliities)
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Random Mutation aided by Natural Selection (Darwinian Evolution) - Organic life started as small microbes in ancient earth. Through a process of small and incremental changes, these microbes gradually evolved into more and more complex organisms. This slow and methodical process is governed by natural selection, the concept that mutations with some increased survival benefit are the ones that tend to survive long enough to reproduce. This process eventually led to all manner of diverse life that we see today. This option relies largely on known and accepted biological functions, and has the ability to explain all manner of complex life in terms of a single simple process spanning an enormous amount of time. The grand canyon was carved by a single stream over a large timeframe. A simple system can produce increasingly dramatic results when given a long enough time to operate.
Law of parsimony test - elegant, simple, and reductive explanation that relies on observed and documented natural forces
Created by an Intelligence (presumably god) - God created all life with his supernatural abilities. This god exists outside of the physical world and is endowed with absolute power and absolute knowledge. God was not created and has always existed. This option answers the question at hand, but it does so while raising another, much more difficult question in it's place. The god being referred to here is immensely complex, needing to have the knowledge and power to blink the universe into existence. A being of this complexity makes the random assembling of molecules in the desk example look probable by comparison. This also pushes the problem further by now raising the impossible-to-answer question of god's origins.
Law of parsimony test - invoking god opens up much larger and more difficult questions to answer, god is enormously complex by definition
How did Human Beings come into being? The law of parsimony says that Humans came from a natural evolutionary process because it is the simplest explanation
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This is the fallacy of presumed design. When you jump to the conclusion that an ordinary object like a house or desk was designed by an intelligence, you are subscribing to a conclusion that provides the simplest and most likely answer. It is all to easy to try and draw analogies of ordinary observation to the biological world (or cosmic, depending on the question you are asking), but you end up creating many more problems than you solve. This is why it is very dangerous to assume that just because something in the natural world has the illusion of design, that the most reasonable explanation is design. Evolution provides an elegant way to demonstrate how complex life can grow out of simplicity, and it does so without invoking the nuclear bomb of a supernatural creator.
In a more general sense, this kind of leap reasoning is a trap that many intelligent arguments fall prey to. God is defined to be so general purpose (all powerful, all knowing, etc.), that the temptation to slot him into every gap is almost irresistible. I feel that it damages the creditability of the argument in general because I liken it to crying wolf. Say there really is a god and he really is behind the scenes. Informed people are going to be less likely to believe in that fact if well meaning religious types are continually sticking god in where it serves no purpose. As science continues to slowly uncover truth in the universe around us, those gaps continue to close in. As the gaps close, the credibility of the 'god did it' argument weakens. What happens if science really does answer questions about the origins of the universe and all gaps are closed? If the church is banking it's future on it's ability to undermine or out-explain science, they are fighting a losing battle.
