Design in Nature

When we see something around us which clearly had been built by humans, we know immediately that there was a mind responsible for its plan. We find that nature around us is full of design of all sorts, from the cells in living things to the measured sweep of the planets around the sun. We are faced with the thorny question whether or not there was mind – of some sort – responsible for nature’s plan.

The origin of the THEORY OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN.

SINCE the theory of EVOLUTION was first pr_oposed, it was seen as a threat to traditional ideas of religion and God. Links were not evident between animals. The huge spans in time were difficult to believe.

Creationism

The “theory” of CREATIONISM was invented. Creationism posited that God created things as they seem to be, including for instance the strata of rock with “fossils” in them. Some fundamentalist religious groups still hold this sort of idea – it can scarcely be called a “theory.” For the most part, CREATIONISM is a discredited claim.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

iNTELLIGENT DESIGN is an intermediate idea, still holding to the workings of a designer. Intelligent design allows for the general operation of biological evolution, but says there are certain steps where the increased complexity is too great for unguided evolution to account for.

Intelligent Design – Quinta Via

Intelligent Design Science

Recent legal flurries have again brought to the fore arguments about creation and design in the universe.  It is worthwhile striving to advance a theory which is consistent with the evidence before us and with our knowledge of the universe, or, for that matter, of anything.

As is true in many arguments, oranges are being mixed with apples, without people realizing it, and the resulting melange does not digest well.

This paper is not neutral on major points in the controversy.  On the contrary, very definite positions are espoused.  It is not intended that everyone be happy with the presentation, but to the extent possible, reasons will be given for tacks taken.  To let the cat out of the bag at the start, the world as herein analyzed is created, and God did it.  But, that requires explanation.

The battle as it plays out in society and before the law sometimes places creation science against evolutionary science as poles on a continuum.  There are all sorts of difficulties and confusions hidden in such a juxtaposition.  Rather than entering into that forum to tease the problems apart directly, I am going to develop certain basic philosophical positions, and I hope that clarification will emerge.

Couched:  evolution or intelligent design –

The effort to advance creationism of any sort as scientific involves a critical error.  The error resides in ascribing to science more power or status than it merits.  Our basic contact with reality is not scientific, and there is no way successfully to make it such.  We have stepped on a most slippery slope if we accept that things have to be scientific to be credible, but that is a slope on which many arguments are jousted, to the considerable confusion of many.  Science gives tremendous insight into many areas of reality, but its basic presuppositions are themselves not scientific.  If we look at a positivistic statement like “only empirical data can be trusted,”  an internal contradiction is immediately entailed.  That statement has no empirical basis, so there is no reason for trusting it.

Science, in short, rests on metaphysical convictions which are themselves non-scientific.

Creation Natural or Supernatural

Sometimes the question is asked whether creation, if true, would be natural or supernatural.  That is an odd question, and one which betrays confusion in the asker.  In context, “natural” means “within the laws of the universe,” and “supernatural” means “intervening within an established natural order.”  Clearly it would involve a confusion to say that creation if it occurs (occurred) it would be one or the other.  For, both “natural” and “supernatural” entail an existing universe, and the point of creation is that it is (would be) a process by which nature finds reality, not something to be found within its own product.  Clearly, creation would involve a special case.

Mundus Mendax

We have a certain right to be ticked off at nature.  We were not inclined to head directly for the truth.  Nature, our only teacher, tricked us at the source.  Reason for more than a sniff of resentment.

This is the way it happened.

For those many long eons during which we were evolving, we carried with us only an inaccurate and woefully incomplete memory of what was happening.  For example,  when Heraclitus and friends set about to speculate about the nature of the universe or the origin of mankind, they had no active recollection of racial experience at the time their ancestors were creating the cave paintings at Lascaux, much less the hominid experience running back to Lucy, our australopithecus predecessor.  The first pioneers in structured thinking tended to feel that man appeared pretty much the way he was at the time, and that he had some sort of magical or mythological provenance.

