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

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