About Intelligent Design, Darwinism and Creationism

“A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; ...”

Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859, Introduction.

When a matter is not known in all its fullness, often the apparent facts can be interpreted in different ways. A superficial knowledge of the facts related to phenomena like, for example, bacterial resistance to antibiotics, or that of diverse pests to pesticides, may conjure Darwinian extrapolations, or interpretations consistent with the thesis of Intelligent Design (ID). It is the detailed knowledge of the diverse mechanisms which will allow us to elucidate the consequences; the conclusion of a rigorous examination is that they do not bring anything constructive nor relevant for the origin of a NEW genetic or structural information. They rather spring from mechanisms which were either already programmed for protection (activation of devices already present in the organism), or from the working of mutations which cause reductions of the genetic and structural capacities of the affected organisms, or perhaps other defence strategies that do not generate genetic novelties (biopolymers, etc.).

The increase of knowledge as to the details of the mutation mechanisms do not bring us to a conclusion of a neodarwinian mechanism that generates novelties, rather one that generates an increasing reduction of information and structure of the organisms that suffer it. See, e.g., the article Is Bacterial Resistance to Antibiotics an Appropriate Example of Evolutionary Change?

On the other hand, referring to the nature of fossils, Edmund Ambrose acknowledged, not so long ago, that:

“At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth.”

Edmund Ambrose,
The Nature and Origin of the Biological World
New York:
(John Wiley and Sons, 1982), p. 164.

ID distinguished from Creationism

When it is said that ID is not creationism, that it does not support a recent Earth or that it does not support the Diluvial or Cataclismic thesis as an explanation of the geological nature of Earth, it must be remarked that it neither supports such thesis nor denies them. It is simply that ID is an instrument for the detection of plan, of purposeful intent, of an intelligent intervention that may have been the cause of certain events or that may be at the origin of certain artefacts that could not have existed without the said intelligent action (e. g., the linking of only L-alfa-aminoacids for the formation of proteins, and the linking of only D-sugars for the formation of DNA chains, the isolation and linking of the compounds of all the structures of life —an embodiment which would be impossible with the solitary action of natural laws in natural chemical systems).

Therefore, the determination of ID does not examine nor touch upon the HOW nor the WHEN, it is rather a rigorous empirical instrument for the detection of the INTELLIGENT DESIGN of specified complex systems. For the history, the when, the how, it is necessary to resort to historical resources.

ID makes on the one hand a very modest proposal, but at the same time a very powerful one: the irrefutable detection of DESIGN and the embodiment of the said design in a set of structures that evince the reality of a true INTELLIGENT DESIGN, and not the activity of natural forces, which are shown to be impotent for such a thing.

Now, what reasons are there for attacks as bitter as those that have been launched against ID from the barricades of materialism? The famous Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin, says it very openly, with very blunt words which bring to mind Voltaire's campaign against the revealed God and his clamour against God with his blasphemous words “Écrassez l’Infâme”. See Lewontin’s words in the sidebar.

As Darby reasons in his essay “The Irrationality of Infidelity”, God is excluded thereby. And, as Paul says in his Letter to the Romans, such people “hold the truth in unrighteousness”, and this they do in such a way that they are “without excuse”.

- ID is not “creationism” understood as a system, as a full blown conception of the world. It is limited to facilitate the identification of DESIGN in an object or in an occurrence.

- ID does not necessarily comport FIAT creation as revealed in Genesis —as it does not deny it at all: it is outside of its competence. ID is a common factor to every thesis that states that an intelligence has had to plan, to choose, direct and embody his creations through ways which are not limited to present natural laws or processes. It is compatible with certain varieties of theistic evolutionism and with several more directly creationist positions (progressive creationism, old earth and young earth creationism, etc.). But in itself ID is NOT fiat creationism. NEITHER theistic evolutionism. It is the objective, analytical instrument for the detection of a design embodied in an intelligent plan which follows a preconceived purpose by the designer or planner of the said occurrence or of the said object. ...

Richard Dawkins stated that Charles Darwin “made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist” —and indeed, Darwinism and the Neodarwinian synthesis are not a dispassionate scientific search for truth, but an intellectual endeavour that seeks to establish and justify a prior position: atheism, as Lewontin has acknowledged openly (see sidebar). But the enthusiasm shown by Dawkins was ill-founded and unjustified. Darwinism has shown to be a failed explanation for the origin of species, and also all attempts to explain the origin of life itself from a materialist approach are completely bankrupt. The features of life keep proclaiming out loud the reality of a NON apparent design, but a real one, of a NON natural selection, but full of deliberation and conscious, guided to a purpose and with full information to reach its end. A Design and a Purpose become evident, the Power and Godhead of the Creator.

