About the Design Allergy

The trial over teaching Intelligent Design last fall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania painted an intriguing picture of American culture. The reaction by many strong voices in the scientific community revealed just how committed many scientists and institutions are to the theory of evolution.  To even dare to question it as the only approach to a scientific understanding of the world evoked patronizing corrections from some sources and bitter vilification from others.   If I were a doctor, I would say that many of us are allergic to the concept of design on a grand scale. In some instances, the vehemence of the reaction against the idea was reminiscent of the reaction against the teaching of evolution in schools just about 80 years ago during the Scopes trial.  Obviously "religious zealots" are not the only ones who can be religious and zealous at the same time.  Though the trial was made more complex by the apparent disingenuousness of some members of the school board, it nevertheless served as a barometer of our society's prevailing response to the mere idea that there is a Designer who exists and designed our world. 

This allergic reaction is justified by a noble motive.  Many are eager to keep science "scientific" by not permitting unscientific assumptions to sail into a Science class under the guise of what some call "pseudo-science."  However, such a  stance by evolutionists in the scientific community involves a significant degree of irony.  At the very core of modern Darwinism is the idea that once, long, long ago, in a place far, far away from anything living, a piece of inorganic, dead matter, suddenly became organic.  Out of non-information erupted information—and that on a comparatively grand scale!  The only thing scientific about spontaneous generation (the scientific label for this hypothetical event) is that it has been proven to be impossible in the laboratory of Louis Pasteur and others.  For macroevolution to function, as it is touted today, this scientifically impossible event had to have happened.  Thus, hidden in the vest pocket of Darwin’s lab coat, is what most people would call a very sizable leap of faith. 

We cannot miss the significance of this idea.  According to modern evolutionary theory, in the beginning there was nothing but stuff.  ("Stuff," though an overused word, was spoken so scientifically by Carl Sagan in the 80's that it seems fitting to use it here.)  This stuff was undifferentiated. It had no genetic code and no power to grow or to adapt or to sense or to respond. It was what we call today, "dead." Most importantly, unlike the beginning that the Bible describes, there was no God to act upon this stuff.  In fact, there was nothing at all . . . except stuff.

That means that if anything was going to happen in the beginning, if the world in all its present complexity was going to start becoming that way, something from the outside would have to bring about such changes. Yet one of the classic features of modern evolutionary theory is that there is nothing beyond this universe. So, since there is nothing in the stuff itself to bring the necessary change (to account for the world as we see it today) and there was no Mind or Designer or Force outside the world that could act upon it,  it had to happen as a function of mere chance and lots of time.

But right away we must be careful to avoid attributing any kind of personality or intelligence to chance or time.  They are not gods.  They aren't really any thing. They have no real existence per se. Rather they are a function or a description of the action of those things that have existence.  But--according to the theory--given enough time, chance can actually do things.   Spontaneously, from no thing within the stuff itself, and from no outside source, this stuff acquired information.  It miraculously developed a very simple structure and the power to grow.  It would be hard to over-exaggerate the quantum leap that this transition from dead (inanimate) to living (animate) represents.  It is a greater leap than that which would be required to turn an amoeba into a man in an instant of time.  Something that had no order or structure or capacity or information, suddenly acquired those things through inexplicable means.  It is a deus ex machina of which  no Greek playwright could have ever dreamed.

For a comparison, imagine that the Mars Rover topped a hill on the red planet tomorrow morning and focused its camera on a fully functioning pocketwatch (to borrow an illustration) sitting in the dirt.  It would give all of us an unrecoverable shock.  Where did that come from?  Who put that there?  The human race would be abuzz with questions and hypotheses.  But, to be sure, the one hypothesis that no right-minded scientist would be content to accept is: it just appeared.  Ironically, that is exactly the current scientific explanation for the existence of stuff, of life, and of the order in the universe. It just is.  Hmmmmm. 

This puzzler brings up another crucial feature of the universe according to modern evolutionary theory.  Since there was no intelligence guiding the beginning of our world, and since all that initially existed was dead matter, there is necessarily no such thing as real meaning in the universe, because meaning presupposes design. 

For example, let us say that today a series of clouds formed themselves in a certain pattern over the skies of Leavenworth; and that pattern happened to represent the following letters in correct order: S-M-I-L-E.  As you know, these shapes are spookily close to certain letters in English (currently one of the most used of many human languages), which, when used in that particular order, refer to the idea of arranging one's face in a manner that communicates pleasure or happiness. 

