EXPLAIN THIS: Eight Characteristics of Intelligent Design
(10-MINUTE VIEWING) — There is a classic illustration in philosophy of Intelligent Design (ID) to infer the existence of God. William Paley, a 19th century English philosopher pointed out that if you are walking along in a field and come upon a watch lying on the ground, you reasonably assume that the watch was assembled by a watchmaker.
Only three pieces, but two of them are handles. Why would the garrot maker include those in the design of a weapon?
The watch consists of a multitude of discrete parts, each of which has a particular function that contributes to the successful overall operation of the device, which is keeping the time.
Those parts must each be produced according to a specific pattern and then assembled in a certain sequence.
Otherwise, the watch won’t do what the watchmaker intended. This is known among contemporary ID advocates as “Irreducible Complexity.” Multiple parts with sequential functions require ordered, or purposeful, assembly.
J. Warner Wallace is a former Los Angeles Police Detective who made an outstanding career of solving cold murder cases, thanks to a highly developed skill in evaluating evidence.
Early in his adult life he was an atheist, but one day he went with his wife to church and heard the preacher describe Jesus Christ as “the smartest man who ever lived.” That prompted Wallace to apply his detective skills to the claims of Christ.
The result was Wallace became a Christian and in the decades since he has become one of the most respected and popular Christian apologists in the world. Among his most significant best-selling books are “Cold-Case Christianity,” “God’s Crime Scene,” “Forensic Faith,” “The Truth in True Crime,” and “Person of Interest.”
He also recently published with son Jimmy (who is also a detective!) “Case Files: Murder and Meaning,” a graphically illustrated novel, which quickly moved to the Best Seller lists.
Building on the Paley argument and based on his own decades of experience in evaluating evidence, Wallace offers in the following 10-minute video eight characteristics that together point to the reasonable inference of ID. Wallace makes a compelling case that is worth serious consideration by ID advocates and skeptics alike:
For a counter-example, consider the essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read. It’s about economics rather than biology, but is relevant nonetheless.
The essay is a long list of steps in the amazingly-complex process of making a humble, cheap No. 2 pencil. Even with his long list of steps, Read leaves out loads of technological detail that the participants have to know, such as how to navigate muddy logging roads with heavy loads, how to fell trees without them landing on you and your co-workers, etc.
His key point is that no one person actually knows in full how to make a pencil. He hints that they cannot know, because the process is too complex. Instead, each person focuses on their immediate surroundings — responding to simple messages like prices and orders from their proximate customers and suppliers. You could model the participants’ efforts as being driven by very basic, simple instincts like “I would like more to eat”.
We can say with some confidence that pencils were “designed” by humans, because pencils appeared so recently. But they were not designed from scratch in a world that was void and without form. They were developed incrementally by humans who were just plugging together existing components that had already been developed, from simpler components that preceded them, for some other use. Pencils evolved. The existence of “complex systems that work” is not by itself an argument for top-down intelligent design.
If you pick up a regular 52-card deck, shuffle the deck, and deal out all the cards, you will be the first person in the history of the universe to have exactly that arrangement of cards.
Thus, you obviously designed that arrangement to come into existence.
Similarly, if the cards were scattered by the wind, it would be the first time in history that all 52 cards ended up in precisely the locations they arrived in. So, the wind intelligently chose to place those cards in their various geographic positions with an unparalleled precision. The fact that the cards ended up where they are demonstrates the intelligence of the wind.
That’s essentially his whole argument.