Design and Plan

In nature, design is not something apparent, against what Dawkins says, but real; it is not the product of blind processes, but of a will, a purpose, a plan, of God. Dawkins says that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” —for Dawkins the key words are “give the appearance”— the appearance is there, but, according to him, it is only a mirage. On what does he base such a position? This is the partisan view of the Atheologian.

"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?"

(Grasse P.-P., "Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation," Academic Press: New York NY, 1977, p2) Corrected version on the basis of the French original, which in the last part says:

“Si rechercher l'origine de l'information dans un ordinateur n'es pas un faux problème, pourquoi le serait-ce quand il s'agit de l'information contenue dans les noyaux cellulaires?"

Fundamentally —and against those that maintain it is a matter of faith versus science, the debate of ID takes place against a position which is dogmatically materialistic from its very beginning (see Lewontin), while ID sets down the criteria to distinguish between secondary causes, the operation of natural law, etc., on the one hand, and intelligent causes (deliberate selection, inventiveness, generation of specified complexity), on the other. Materialism cannot pretend to be more than what it is: an ideological prejudice, and not the final measure of reality, which cannot admit this restriction ON PRINCIPLE.

Santiago Escuain

God in Creation, and God in Providence

NOTE: This entry is a compilation of thoughts written down throughout 2007. Therefore, they date from before the publication of the article by Oliver R. Barclay in Aletheia, n.º 31, 1/2007, pp. 39-52 [a publication of the Spanish Evangelical Alliance], and do not constitute a point by point reply to it; however, I do provide some reflections to some of the questions raised by the said author.

* * * * * *

Qualitative differences between origins and operation

The detectability of special design does not exclude at all a general design in the so-called Natural Law. But the Natural Law as a framework is qualitatively different from the system of engines and inventions of the gadgets of life, of its mechanisms. The vast system of Natural Law is a system of uniform cause and effect, and constitutes the operational framework within which life is made possible but not necessary; it certainly shows design and purpose. But this system of uniform operation of cause and effect is not the cause, cannot be the origin, of the computer-like, cybernetic system of life; in the same way as the electrical, magnetic, mechanic laws that a set of machinery obeys in its operations cannot explain the origin of the machinery, of all its gadgetry —all this results from an inventiveness that belongs to another level.

Information cannot be explained by matter nor by energy. Information is the expression of a purpose that has as its ed to materialize the said purpose in its execution and to communicate information for the performance and control of the processes that bring about a proposed end.

The key lies in that in the summit of the hierarchy is the purpose of a Being that, in the last term, must be recognized necessarily as God. And information is the key of life and of Revelation. Both things come from God. He is the source of the one and of the other.

Direct intervention and providence

DI does not pretend to attribute EVERYTHING to a direct action, to a direct intervention of God —God acts often through secondary causes. What DI does is to bring in some rigorous instruments to distinguish the action, the embodiment, of a purpose, of a design through a plan that is not apparent but real, produced in an intelligent way (for instance, the production of some devices, of a machinery), in contrast with what is produced by the uniform operation of causes and effects governed by laws (the operation of the designed machine). The issue discriminated by the analytical apparatus (the filter) of the ID is that the properties of the system CANNOT give rise to the elements of this said natural or technological system. Only when this system has its components formed and in their corresponding place (chlorophyll, flagella, ribosomes, mitochondria, etc.) can it then be maintained by a whole series of conservative processes. But these processes of operation and conservation of the system CANNOT explain its origin; these demands an inventiveness, an intelligent activity, OUT OF REACH of the forces and laws by which the system works.

The criterion

The essential question is: Can the origin of all the system of nature be explained by means of the forces that we can observe in our own times? This is what is derived from the ideological position —expressed by Carl Sagan in the Cosmos series— that «the Cosmos is all that there has been, is or will be».

According to materialism, the basic phenomena and processes found in a system are the same ones as those that gave it its origin. "All is matter and movement". The argument of materialists seems to be that the properties of the systems explain the origin of the system. Rather, what comes from the exam of the forces that act in nature, in the operation of its systems which follow a CHAIN OF CAUSES and EFFECTS in the natural system, is that they are INCOMPETENT and qualitatively different of what is necessary to ORIGINATE the said system.

When performing an analysis of the facts, what is observed is that the properties of the system proceed from the design of the system. The origin of a system must be governed by a deliberate plan, with the application of energy directed by an information which applies the plan for the constitution of this organized system.

