Imagine a team of researchers who set out to explore a string of remote islands near Antarctica. After many days at sea, they arrive on an icy, windswept shore. Shouldering their packs, the team hikes inland and eventually takes shelter from the bitter cold in a cave. There, by the light of a small campfire built to cook their freeze-dried rations, they notice a curious series of wedgelike markings vaguely reminiscent of Sumerian cuneiform. It occurs to them that perhaps these scratches in the rock constitute some sort of written language, but dating techniques reveal that the markings are more than five hundred thousand years old, far older than any known human writing and, indeed, far older than anatomically modern human beings.
The researchers investigate other possibilities. Perhaps the markings are animal scratchings. Perhaps they were left by some sort of leeching process or by glacial action, perhaps in conjunction with winds bringing sand through gaps in ice at high speeds. After extensive research by investigators with a broad range of expertise, these and other explanations invoking purely mindless undirected causes fail to explain the evidence. An additional discovery reinforces this conclusion. In a broad cavern farther inside the cave, the explorers find a series of drawings on the walls of various fish, birds, and mammals; geological features such as mountains and valleys; and what appear to be tools of modest sophistication. Each picture has beneath it a sequence of markings, sequences also found among the markings along the walls of the entrance cave. The markings, it seems, are words. The investigators are unable to unravel the function of every word or sequence in the cave writings, and there even appears to be possible misspelled words among them, but eventually it becomes clear that the markings have been arranged in a variety of complex patterns to describe hunting and fishing techniques as well as methods for using the various creatures for food and fuel.
In the process of their painstaking investigation, the explorers make an inference. They note that, although the markings do not reveal the identity of the scribes, they do point to intelligent activity of some kind. The markings reveal a sophisticated system for conveying information, and the only known cause for such a thing is intelligence—conscious rational activity. They conclude that the remote and barren islands were once settled by a group of toolmakers and hunters who employed written, alphabetic language some five hundred thousand years before modern humans were believed to have invented the technique.
The team expects to face skepticism over the dating of the cave markings, and indeed the first wave of doubts focus on this. However, two independent teams, including one using a new dating technique, confirm that the markings are ancient, between four hundred and six hundred and fifty thousand years old. The scientific community soon accepts these findings.
The original researchers think they have now established a solid scientific conclusion. But then some naysayers begin to level a series of philosophical and methodological objections to their work. Some of the critics dispute the conclusion, because they claim it’s based merely on our ignorance of any known natural process capable of generating inscriptions. Scientists discover new things all the time, the naysayers point out. Surely it’s only a matter of time before one of them discovers a natural cause that can explain the inscriptions. They claim that the research team has made a fallacious “scribe of the gaps” argument.
Another skeptic, a philosopher of science, insists that it’s fine to infer that an intelligent agent was at work at times and in places where humans were known to be present, but it’s not clear that any human agent was on the scene when these markings were made. Since we don’t know of any nonhuman examples of intelligent activity, we can’t say anything about the origin of the markings in the cave. Still another skeptic, a famous biologist, poses what he sees as the ultimate stumper. He insists that the team hasn’t really explained the origin of the markings at all. “If inscriptions point to an ancient scribe, then who designed the designer of the inscriptions?” he asks. Since presumably the mind who designed the inscriptions was full of information, then invoking an intelligence as the explanation for the information on the cave wall merely pushes the question of the ultimate origin of information back in time, generating an unacceptable and possibly infinite regress.
For these and other reasons, skeptics question the logic of the research team’s inference to design. Some insist that the inference to an intelligent cause was not warranted, others that it explained nothing.
As I have presented the argument for intelligent design as the best explanation for the DNA enigma at academic and scientific conferences, I rarely encounter scientists who claim to have a better, or even adequate, explanation for it. In response to the case for design from DNA, I frequently have the experience of debate opponents actually conceding that they do not know how to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life, as indeed leading origin-of-life researchers have often done as well.
Instead, as I have made my case for design as the best explanation for the origin of biological information, I have found that the scientists and philosophers who reject it typically do so on philosophical grounds not unlike the objections raised by the hypothetical naysayers in the preceding parable of discovery. Critics insist that the argument to intelligent design is logically flawed, that it is unwarranted or that it explains nothing.
In this chapter, I defend my case for intelligent design against those who claim that it is, in some way, unwarranted or logically flawed. In the process, I also show how making the case for intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation inoculates it against several common philosophical criticisms.
Argument from Ignorance?
