The detectability of Intelligent Design

What is considered as unacceptable — that Intelligent Design may be detected objectively.

This is the true battlefield in the controversy of Darwinism against the thesis of the Intelligent Design of the structures of life and of organisms as an integrated whole. In Romans 1:18-20 we are told clearly that those that deny the reality of the Creator God as the source of life, do it denying the evidence itself ("so that they are without excuse"). The world will tolerate "religion" provided it is considered as a leap of faith without any contact with objective reality or with historical truth. In such case it will be considered harmless. What the world does not tolerate nor will tolerate is the approach of a rational faith (in contradistinction to "rationalist"), founded on realities, the realities of God being present, with the obvious testimony of His works, and that God has acted in an effectual way in the midst of History, that God has spoken, and that God has brought this revelation to its fullness in that the Son of God became man in a supernatural Incarnation, and was manifested also in the midst of the time and space of this world, partaking of our blood and of our flesh. And the world does not tolerate either that this manifestation may have the support of an undeniable testimony. This sober and well-grounded position is attacked with epithets like "religious extremism" and branded as "dangerous" from many worldly quarters. In fact, this position collides openly with watered down versions of a falsely understood Christianity which ends up denying or relativizing the Word of God, and which is accepted by the world —the world will accept all that which pertains to itself, but not that which comes from the God revealed in Christ Jesus, who was fully rejected by the world.

This rational faith, grounded on the truth of a God made evident by the things that are made, and this to the point that those that deny him "are without excuse" (Romans 1:20), and in the reality of a God that has manifested Himself in many ways and manners through the history of men, until He was manifested in a full way in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1-4), is a threat to incredulity. This faith has the true arguments which leave without answer those that show themselves as adversaries of God. This rational faith is the true enemy of incredulity.

A merely "mystical" faith in God, dissociated from reality, is well tolerated. A faith in the Word of the God that manifests Himself in an undeniable way in His works attracts the hostility of the materialists. It bears repeating the words of Richard Lewontin, the famous Harvard geneticist and avowed materialist, who said openly:

"... we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

New York Review of Book(9 de enero de 1997, p. 31).

Thus, the argument of Design and of an Intelligent Design of the Universe and of the structures and forms of life is, for materialism, the great enemy to beat. And the collision with (neo)darwinism as the explanation proposed from the materialistic viewpoint as the explanation for the origin and development of the different structures and forms of life is necessarily direct. And emotional. Materialists and atheists have always been around. It is only necessary to remember the Greek Democritus (ca. 460 B.C. — ca. 370 B.C.) and the Roman Lucretius (1st. century B.C.), which shows it is not a recent phenomenon due to the enlightenment provided by science. In fact, the proposals of Darwinism were welcomed eagerly by a big public educated in the Enlightenment, led by an elite educated in the rejection of a God that intervenes and that acts in a sovereign way. The apparent plausibility of the mechanism of Natural Selection, given the state of ignorance of the true nature and sources of variability in the living beings, gave wings to the materialists, who believed that Natural Selection was the great motor for that evolution in which they believed ever since the times of the ancient Greek philosophers. What the materialists were lacking was a mechanism that would justify their belief in this origin of all living beings by chance and natural law, without any divine intervention. And it was the Natural Selection proposed by Darwin which seemed to be at the time this plausible mechanism. And this is how Richard Dawkins, who is amongst the most militant of materialists and atheists of our time, could say that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" (p. 9 of The Blind Watchmaker).

In fact, and from the very beginning, Darwin did not feel himself very sure about his own theory. He was emotionally very attached to it, but when he was confronted by arguments like the one of the complexity of the design of the eye itself, and of other structures, he even says that "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind...?" [Letter 13230 — Darwin, C. R. to Graham, William, 3 July 1881.]

And the proposal and the rigorous justification of the Design inference and of the need of a deliberate design, both on the basis of what was already known in the times of Darwin as well as —and in an overwhelming way— due to all the knowledge piled up through the last 60 years about all the mechanisms of the working and of the reproduction of the cells and of the coordination of the different tissues in the biological processes of the multicellular organisms, again leaves materialists void of that apparent justification which they thought they had with the mechanism proposed by Darwin for the origin and development of the life-forms. Objectively, we are back to the pre-Darwinian situation. Materialists accept and believe there has been an evolution, but the mechanism of this evolution, which for a time it was believed that had been solved by Darwin, is at present a matter of heated polemics. Scientific research has unveiled the fundamental structure of life, and that this constitution, control and reproduction are based on systems of filing, treatment, transcription and expression of Information, of a nature and of a complexity that give evidence that are the embodiment of the purpose of a Super-Intelligence. The big problem facing materialists is the origin of the information that appears in the background of all organic systems and of the make-up of all the nanomachinery performing the cellular functions. Materialists are holding to their paradigm of chance and natural law as a necessarily sufficient explanation for the origin of the forms of life and of their mechanisms, but this paradigm is really void of a true answer to this question: What is the origin of biological information?

Pierre P. Grassé, a distinguished French zoologist, reflected the following with reference to this problem, back there in 1973:

"When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the 'intelligence' which fashioned it comes

from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides.

An act of faith is necessary to make us adopt one hypothesis rather than another. Science, which does not accept any credo, or in any case should not, acknowledges its ignorance, its inability to solve this problem which, we are certain, exists and has reality.

If the search for the origin of information in a computer is not a false problem, why should it be when it is a matter of the information contained in the cellular nuclei?"

(Grassé, P. P., L’Evolution du Vivant,
Éditions Albin Michel: París, 1973, p. 15)

Thus, it is not only a matter of the evidence proceeding from structures of great perfection, not only from the eye, or in general of all the structures of life which give evidence of an intelligent design governed by a Purpose that expresses the wisdom and the power of God. We have much more. At present the evidence has piled up of a whole cybernetic system in the basis of life itself and of all its expressions. And this fact of this information built-in in magnitudes that go beyond all measure brings us to an unavoidable fact:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life ..." (Gospel of John, 1:1-4)

Santiago Escuain