Our ancestors “forgot” the experience of evolving.  Further, they had no foggiest idea of the biological complexity required to make the human organism “go.”  This resulted in totally inadequate explanations given by even astoundingly large minds, such as saying that matter was “informed” by a substantial “form,” and thinking that that was enough to say.

An Unfortunate (?) Skew

What drove pegs into human experience and stabilized the intellectual project was writing.  In a way quite analogous to the digitization of information in current time, the ability to capture the length and breadth of human experience in two dozen little squiggles on paper (parchment, etc.) led to an immediate explosion of systematized thought.  Within the span of a few centuries, just about every literary and philosophical genre was not only invented, but raised to levels never to be surpassed.

Marvelous that civilization moved ahead, of course.  An unfortunate skew was that, due to the weakness of our racial memory and our inability to work with nature’s complexity, the first huge efforts of thinkers to understand the universe were long on philosophy, short on factual accuracy.  Man grasped the tools that were available, rather than those which required further experience to develop.

The resultant cultural problem was this:  during the pre-scientific era, certain metaphysical insights were developed which got lost sight of once empiricism gained foothold.  And, even more deleteriously, there developed a tendency to squeeze metaphysics into an empirical mold, where it doesn’t fit well.

Once Galileo (and his cultural colleagues, mutatis mutandis) espied Jupiter’s moons and got exiled to house arrest for the effort, medievalism was doomed and modern empiricism enthroned.  We are still struggling to rearrange the furniture sent into disarray once this whirlwind blew through our premises.

Metaphysics

Pre-Renaissance thinking was long on metaphysics, short on empirical truth.  Modern thinking has been the opposite: long on fact, short on metaphysics.  Rather a pity.  But, our objective is to straighten this out.  It’s only in doing this that we can get to the bottom of the problem of design and of orderedness in the universe.

It is not that metaphysics is abstruse, or particularly difficult.  However, it is a mode of thinking that the empirically accustomed mind is not particularly used to.

Existence is the core of metaphysical thought.  We know in general that whether things are real is the same question as whether they exist.  We have an intuitive sense of what reality means.  We are not, however, accustomed to focusing on reality as such, and teasing out its meaning from the welter of existing things which surround us.

Medieval scholasticism was deeply concerned with existence:  “esse,” “to be.”  And, Thomas Aquinas probably got it more “right” than anyone else.  The modern mind is liable to say that there is nothing scientific about the core of Aquinas’ thought – and, of course, that is correct.  In the modern sense of the world, metaphysics is non-scientific.

To use an analogy, metaphysics is like taking a vertical cut through a planar surface, where “facts” are all on the plane.  Metaphysics is what’s true about everything real.

The Third Way

“The third way is taken from possibility and necessity…. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be…. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there must have been nothing in existence.  …if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence – which is absurd.  …there must exist something the existence of which is necessary.  This all men speak of as God.

The Fifth Way.

“We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to attain the best result.  …  Now, whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it is directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer.  … This being we call God.”

Medieval Metaphysics not enough – but, some necessary insights

The Medievalists – at a particular phase in the evolution of thought.  The objective is not to turn the clock of development back to an earlier time, but, where necessary, to apply medieval insights to our understanding of the complex matrix of knowledge.

Here – something must exist the nature of which is to exist – a necessary mode of existence in the universe – and that we call God.

Conclusion – a mode of self-existing being is metaphysically necessary for anything to exist at all.

Throughout history, by analogy, humans have believed in some superior power as the source of existence and order in the universe – tendency to identify God.

Metaphysical thinking – shows this general pattern to be objectively based.  That’s what any existing universe would be like – but, where do we go from there?

What is God “like”?

Certainly not the old man with flowing beard picture.  Basically, a principle of being, strictly.  Must somehow be the cause of all contingent reality.  In some sense, must be the source of whatever positive realities are to be found in the world around us.  But – God isn’t like anything.  Rather, to whatever extent they exist, things are like God.

It is necessary to think in terms of physical images or meaning symbols.

We find the universe to be specified – not to be haphazard.

As science has made progress, we have specified more and more how the universe itself is structured in very specific ways.