Over the years, I have participated in many debates about the theory of intelligent design at scientific conferences, on university campuses, and on television and radio programs. In nearly every debate, my debate partner has claimed that the case for intelligent design constitutes an argument from ignorance. Arguments from ignorance occur when evidence against a proposition is offered as the sole (and conclusive) grounds for accepting some alternative proposition.
Critics of intelligent design often assert that the case for intelligent design commits this fallacy.1 They claim that design advocates use our present ignorance of any natural or material cause of specified information as the sole basis for inferring an intelligent cause for the origin of biological information. They accuse ID advocates of arguing for intelligent design based only upon evidence against the adequacy of various natural causes. Since we don’t yet know how biological information could have arisen, we invoke the mysterious notion of intelligent design. In this view, intelligent design functions not as an explanation, but as a fig leaf for ignorance.
The inference to design as developed here does not commit this fallacy. True, some of the previous chapters of this book do argue that, at present, all types of material causes and mechanisms fail to account for the origin of biological information from a prebiotic state. And clearly this lack of knowledge of any adequate material cause does provide part of the grounds for inferring design from information in the cell, although it is probably more accurate to characterize this supposed “absence of knowledge” as knowledge of absence, since it derives from a thorough search for alternative materialistic causes and a thorough evaluation of the results of numerous experiments performed over several decades.
In any case, the inadequacy of proposed materialistic causes forms only part of the basis of the argument for intelligent design. We also know from broad and repeated experience that intelligent agents can and do produce information-rich systems: we have positive experience-based knowledge of a cause that is sufficient to generate new specified information, namely, intelligence. We are not ignorant of how information arises. We know from experience that conscious intelligent agents can create informational sequences and systems. To quote Quastler again, “The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.”2 Experience teaches that whenever large amounts of specified complexity or information are present in an artifact or entity whose causal story is known, invariably creative intelligence—intelligent design—played a role in the origin of that entity. Thus, when we encounter such information in the large biological molecules needed for life, we may infer—based on our knowledge of established cause-and-effect relationships—that an intelligent cause operated in the past to produce the specified information necessary to the origin of life.
For this reason, the design inference defended here does not constitute an argument from ignorance. Instead, it constitutes an “inference to the best explanation” based upon our best available knowledge.3 As noted in Chapter 7, to establish an explanation as best, a historical scientist must cite positive evidence for the causal adequacy of a proposed cause. Indeed, unlike an argument from ignorance, an inference to the best explanation does not assert the adequacy of one causal explanation merely on the basis of the inadequacy of some other causal explanation. Instead, it asserts the superior explanatory power of a proposed cause based upon its proven—its known—causal adequacy and based upon a lack of demonstrated efficacy among the competing proposed causes.
In Chapter 15 I provided evidence for the causal adequacy of intelligent design to account for large amounts of specified information. There I showed that we know from ordinary experience as well as from the results of scientific experiments and computer simulations that intelligent agents do produce large amounts of specified information. Since I had previously shown via a thorough search that no known material process produces this effect, I argued that we can infer design as the best explanation for the origin of information in the cell. The inference to design, therefore, depends on present knowledge of the demonstrated causal powers of material entities and processes (inadequate) and intelligence (adequate). It no more constitutes an argument from ignorance than any other well-grounded inference in geology, archaeology, or paleontology—where present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships guides the inferences that scientists make about the causes of events in the past.
Formulated as an inference to the best explanation, the argument for design from biological information exemplifies the standard uniformitarian canons of method employed within the historical sciences. The principle of uniformitarianism states that “the present is the key to the past.” In particular, it specifies that our knowledge of present cause-and-effect relationships should govern how we assess the plausibility of inferences we make about the cause of events in the remote past. Determining which, among a set of competing explanations, constitutes the best depends on knowledge of the causal powers of the competing explanatory entities, knowledge that we acquire through our repeated observation and experience of the cause-and-effect patterns of the world.4 Such knowledge, not ignorance, undergirds the inference to intelligent design from the specified information in DNA.
Arguments from ignorance make an obvious logical error. They omit a necessary kind of premise, a premise providing positive support for the conclusion, not just negative evidence against an alternative conclusion. The case for intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation does not omit that necessary type of premise. Thus, it does not commit the fallacy.
Let’s take a closer look. In an explanatory context, arguments from ignorance have the form:
Premise One: Cause X cannot produce or explain evidence E.
Conclusion: Therefore, cause Y produced or explains E.
