The Fundamental Logic behind Intelligent Design

“Where did that come from?” Is an innocuous enough question in mundane circumstances, but when applied to something as complex as the human race – and by proxy, to all life – the issue becomes incredibly clouded. The argument that humans and the material universe they inhabit resulted from the conscious and deliberate actions of an outside entity can sound at least passably convincing, even if one is determined to accept biological evolution as an established fact. It is fairly easy to dismiss literal Biblical creationism as irrelevant and/or inappropriate for the discussion of science, but it is harder to object to the formulation of a more sophisticated view that the universe’s form and structure shows signs of having been designed.

To understand the fundamental logic behind intelligent design, consider the rational mind’s instinctive reaction to two different events: If Bob were to win the lottery when the odds of doing so were one-in-one-billion, rational minds are not immediately tempted to think that Bob somehow cheated in order to win. But if Bob were to win several consecutive lotteries set at odds of one-in-one-thousand, it becomes increasingly more tempting to accuse Bob of cheating. The structure of the latter scenario is such that it justifies a belief that cheating was involved: Bob getting lucky in one lottery is consistent with the contest’s inherent randomness, but getting lucky in three consecutive lotteries is a reliable indicator that Bob’s victories were the intended result of someone’s intelligent input into what was intended to be a random system. Despite the probability of winning three consecutive one-in-one-thousand games being exactly the same as the probability of winning a single one-in-one-billion gam...

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... universe and the evidence that we can observe with our own two eyes both appear to point to the deliberate intervention of a cognizant, intelligent being somewhere in humanity’s distant past. Whether this agent was in fact the monotheistic God, a pantheon of gods and goddesses, extraterrestrials, or something else entirely remains up for debate, but the simple fact is that human life is simply too ingenious and complicated to have arisen by dint of evolution alone.

References:

1. George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)

2. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996)

3. Gee, H., In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of life (1999).

4. Scherer, S., "Basic Types of Life" in Mere Creation, edited by Dembski 195-211 (1998).