Stages and actors

Physics and chemistry are spheres of activity of the uniformity of the law of cause and effect —in biology we have an added magnitude. To pass from physicochemical systems to biological systems the need arises to SELECT the components [concept of Maxwell's demon], and for this it is necessary that an intelligent agent has INFORMATION upon which to act deliberately so as to embody DYNAMIC systems —away from the equilibrium to which physicochemical systems tend, and with a necessary specified complexity beyond (a) all possibility of chance or (b) of the uniform operation of natural law.

Thus, we have a background or stage, a physical-chemical universe where we have evidence of a uniform operation of cause and effect. And it must be said that this same universe gives evidence of design due to the absolute improbability of its structure, which requires «fine tuning», as it is shown by González and Richards in their book The Privileged Planet (see sidebar). But against the background of this universe and of these operations ruled by physical and chemical laws, the extrinsic operation of an informational activity can be detected by which the biological structures have acquired forms and functions which they would never have acquired by the uniform operation pf the said laws, but which require an intelligence to select for this purpose. This Intelligence is made evident in this way, and this both from the most direct intuition as under the most demanding criteria of a conceptual and mathematical analysis, as is shown by Dembski with his filter to ensure the presence of a design, of a deliberate purpose, in the making of an object or in the occurrence of an event, which provides the tool to establish a rigorous distinction between a true design, on the one hand, and a possible or certain happenstance. See the recommended books by Dembski, and also of Woodward, in the sidebar.

The role of chance in Chemical systems

“Throwing dice” in a chemical system will introduce irrelevant differences in that chemical system, changes in it, but it will not transform it upward into an integrated biological system, which belongs to another ontogenic nature.

Throwing dice can only bring out the potentiality already present in a dice, it cannot go beyond.

And giving more space and more time?

A bigger sphere and a longer time may in theory increase the chances that a hormone and its receptor may appear by chance —but it will also mean that their appearance by chance will be much more apart in space and in time. They will certainly dissolve by much more probable processes before they have the slightest chance to meet. Therefore, the theoretical increase of the scopes of space and time will not increase at all the probabilities of the chance occurrence of an integrated biological structure.

About science – its origin and role

Science used to be that enterprise of man to study the works of God, that is, the universe in its totality and in each of its parts. Its workings and interrelationships. Its cause and effect relationships. 1) To follow God’s thoughts after Him, 2) To fulfil His mandate of dominion as His stewards and beneficiaries. It was not a search for materialistic explanations of the origin of the Universe, but a search for the interrelationships of the matter-energy phenomena in God’s created and ordered universe. The search has revealed now that the created order includes matter / energy (physics, chemistry) and information / information treatment mechanisms (biology).

A word to Christians

"Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth."

(John 11:43-44).

If God should operate only through natural processes and laws, the resurrection would be effectively IMPOSSIBLE, because it is something diametrically opposite to all the tendency of the natural processes. In fact, the theological positions of the so-called "modernism" and of dialectic theology deny the reality of resurrection and the "prodigies and miracles" of the Scriptures. At most, from these perspectives, they would serve as didactic "myths", but they would not be at all realities that happened in time and in space.

However, this position is not "modern" at all. We find it already in Plato, Galen and many other Greek naturalistic philosophers.

For instance, the celebrated physician Galen (130-201 A.D.), who spoke against the Genesis record in the following words:

“It is precisely this point in which our own opinion and that of Plato and of the other Greeks who follow the right method in natural science differ from the position taken up by Moses. For the latter it seems enough to say that God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should he wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes. We, however, do not hold this; we say that certain things are impossible by nature and that God does not even attempt such things at all but that he [sic] chooses the best out of the possibility of becoming.”

On the usefulness of
the parts of the body, 11:14.

Paul had to confront all this already, amongst other passages in 1 Corinthians 15. The fundamental factor is: The power of God that has wrought in Creation, which has intervened in history and which shall be manifested bringing His kingdom in.

It is obvious that a consistent reading of the Scriptures leads to a rejection of Naturalism as a limiting concept to the special actions of God in Creation and in His interventions in the History of Revelation.

Santiago Escuain

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On the specific but most important question of the present state of the research on the Origin of Life, we recommend reading The Last Testament of Leslie Orgel, just published.

Darwin against Design - background and motivations

Touching the controversy between Darwin and the intelligent design of life, the following can be said:

1. No one doubts the observations made by Darwin, and by students of nature before him, regarding changes in living beings, nor regarding descent with modification. The great question mark has to do with the scope of such changes, the meaning of the same, the interpretation they may receive.

Darwin himself conceded this point, saying:

"... I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; ..."

Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
by Means of Natural
Selection, 1859, Introduction.