There are two ways to respond to this remarkable event.  If one believes that there is a great Speller somewhere who not only understands human languages and controls clouds, but also  is capable of communicating with human beings, it would make sense to speak of those clouds having a meaning beyond their existence as carriers of water.  That is, the clouds are being used to communicate a message. There would be an actual meaning to the arrangement of those clouds. They mean something because they were designed to mean something. 

However, if one disbelieves in the existence of some kind of Speller, and is convinced that there is no intelligence in the universe beyond that of human beings, and that the entire universe is actually a product of chance functioning on mere matter over long periods of time, then it would only follow logically that, as meaningful as it may appear, the arrangement of the clouds is strictly a function of chance.  Therefore, while these arranged clouds constitute  a noteworthy oddity that tempts the less insightful to assert the existence of a Speller, they actually carry no essential meaning.  Thus, while we can choose to assign meaning to the universe, we obviously cannot discover any essential meaning, for in a universe governed strictly by chance and in which human intelligence is actually a function of random mutation, there is no such thing as essential meaning. There cannot be. 

(But we don't live in that kind of universe.  Go where we can to get away from order and design, it follows us like a haunting shadow.  For example,  the seemingly random arrangement of the molecules of Dr Pepper when cast from a car window by a careless . . . . . . .    are all predictable and decipherable according to the laws and formulas of motion and physics and dynamics.  )

This means that if we were to adopt a strictly evolutionary (or naturalistic) view of the world we could not say that ideas such as "right and wrong" or "good and evil" or "meaningful and meaningless" have anything to do with the nature of reality.  Reality, so conceived, is just an arrangement of stuff.  Each human being, while complex, is ultimately only stuff.  And so, this constant obsession that human beings have with finding meaning in the universe, finding meaning in life, trying to discover what is good and right and beneficial is really an absurd enterprise (as the Existentialists are wont to call it).  In the universe according to modern science, we find ourselves thirsting for meaning in a world that is as barren of it as the Sahara is of snow.  If there is no design to the universe, words like "good" and "right" and "true" and "excellent" and especially "meaningful" are only words.  Or they are merely those things we choose--by a sort of fiat--to call "good" and "right," etc.  We can have no hope that helping a person to live is any "better" or "more excellent" than killing a person.  Where--in a universe governed by chance and time alone, that has its source in dead matter--does the idea that "human life is precious" come from?  It has no ultimate grounding in the way things are. 

But Darwinian evolutionists are quick to point out that the answer to question about the value of human life has to do with promoting the survival of the species. This idea is most succinctly phrased in the mantra: "the survival of the fittest."  While this often forms the foundation of the moral ethic of evolutionary thought--that what is right is what tends toward the survival of the species and the world we live in--it does not offer any reason why it is better to survive than to not survive.  What makes survival essentially good?  We can just arbitrarily decide to call it good.  But we can't look back to the beginning or to some essential design or to some higher Mind to confirm our notion that it is good to live. We can never say that survival (or any other thing for that matter) is really, absolutely, essentially a good thing.   In fact, it actually isn't essentially good unless we admit of a design to the universe and an ultimate purpose to the existence of the human race.  But such ideas don't spring out of an evolutionary worldview.  They must be borrowed from some other philosophy.   And so, if we are to honestly embrace the evolutionary worldview, we are left with the power to merely state that survival (like the entire universe itself) just is. 

While I did not become a Christian because I knew I needed some ultimate ground for the concept of good, I did realize that my life lacked essential meaning without a Designer, and that I was dying and actually spiritually dead because of that lack.  The modern man is quick to point out the difficulty of believing in God.  They think it takes a great deal of faith to believe that the universe was created by an uncreated Creator.  It is a position that appears very "out of the lab" for the modern mind.  But, on the contrary, I would maintain that it is infinitely more difficult and requires monstrously more credulity to embrace the idea that  the complete florescence of design that we see in the world has its origin--not from a Mind or Designer--but from nowhere at all.  What the modern evolutionary scientist is asking us to do is to believe that--contrary to the the second Law of Thermodynamics, and contrary to the whole nature of the universe in the beginning--the complex, ordered world we live in has come into being and it is a gargantuan, inexplicable aberration.  I find it much more reasonable to believe in God than to believe that all of this order and beauty and design with which the world is crammed (and for which chance and time cannot account) just happened for no apparent or explicable or scrutable reason.    

This comparison can be stated another way.  If the universe was designed it is Art.  If it was not, it is debris.  Human awe and wonder are justified when one encounters the evidence of intelligence greater than one's own in the structure of the universe.  That same awe and wonder, though an involuntary reflex when confronted with the majesty of the Sun, or the elegance of the planetary orbits, or the intricacy and symmetry of a snowflake, is absurd in a universe that is a function of chance.

If you have thoughts about this idea, I would like to hear them.