Critics of intelligent design claim that the argument for intelligent design takes this form as well. As one of my frequent debating partners, Michael Shermer, likes to argue, “Intelligent design…argues that life is too specifically complex (complex structures like DNA)…to have evolved by natural forces. Therefore, life must have been created by…an intelligent designer.”5 In short, critics claim that ID proponents argue as follows:
Premise One: Material causes cannot produce or explain specified information.
Conclusion: Therefore, an intelligent cause produced specified biological information.
If proponents of intelligent design were arguing in the preceding manner, they would be guilty of arguing from ignorance. But the argument made in this book does not assume this form. Instead, it takes the following form:
Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.
Or to put it more formally, the case for intelligent design made here has the form:
Premise One: Causes A through X do not produce evidence E.
Premise Two: Cause Y can and does produce E.
Conclusion: Y explains E better than A through X.
In addition to a premise about how material causes lack demonstrated causal adequacy, the argument for intelligent design as the best explanation also affirms the demonstrated causal adequacy of an alternative cause, namely, intelligence. This argument does not omit a premise providing positive evidence or reasons for preferring an alternative cause or proposition. Instead, it specifically includes such a premise. Therefore, it does not commit the informal fallacy of arguing from ignorance. It’s really as simple as that.
Science and Saying Never
Some might still deny the legitimacy of inferring intelligent design (even as a best explanation), because we are ignorant of what future inquiry may uncover about the causal powers of other natural entities or material processes. Some would characterize the design inference presented here as invalid because it depends on a negative generalization—that is, purely physical and chemical causes do not generate large amounts of specified information—a generalization that future discoveries may later falsify. We should “never say never,” they say; to do so is a science stopper.6
Yet science often says “never,” even if it can’t say so with absolute certainty. Negative or proscriptive generalizations often play an important role in science. As many scientists and philosophers of science have pointed out, scientific laws often tell us not only what does happen, but also what does not happen.7 The conservation laws in thermodynamics, for example, proscribe certain outcomes. The first law tells us that energy is never created or destroyed. The second tells us that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease over time. Those who claim that such “proscriptive laws” do not constitute knowledge because they are based on past but not future experience will not get far if they try to use their skepticism to justify funding for research on, say, perpetual motion machines.
Further, without proscriptive generalizations, without knowledge of what various possible causes cannot or do not produce, historical scientists could not determine things about the past. As we saw previously, reconstructing the past requires making abductive inferences from present effects back to past causal events.8 Making such inferences requires a progressive elimination of competing causal hypotheses. Deciding which causes can be eliminated from consideration requires knowing what effects a given cause can—and cannot—produce. If historical scientists could never say that particular entities lack particular causal powers, they could never eliminate them from consideration, even provisionally. Thus, they could never infer that a specific cause had acted in the past. Yet historical and forensic scientists make such inferences all the time.
As archaeology, cryptography, and criminal forensics show, we often infer the past activity of an intelligent cause without worrying about committing fallacious arguments from ignorance. And we do so for good reason. A vast amount of human experience shows that intelligent agents have unique causal powers that purely material processes lack. When we observe features or effects that from experience we know only agents produce, we rightly infer the prior activity of intelligence. To determine the best explanation, scientists do not need to say “never” with absolute certainty. They need only say that a postulated cause is best, given what we know at present about the demonstrated causal powers of competing entities. That cause C can produce effect E makes it a better explanation of E than some cause D that has never produced E (especially if D also seems incapable of doing so on theoretical grounds), even if D might later demonstrate causal powers of which we are presently ignorant.9
Thus, the objection that the design inference constitutes an argument from ignorance reduces in essence to a restatement of the classical problem of induction, the problem of not knowing whether our generalizations about nature based upon past experience will be confirmed by future experience. Yet one could make the same objection against any scientific law or explanation or any historical inference that takes present knowledge, but not possible future knowledge, of natural laws and causal powers into account. As physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler note, to criticize design arguments, as Hume did, simply because they assume the uniformity and normative character of natural law cuts just as deeply against “the rational basis of any form of scientific inquiry.”10 Our knowledge of what can and cannot produce large amounts of new information later may have to be revised, but so might the laws of thermodynamics. Such possibilities do not stop scientists from making generalizations about the causal powers of various entities or from using those generalizations to identify probable or most plausible causes in particular cases. Inferences based on past and present experience constitute knowledge (albeit provisional), not ignorance. Thus, those who object to such inferences are objecting not only to the design inference, but to scientific reasoning itself.