2. Now, due to ideological and sociopolitical circumstances, the general atmosphere of England and in many places in Europe was in expectation of an approach to the origin and development of life that would give rational support to an atheistic or agnostic philosophy, which was already very well spread. But those that maintained this position confronted the weight of the argument as argued in the work Natural Theology, by William Paley (1802), on the evidence of an intelligent design for the forms and functions of life. This meant that atheistic or agnostic philosophy had the great obstacle of the evidence of design in living beings. In fact, one of the main modern proponents of atheism, professor Richard Dawkins, stated that Charles Darwin "made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist" (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 9).

We think that the great attractive of Darwin's thesis centres, more than in the rigour of the interpretations proposed by him, in the "deliverance" it offers man with respect to God as a Real Being on Whom he depends. For whatever reasons, ad as it is documented by Michael Denton in his work Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, after a few years Darwinism had passed from an arguable proposal to a dogma massively accepted by the intellectual classes. Darwin's apparently persuasive arguments, plausible for the state of knowledge about the living beings and their relationships in those times of the middle of the XIXth century (or rather due to the great lack of knowledge about it, as a matter of fact) were not supported by the inrush of new data which should lead to such a massive acceptance of Darwin's thesis. Rather, there was a climate of opinion ready to reject Christianity, and to accept the materialistic and atheistic thesis, or at least to reject any thought of a personal God active in Creation and Providence, due to the influence of philosophers like David Hume, and of writers like Voltaire.

Darwin himself reveals occasionally in his correspondence both his background and his motivations. In a letter to his son George he says, amongst other things:

“... Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the Deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible, than if he had acted otherwise. ...

I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent attacks.” (October 21, 22, 24, 1873: Cambridge MSS.)

Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb,
Darwin and the Darwian Revolution
(Chatto & Windus, Londres 1959), p. 320.

Continuing with the matter of background and motivations, Aldous Huxley, the celebrated novelist, brother of Julian Huxley who was the first director of UNESCO, and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog", shared these reflections in on of his works:

"... The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, ...

"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. ... For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ..."

Huxley, Aldous: From Ends and
Means: An Inquiry into the Nature
of Ideals and into the Methods
Employed for Their Realization
(Harper and Brothers Publishers,
New York and London,
1937, fifth edition), pp. 314-317.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his book, The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997), talks about what he calls "the fear of religion itself." He writes,

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

In his view, this fear may be "responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time." (p. 130)

In these pages it is our purpose to reopen Darwin's challenge, examining it and pondering both sides of the matter. As he himself expressed it: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question". Already in Darwin's time, a good amount of studies and arguments appeared expounding the real implausibility of his arguments beyond any superficial appearances. And during the XX century more and more knowledge has emerged which brings home the effective bankruptcy of the Darwinist argument. It is true that a great effort has been made to achieve the synthesis of this knowledge, as the confirmation of the discontinuous nature of the fossil record, the cellular mechanisms, the realities of genetics, construing them and pigeonholing them within the Darwinist or Neodarwinist model. But the build-up of data during the XXth century, and particularly during the last 50 years, due to the inflexibility of facts, shows the breakdown of the old materialism of the XIXth century, which considered all exclusively in terms of matter and movement, or matter and energy. Now we know that all structures of life are organized and ruled by an information which is codified in different ways, and the existence of several information supports, information transcription systems, systems to translate the said information, and to execute this information to form and function in the living beings; also verification systems and systems for the maintenance of this information, and of a dynamic for reproducing these systems. This information involves effectively a whole set of machinery which makes possible reading the same, and to understand it and manifest itself in the phenomena of life, with true and strict mechanisms for timing and for flux control and for identification, of great specificity and of irreducible complexity both upwards and downwards which never could have come by small chance steps with functionality. Because this functionality belongs to the system as a whole.

It is only too true that in our present society there is the barefaced attempt to sideline the thesis of the Intelligent Design of life, as something already refuted by Darwin. But this is not true. Darwin did propose his thesis denying design, and he did propose certain lines of evidence, although, in the words of Darwin, it was clear that "scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived", i.e., the directly opposite conclusions are those that maintain the Intelligent, divine, Design of life. The crystallization of Darwin's proposal as a dogma in his time was more due to the precipitation in accepting arguments that looked plausible, and not to the application of intellectual rigour to ponder these arguments, due to a social and ideological climate which were favourable to them. And the maintenance of this thesis in our time cannot be understood except with reference to the massive propaganda of the mass media addressed to drum-up a dogmatic materialistic approach, which comes uncovered in the candid and recent admission by Richard Lewontin, which we have to give again:

"... 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."

Richard Lewontin,
New York Review of Books
(January 9, 1997, p. 31).

Santiago Escuain