Real Design

2008.11.12   prev     next

ID (Intelligent Design) is the sane middle ground between two unscientific extremes:

Darwinism posits that natural selection, acting on random mutation, can (and did) produce life on Earth, and all its adaptations, automatically. No design needed.

ID advocates are at their logical best when they point out the myriad empirical and mathematical flaws in Darwin’s idea. But they stumble when it comes to advancing their own position: They say that they believe in design — but almost to a person they believe in a Sunday-school, singular, omniscient designer. What is omniscience? It is knowing everything in advance. But if you know everything in advance, there is no need to design anything. In fact, you can’t design anything. You just translate your perfect knowledge of the human body from your mind to the matter of this universe. No design needed.

For example, when I write a software application at my Dilbert job, I am usually handed a pre-written spec that contains, in excruciating detail, a precise description of exactly what the app will look like, what it will do, and how it will do it. My job is just fiduciarily to translate the spec into a working program. I don’t really get to design anything.

Now, of course, whoever wrote that spec did design the app. But that wasn’t me. So if I had the power of omniscience, then I would have the spec already in my head (designed by nobody; just there), and would simply perform the mundane chore of translating from spec to usable app.

So although they say they are champions of design, most ID advocates actually believe we were created by a God who never designs anything, because he doesn’t need to. He always knew exactly how the human body would work, long before humans existed, before the planet Earth existed, even before this universe with its physical laws existed. He never designed it; he always just knew it in its finished form.

Like the Darwinists having to invent ad hoc, constantly mutating excuses for incompatibilities between their theory and the evidence, religious ID advocates have to invent ad hoc, ever-shifting excuses for the “problem of theodicy” — which is really the problem of how to keep evading the real-design conclusion in the face of massive evidence that supports it.

The only explanation for the existence of humans and other complex life on Earth that is even compatible with scientific inference to the best explanation, is that we were really designed by designers who design as we do: imagining systems, building them, discovering what really works and what doesn’t, then refining and perfecting the ones that panned out.

Real design of complex machines doesn’t self-generate by iterating simple laws. And it doesn’t pre-exist forever in its finished form (quirky kludges and all!), waiting to be copied to a world where it actually does something.

Real design is a process carried out by non-omniscient beings. And the evidence from biology is immensely compatible with that scenario.

But almost everyone alive today doesn’t want to believe it. Whether by omniscient translation or by automatic formation, almost everyone wants to believe that their bodies, and especially their minds, their thought processes, their emotions and preferences, were not really designed by anyone. The idea that they were is so disturbing that they would rather go to their graves defending a scenario of non-design, against all evidence.