I’m blogging through Nancy Pearcey’s excellent book Total Truth as part of a book discussion I’ve been doing. Last time, some months ago, I covered chapter 5, dealing with Darwinism. This time, I’m on chapter 6, “The Science of Common Sense”, which deals with the evidence of design in nature.

Pearcey argues (as does the Bible, see e.g. Romans 1) that evidence of design is compelling enough in creation that many people cite it as part of why they believe in God. (I’d note that in my own field, the evidence of design is so compelling that scientists often talk about how biochemical systems were designed to work the way that they do, and asking why they were designed that way rather than another way is often a productive line of research. The difference is that most believe that “Mother Nature” is the designer.) In any case, Pearcey observes this:

a 1998 survey by the Skeptics’ Society found that among highly educated Americans the number one reason for believing in God was seeing “good design” and “complexity” in the world. Design was cited by almost a third of respondents – 29 percent – while only 10 percent said they believed in God because religion was comforting or compelling.

Evidence of design in biology

In any case, this chapter deals in part with the idea that evidence of design can be empirically detected. She goes over some of the work used in design inference in various fields, such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, and by detectives, archaeologists, cryptologists, etc., and looks at how similar reasoning can be applied to the study of the world around us. There’s been quite a lot of work in this area, and one book I particularly like – which Pearcey also quotes – is Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box.

Behe’s book notes that Darwinism only works as long as each new system can be made from simpler systems by a series of small changes which either maintain the system’s functionality, or make it steadily better. Behe highlights a number of systems which seem to be, however, irreducibly complex – that is, if you take out any of the parts at all, or degrade their function, the whole system ceases to work entirely. These systems have the complexity of machines designed for a specific purpose, like those designed by humans. This poses problems for Darwin’s theories. Pearcey quotes Darwin:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would break down.

Pearcey adds, “With the explosion of knowledge from molecular biology, it appears that Darwin’s theory has indeed broken down.”

Evidence of design in cosmology

Pearcey also devotes some time going over to evidence of design in cosmology; there’s also been some very nice work in this area. It turns out that a very large number of details of the universe around us are very precisely tuned in order to make life possible – or even to make it possible for there to be stars, planets, etc. A vast number of physical constants have to be “just so”, but there is no apparent reason why this should be the case. Pearcey notes:

Take, for example, the force of gravity: If it were only slightly stronger, all stars would be red dwarfs, too cold to support life. But if it were only slightly weaker, all stars would be blue giants, burning too briefly for life to develop… the fundamental forces of the universe just happen to have the exact numerical value required to make life possible. The slightest change would yield a universe inhospitable to life.

There’s a lot more to this tuning, and it’s worth reading Pearcey’s summary of this and digging into other related work if you’re interested. She summarizes:

Nobel Prize-winner Arno Penzias, who has a Jewish background, is quick to see the religious implications. “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.”

Pearcey notes that critics admit this fine tuning, but look for alternate explanations, like the idea of there being multiple universes, or that an alien mind tinkered with details of the universe to make life possible. She points out that David Gross, who directed the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, said that his objection to the idea of this fine-tuning is “totally emotional” and that he finds the idea dangerous because it “smells of religion”.

Evidence of design in the genetic code

Pearcey also devotes a good section of the chapter to looking at evidence for design in the information contained in the genetic code. It’s worth reading, but I won’t summarize it at length here. The key problem, though, is where the vast information contained in life – and particularly in genetic codes – came from, since random processes don’t create information. Pearcey writes, “In principle, law-like processes do not generate high information content.” Pearcey goes over some of the many origins-of-life experiments which have been done which, in general, fail – bringing the right molecules together in the right proportions doesn’t result in life. She observes, “…life is not about matter, it’s about information…” DNA provides the medium, not the message or information; it simply conveys the information. This leaves unanswered the question of where the information came from.

Darwin and design

Pearcey goes on to note, with quotes from Darwin himself, that part of his goal in advancing his theories, was to get rid of the idea of design. He objected to the idea of theistic, or God-guided, evolution, because it would make natural selection superfluous, but also because he wanted to change the definition of science itself. He wanted to ensure that science was defined in such a way that it admitted only purely naturalistic explanations for the world around us. If we were to consider chance, law, and design as explanations for the world around us, Darwin wanted to allow only the first two. So in some way, Darwin’s objection was religious – to the idea of design at all.

The point, here, is partly about philosophical naturalism, which sees the natural or material world as all there is, and allows no explanations beyond the purely natural. Those with a broader view realize that natural explanations and supernatural explanations are both possible, and are able to decide which explanations best fit observed reality. And, when the evidence for design becomes sufficiently compelling, we can recognize it points to a supernatural designer who created the universe.