The Human Factor
Some critics of intelligent design marshal a more subtle version of the preceding argument. They admit that we may justifiably infer a past human intelligence operating (within human history) from an information-rich artifact or event, but only because we already know that human minds existed during that time. But, they argue, since we do not know (we are ignorant of) whether any intelligent agent existed prior to humans, inferring a designing intelligence that predates humans cannot be justified, even if we observe effects that typically arise only from intelligent agents.11 This objection asserts, in effect, that since we do not have independent knowledge of the existence of intelligent agents prior to the advent of human beings, the case for intelligent design does not meet the causal-existence requirement of a best explanation.
Though this objection reflects an understanding of the historical scientific method, it reflects only a partial understanding of that method. It also overlooks the strong logical basis for the design inference as formulated in Chapter 15. True, historical scientists must meet both adequacy and past-existence conditions in order to establish a causal claim. But, as noted in Chapter 7, one way to meet that causal-existence requirement is to show that there is only one known cause of a given effect. In such a case, the observation of the effect automatically establishes the past existence of the cause and satisfies the causal-existence requirement. Since, as argued in Chapters 8 through 15, intelligence is the only known cause of large amounts of specified information, the presence of such information in the cell points decisively back to the action of a designing intelligence.
In the parable of discovery at the beginning of this chapter, my fictional anthropologists reasoned in this manner. They inferred the existence of a past intelligence prior to the existence of humans because they had discovered an effect that, based upon their repeated experience, had only one known cause. Thus, they inferred the existence and activity of intelligent agents, even though the evidence of that activity predated the origin of anatomically modern humans. Did this evidence provide a basis for affirming an earlier origin for modern humankind? Perhaps. Did it provide the basis for inferring the existence of a nonhuman form of intelligence? They couldn’t be sure. But based on their repeated experience—and their introspective awareness of the capacities that we possess that allow us to generate information—they could affirm that a conscious and intelligent mind or minds had acted to produce the specified information—the inscriptions—of interest.
My hypothetical explorers aren’t the only scientists to reason in this manner. Actual anthropologists have often revised their estimates for the beginning of human history or particular civilizations, because they have discovered information-rich artifacts dating from times that predated their previous estimates of human or cultural origins. Such inferences to design establish the existence and activity of human agents operating in a time or place in which they were previously unknown. In making such inferences, anthropologists do not initially have independent knowledge of the existence of humans from those times or places. Instead, they have only artifacts displaying features that intelligence alone produces. That alone, however, enables them to establish the existence of a prior intelligent cause. The anthropologists did not need independent knowledge of the existence of humans from those earlier times or locales.
Similarly, the scientists searching for extraterrestrial intelligence do not already know that extraterrestrial intelligence exists. Yet they assume that the receipt of specified information or complexity from an extraterrestrial source would indicate the existence of an intelligence in space. In the science-fiction novel Contact, scientists detect extraterrestrial intelligence in radio signals carrying the first one hundred prime numbers. In actual SETI research, scientists are looking for more subtle indicators of intelligence, namely, unnaturally modulated and focused radio signals.12 Either way, SETI does presume that the presence of a complex and specified pattern would provide grounds for suspecting the existence of an intelligence. Moreover, SETI seeks precisely to establish the activity of an intelligent cause in a remote place and from a remote time in which intelligence is currently unknown. If scientific methods can—in principle, at least—detect the presence of an extraterrestrial (and nonhuman) intelligence in a faraway galaxy, why can’t methods of design detection be used to establish the activity of nonhuman intelligence in the remote past as the cause of the specified complexity in the cell?
Hume’s Objection: A Failed Analogy?
Students of philosophy know about another common objection to intelligent design, since they usually encounter it in their freshmen textbooks. According to many philosophy textbooks, the debate about the design argument was settled by the skeptical philosopher David Hume (1711–76).13 Hume refuted the classical design argument in biology by showing that it depends on a flawed analogy between living forms and human artifacts. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume admits that artifacts derive from intelligent artificers and that biological organisms have certain similarities to complex human artifacts. Eyes and pocket watches both depend on the functional integration of many precisely configured parts. Nevertheless, he argues, biological organisms also differ from human artifacts—they reproduce themselves, for example—and the advocates of the design argument fail to take these dissimilarities into account. Since uniform experience teaches that organisms always come from other organisms, Hume argues that analogical arguments really ought to suggest that organisms ultimately come from an infinite regress of earlier organisms or from some eternally existent primeval organism (perhaps a giant spider or vegetable), not a transcendent mind.