From our philosophical beginnings, efforts have been made to determine the basic constitution of matter.  The arguments of the ancients were based more on untested observations and inferences than they were on critical evidence.  Thinkers of classical antiquity never evolved an unswerving theory, but the most commonly accepted classification settled on earth, air, fire and water.  In medieval alchemy, a fifth element was hypothesized, the quintessence, which was felt to be aether, of which the heavenly bodies were thought to be made.  These four (five) retained currency throughout medieval times and into the Renaissance, when scientists began to perform specific experiments on the composition of substances.

Modern science through the twentieth century identified what were thought to be nature’s basic forces: the strong atomic force, the weak atomic force, gravity and electomagnitism.

One of the great projects of continuing science has been the search for a theoretical structure which would unite nature’s basic forces into a unified theory, referred to as the GUT, or Grand Unified Theory.

The attempt to reduce reality to a unified theory that encompasses everything – questionable to what extent this has been achieved – or could be achieved.

Martin Rees, the noted English astrophysicist, has identified what he considers the basic physical constants which hold the universe together and control the way in which physical things exist and operate.  He has described these and identified the underlying pertinent physics is his epochal book “Just Six Numbers.”

Universe Not Haphazard

We have changed and refined our ideas about the basic realities of the physical universe.  Our ideas have changed from the primitive thinking of classical times to the highly sophisticated thinking of the twenty-first century, but one conclusion is clear:  the universe is anything but haphazard.  It is, in fact, very finely “tuned,” and without that tuning nothing could possibly exist, or have developed the way it has.

The universe is evolutionary

Although there is still a great deal more detail to mine out of the different areas of contributory science, the overwhelming weight of evidence demonstrated beyond all possible doubt that the world has been a developmental and evolutionary world.  On planet Earth, it is clear that stages in geological and biological history have been preceded in time by earlier stages, and, most importantly, later stages have developed from earlier stages by laws and principles which are discoverable and highly specific.  This, it is noteworthy, is the arena in which the current arguments about intelligent design are being waged.

Leaving Earth and venturing into space beyond, the first thing to be said in the longitudinal development of our thinking is that it has become clear that the nature and laws of matter beyond Earth are the same as they are “here below.”  The elements constituting matter, wherever it is found, are the same, and so are nature’s laws governing the way matter operates.

But nature on a cosmic level has also proved to be evolutionary: no magical leaps; later stages have developed from early stages, according to highly specific principles and “laws.”

Creationism – desire to see the hand of a Creator in “coming to being”

Creationism refers to a range of ideas, “theories” in a loose sense which posit in general that the picture of a universe developing over long eons of time from earlier stages to later stages by discoverable laws is false, and the world (universe) has been created at various stages, usually by an anthropomorphic deity, usually the God of the hebrew Bible.

Examples of creationistic theories are that the world was created a definable relatively short time ago – possible thousands of years, rather than millions and billions of years before current time.  Or that the fossils of strange creatures have been “created” by God in rock strata, possibly to impress us with God’s imaginativeness, or to test our faith in his omnipotence.

The motivation in back of creationist theories seems to be to preserve a fairly literal interpretation of the creation stories of the Bible, or to emphasize that the universe is the direct handiwork of an omnipotent creator.  Creationist believers generally are interested in seeing the direct hand of the Creator in cosmology and in the continuing saga of the human race.

Most scientists, or those with an investment in the capacity of scientific investigation to find truth in the universe, are convinced that, however earnest and sincere creationist “theorists” may be, most creationist accounts of cosmology or biology are, in short, untenable.

How to weave this into previous beliefs or convictions about the universe represents, clearly, a major and continuing issue.

The World does speak to us of a coming to be – does this entail creation?

Cosmological theory has lead us back to the origin of the cosmos in the “Big Bang,” an event at the beginning of time prior to which we have no knowledge – a moment when “everything” came into existence at a physical point of near-infinite density and energy.  The initial state was magnificently unstable, and things “blew up,” bringing space and time into existence.  The universe we know at out period in the unraveling of time developed from this primal event.

The “Big Bang” concept arose during the middle decades of the 20th Century, emanating from Edwin Hubble’s theory of expansion in the universe, and the corollaries associated with that central thought.