Intelligent Design Uncensored

An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy

William A. Dembski, Jonathan Witt

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780830837427
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830867141
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

What is ID? Why is it controversial?Intelligent design is surrounded by a storm of debate. Proponents and opponents have both sought to have their voices heard above the din. Is it unscientific? Is it a danger to real Christian faith? Is it tryingto smuggle God into the classroom?Controversy can create confusion rather than clarity. So here to clear things up is Bill Dembski, one of the founders of intelligent design, who joins with Jonathan Witt to answer these questions and more. They plainly lay out just what intelligent design is and is not. They answer objections with straight talk that is down to earth.You'll be surprised at how often smart people have misrepresented ID. You might be surprised to see exactly how they respond to what turns out to be misleading arguments. Here is the book to make you intelligent about the whole fuss!

1

Fantastic Voyage

Did mind make matter, or matter mind? Are the things of nature the product of mindless forces alone, or did creative reason play a role? Theologians have grappled with this question but so have philosophers and scientists stretching from ancient Athens to modern Nobel Prize winners like physicists Albert Einstein, Arno Penzias and George Smoot. The reason is simple: It may be the most important, the most fundamental question of all.

In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution to argue that blind nature had produced all the species of plants and animals around us. The new theory convinced a lot of people that evidence of a Creator could not be found in nature. If there were things in nature that remained mysterious, scientists would figure them out in time. To attribute its origin to God, they insisted, was simply to give up on the enterprise of science.

Today, Darwinists level the same charge against the contemporary theory of intelligent design (ID). They insist that ID is just an argument from ignorance—plugging God into the gaps of our current scientific understanding. Darwinists have made many thoughtful arguments over the years, but this isn’t one of them. The theory of intelligent design holds that many things in nature carry a clear signature of design. The theory isn’t based on what scientists don’t know about nature but on what they do know. It’s built on a host of scientific discoveries in everything from biology to astronomy, and some of them are very recent discoveries. To show what we mean, let’s take a journey.

Miracle of Rare Device

Imagine you are a world-class software architect living twenty years in the future, and you just learned that you’ve won a lottery for a space flight to an unnamed distant planet. The rendezvous point for departure is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. When you arrive, the scientists in the obligatory white lab coats seat you in a white conference room and explain that the flight will employ what they refer to as “mass driver technology”—no rockets, no flames and thus no need for an enormous launch pad. You’ll depart directly from JPL.

After a thorough physical, you enter the raindrop-shaped vessel along with the captain, pilot and two other lottery winners. You’re strapped into a cockpit seat in front of a panoramic viewing window and hooked to various wires, patches and tubes. On your left is a lottery winner with thick, hairy arms. He looks and talks like an aging steel worker from Pittsburgh, though you soon learn that he’s actually a top-notch submarine engineer. The woman to your right is a gangly blond in her thirties, a Cal Tech physicist who keeps peppering the captain with questions about the mass driver.

The hatch is shut. The countdown begins. At seven you hear a low, groaning. At five it drops an octave and your teeth vibrate inside your gums. At three the lights flicker. At zero the cabin falls silent, a stab of pain runs the length of your body, and you fall into darkness.

When you wake, drooling, eyes blurry, head aching, you have no idea how long you’ve been asleep. A minute? An hour? A day? You rub your eyes and see that the ship is already approaching a moon or planet marked by a pattern of blobs haphazardly swinging this way and that over the surface. Maybe they’re tornados, except that they’re moving in all different directions. Would a storm do that? As the ship draws closer, you realize the moon isn’t quite like anything from our solar system that you’ve ever heard about. The colors, the details are wrong somehow.

Noticing that you have the arms of your chair in a death grip, you try to relax. Farther and farther the ship descends. It’s clear now that this strange moon is closer and smaller than you supposed, maybe only a dozen miles away and as many across.

If it’s an asteroid, though, it’s a strange one—almost perfectly round. You glance to either side to read the expressions of your fellow lottery winners. They’re wearing the same blank look of wonder you are.

You turn back to the approaching moon, and here a curious thing happens. Though the moon had seemed small a moment ago, it now seems enormous again, not because you go back to thinking it’s big for a moon but because you realize you’re not approaching a moon, not a planet, but a machine of some kind, one far bigger than any manmade object you’ve ever met.

As your ship draws closer, you make out, across the thing’s surface, millions of portholes opening and shutting as millions of ships enter and exit. A sensor beeps gently at the pilot’s control panel. “I suggest the three of you breathe,” he says, turning toward you with a smile.

You take a few deep breaths, but a moment later you’re holding your breath again. You were expecting your ship to move into orbit around the space station, but now you realize that one hole—barely larger than the ship—lies directly ahead and the pilot is making straight for it.

You find yourself counting down from ten, wondering if these will be the final seconds of your life.

The engineer beside you crosses himself and murmurs, “What is it?”

“Byzantium,” the captain answers mysteriously.

In the next moment you’re through the portal and on the other side.

In modern parlance the ancient capital city of Byzantium, with its intricate and devious political environment has come to serve as a metaphor for all things labyrinthine and, well, Byzantine. Immediately you understand why the captain would refer to your destination by the name of that ancient city. Within is a realm of dizzying sophistication, a labyrinth of intricate corridors and conduits networking off in every direction, some stretching off to processing units and assembly stations, others to what the captain explains is an enormous computer, as yet far out of sight, at the center of the space station.