Despite the assertions of some critics,14 Hume’s objections to the classical design argument fail to refute the argument of this book for several reasons. First, we now know that organisms come from organisms, because organisms possess information-rich macromolecules and a complex information-rich system for processing and replicating the information stored in those molecules. Thus, his argument that uniform experience suggests that organisms necessarily arise from an infinite regress of primeval organisms (or an eternally self-existent one) fails. Repeated experience about the origin of information-rich systems suggests two possibilities, not one. Either information-rich systems arise from preexisting systems of information via a mechanism of replication, or information-rich systems arise from minds. We have repeated experiences of both. Even so, our experience also affirms—based on cases in which we know the cause of such systems—that systems capable of copying and processing other information ultimately arise from intelligent design. After all, the computer hardware that can copy and process information in software originated in the mind of an engineer.
Beyond that, advances in our understanding of planetary and cosmic evolution have ruled out the possibility that biological life has always existed, either on earth or in the cosmos. At some point in the remote past, the conditions on earth and in the larger cosmos were simply incompatible with life. The big-bang theory alone implies that the cosmos itself is finite. Thus, scientifically informed people generally don’t argue that biological life always existed or even that it always existed on earth. The question is whether life originated from a purely undirected material process or whether a mind also played a role. Between these two options uniform experience affirms only the latter as an adequate cause for information-rich systems capable of processing and copying information. Since we know that organisms capable of reproduction constitute information-rich systems, a Humean appeal to uniform experience actually suggests intelligent design, not undirected processes, as the explanation for the origin of the first life.
Second, the contemporary case for intelligent design (such as the one made in this book) is not an analogical argument, even though many interesting similarities do exist between living organisms and human information technology. If, as Bill Gates says, “DNA is like a computer program,” it makes sense, on analogical grounds, to consider inferring that DNA also had an intelligent source. Nevertheless, although the digitally encoded information in DNA is similar to the information in a computer program, the case for design made here does not depend upon mere similarity. Here’s why.
Classical design arguments in biology typically seek to draw analogies between whole organisms and machines based on similar features present in both systems, reasoning from similar effects back to similar causes. These arguments are a bit like those sixth-grade math problems in which students are given a ratio of known quantities on one side of the equation and a ratio of an unknown to a known quantity on the other and then asked to “solve for x,” the unknown quantity. In analogical design arguments, two similar effects are compared. In one case, the cause of the effect is known. In the other case the cause is unknown, but is presumed to be knowable because of the alleged similarity between the two effects. The analogical reasoner “solves for x,” in this case, the unknown cause.
The status of such design arguments inevitably turns on the degree of similarity between the systems in question. If the two effects are very similar, then inferring a similar cause will seem more warranted than if the two effects are less similar. Since, however, even advocates of these classical design arguments admit there are dissimilarities as well as similarities between living things and human artifacts, the status of the analogical design argument has always been uncertain. Advocates argued that similarities between organisms and machines outweighed dissimilarities. Critics claimed the opposite.
But the DNA-to-design argument does not have an analogical form. Instead, it constitutes an inference to the best explanation. Such arguments do not compare degrees of similarity between different effects, but instead compare the explanatory power of competing causes with respect to a single kind of effect.
As noted, biological information, such as we find in DNA and proteins, comprises two features: complexity and functional specificity. Computer codes and linguistic texts also manifest this pair of properties (“complexity” and “specificity”), what I have referred to throughout this book as specified information. Although a computer program may be similar to DNA in many respects and dissimilar in others, it exhibits a precise identity to DNA insofar as both contain specified complexity or specified information.
Accordingly, the design argument developed here does not rely on a comparison of similar effects, but upon the presence of a single kind of effect—specified information—and an assessment of the ability of competing causes to produce that effect. The argument does not depend upon the similarity of DNA to a computer program or human language, but upon the presence of an identical feature in both DNA and intelligently designed codes, languages, and artifacts. Because we know intelligent agents can (and do) produce complex and functionally specified sequences of symbols and arrangements of matter, intelligent agency qualifies as an adequate causal explanation for the origin of this effect. Since, in addition, materialistic theories have proven universally inadequate for explaining the origin of such information, intelligent design now stands as the only entity with the causal power known to produce this feature of living systems. Therefore, the presence of this feature in living systems points to intelligent design as the best explanation of it, whether such systems resemble human artifacts in other ways or not.
Information as Metaphor: Nothing to Explain?