On and on you fly. When the central processing unit at last rounds into view, it looks like a space station itself, about a half a mile across and shaped like a geodesic dome. The pilot threads the ship through a tiny portal. Inside, in every direction you look, are mile on mile of spiraling staircases. “They’re not for walking on,” he says. “They’re for storing data. They’re part of the hard drive.”

“I had no idea we were this advanced!” the lottery winner to your left says. “How did we manage it?”

“Us?” the pilot says. “Don’t be silly. You have to realize, this factory does something human factories don’t—it builds copies of itself. ”

So it’s even more sophisticated than you first imagined. You glance at the passenger to your left. She’s biting her fingernails. Like you, she probably doesn’t want to play the role of the theatrical passenger, doesn’t want to voice the explanation hanging in the air—that this amazing space station must be the work of some alien civilization light years ahead of our own.

The pilot continues with his explanation. “Don’t get me wrong. As extraordinary as this factory is, it isn’t perfect. Occasionally when it builds a copy of itself, there’s a minor difference, a copying error. But as the French say, vive la différence. Those tiny differences make all of this around us possible. You see, occasionally, one of those copying errors was actually an improvement. The improvement was preserved, and over time a series of these tiny improvements led to the extraordinary factory before us. Initially the factory was quite crude, but over time . . .”

The woman beside you—the physicist—interrupts. “How crude could it have been if it could build copies of itself? We’ve never managed to build a factory that could build a factory that could build a factory that could build a . . .”

“What are you suggesting?” the pilot snaps. “Are you some sort of religious freak?”

The physicist blinks, disoriented by the seemingly random charge. “No, I . . .” She tries again. “I just mean that the engineers who built this must have been brilliant. It’s phenomenal.”

The pilot’s indignity falls away and is replaced by an expression of one amused and relieved by a sudden realization. “I think we have a little misunderstanding. Do you three have any idea where you are?”

“No, nobody’s told us,” the physicist says.

Here the captain cuts in. “Everything was on a need-to-know basis. You three were chosen each for a particular expertise—an engineer, a physicist and a software architect. The entire project is on the qt. Very hush-hush.”

As you listen to this strange conversation unfold, you realize that the spiral staircases outside the panoramic viewing window seem to have grown larger. The ship has drawn up beside one, and it occurs to you that the staircase or ladder seems oddly familiar. Like the others, it has a pair of spiraling rails running parallel and joined across the middle by . . . Suddenly it hits you, but the engineer beside you speaks first. “A DNA model—the size of a building!” He tries to leap from his seat to point, but he’s caught by the intricate restraint system. “Look! The intertwining rails are the double helical structure, and notice they’re joined across the middle by the nitrogen bases. It’s all coming back to me.”

“Nitrogenous bases,” the pilot corrects him, gesturing for him to stay put. “Adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine.”

“The genetic code’s four-character alphabet,” says the captain. “A, T, G and C for short.”

“This is where genetic defects come from,” the pilot adds. “Cystic fibrosis, Down Syndrome. If there’s a genetic defect, eventually you’ll find a glitch in a strand of DNA.”

You recognize the four bases now, the four letters, by the way the adenine fits like a puzzle piece to the thymine and the guanine to the cytosine. This and the architecture of the double helix are the essence of order, of regularity.

However, as you study it more closely, you see that not everything about it is regular. The sequence of letters on any given rail follow one another in a seemingly random pattern.

The engineer interrupts your train of thought. “If this models DNA, what’s all of this other . . . the space station, I mean.”

“The larger sphere is the cell as a whole,” the pilot says, “and the smaller inner sphere is the nucleus—where the biological information is processed and shipped out as code for helping build the various protein machines,” the captain adds.

You and your fellow passengers are trying to process several things at once. Does this really model one-celled organisms? Could a tiny cell really be this sophisticated? And is it possible that the most ambitious government program could build such an elaborate model on such an enormous scale?

The engineer beside you breaks in with another question. “If the United States—planet Earth, humans, whatever—built this model, this space station, why was I brought in? My engineering work looks like tinker toys beside this stuff.”

The captain takes a deep breath and proceeds to drop the other shoe. “Humans didn’t build this. And, no, an extraterrestrial race didn’t build it either.”

“Nobody built it,” the pilot interjects.

The captain continues. “You know how physicists have been trying for the better part of a century to unite Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum physics—the physics of large bodies with the physics of the subatomic realm? A couple years back, a pair of physicists at JPL finally succeeded.”

“The theory of everything,” the pilot adds.

“So-called,” the captain continues. “This discovery has allowed us to make a series of technological breakthroughs more rapidly than anyone imagined. The details of those breakthroughs are still classified, but as we develop these new technologies, we have to recruit more and more talent to keep pushing forward. The three of you have been recruited into the project.”

A new and rather disturbing explanation for their situation has begun to dawn on the lottery winners. At last the captain brings it out into the open. “The so-called ‘theory of everything’ has taught us how to miniaturize things,” he says. “When you woke from the initial shock, the miniaturization process was well under way. That vague blob you saw when you first woke up? That’s a cell, looking about as big as cells looked in the best microscopes of the nineteenth century. Those microscopes enlarged things about seven-hundredfold, and when you woke, you were seven hundred times smaller than normal, meaning the cell looked seven hundred times bigger. Then, as we drew closer to the cell, we continued to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Fantastic Voyage
• 2. The Design Revolution
• 3. The World’s Smallest Rotary Engine
• 4. The Design Test
• 5. The Poison of Materialism
• 6. Breaking the Spell of Materialism
• 7. The Book of Nature Lifting the Ban
• Notes
• Subject Index
• About the Authors
• Endorsements