A related objection is answered in much the same way. Though most molecular biologists see nothing controversial in characterizing DNA and proteins as “information-bearing” molecules, some historians and philosophers of biology have recently challenged that description. The late historian of science Lily Kay characterized the application of information theory to biology as a failure, in particular because classical information theory could not capture the idea of meaning.15 She suggests that the term “information” as used in biology constitutes nothing more than a metaphor. Since, in Kay’s view, the term does not designate anything real, it follows that the origin of “biological information” does not require explanation.16 Instead, only the origin of the use of the term “information” within biology requires explanation. As a social constructivist, Kay explains this usage as the result of various social forces operating within the “Cold War Technoculture.”17 In a different but related vein, philosopher Sahotra Sarkar has argued that the concept of information has little theoretical significance in biology because it lacks predictive or explanatory power.18 He, like Kay, seems to regard the concept of information as a superfluous metaphor.
Of course, insofar as the term “information” connotes semantic meaning, it does function as a metaphor within biology. That does not mean, however, that the term functions only metaphorically or that origin-of-life biologists have nothing to explain. Though information theory has a limited application in describing biological systems, it has succeeded in rendering quantitative assessments of the complexity of biomacromolecules. Further, experimental work has established the functional specificity of the base sequences in DNA and amino acids in proteins. Thus, the term “information” as used in biology refers to two real and contingent properties: complexity and functional specificity.
Since scientists began to think seriously about what would be required to explain the phenomenon of heredity, they have recognized the need for some feature or substance in living organisms possessing precisely these two properties together. Thus, Erwin Schrödinger envisioned an “aperiodic crystal”;19 Erwin Chargaff perceived DNA’s capacity for “complex sequencing”;20 James Watson and Francis Crick equated complex sequences with “information,” which Crick in turn equated with “specificity”;21 Jacques Monod equated irregular specificity in proteins with the need for “a code”;22 and Leslie Orgel characterized life as a “specified complexity.”23 The physicist Paul Davies has more recently argued that the “specific randomness” of DNA base sequences constitutes the central mystery surrounding the origin of life.24 Whatever the terminology, scientists have recognized the need for, and now know several locations of, complex specificity in the cell, information crucial for transmitting heredity and maintaining biological function. The incorrigibility of these descriptive concepts suggests that specified complexity constitutes a real property of biomacromolecules—indeed, a property that could be otherwise, but only to the detriment of cellular life. Indeed, recall Orgel’s observation that “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals…fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.”25
The origin of specified complexity, to which the term “information” in biology commonly refers, therefore does require explanation, even if the concept of information connotes only complexity in Shannon information theory, and even if it connotes meaning in common parlance, and even if it has no explanatory or predictive value in itself. Instead, as a descriptive (rather than an explanatory or predictive) concept, the term “information” (understood as specified complexity) helps to define an essential feature of life that origin-of-life researchers must explain “the origin of.” So, only where information connotes subjective meaning does it function as a metaphor in biology. Where it refers to complex functional specificity, it defines a feature of living systems that calls for explanation every bit as much as, say, a mysterious set of inscriptions on the inside of a cave.
But Who Designed the Designer?
Once when I was explaining the theory of intelligent design on a radio talk show, a caller challenged me with another, now common, objection to the design inference—one that the caller clearly considered a knockdown rebuttal: “If an intelligence designed the information in DNA,” he demanded, “then who designed the designer?” I asked for clarification. “Are you arguing that it is illegitimate to infer that an intelligence played a role in the origin of an event unless we can also give a complete explanation of the nature and origin of that intelligence?” Yes, he said, that was exactly what he meant. I then answered as best I could in the available time, but I remember thinking later how facile I thought the objection was. It reminded me of the three-year-old child in the neighborhood where I grew up who used to follow older children around asking them “why” questions. “Why are you going swimming?” “Because it’s hot.” “Why is it hot?” “Because the sun’s out.” “Why is the sun out?” “Because there are no clouds today.” “Why are there…” No matter how you answered, he would ask “why” again, as if in so doing he had somehow invalidated the answer you had just given.
But does the ability to ask about the cause of a cause of an event invalidate a causal explanation? That had always seemed such an obviously flawed idea that I never bothered to refute it in print. Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that Professor Richard Dawkins, holder of the Charles Simony Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, had advanced precisely that argument as the centerpiece of his case against intelligent design in his bestselling book The God Delusion.26
There Dawkins argues that the design hypothesis fails to explain anything, because it evokes an infinite regress of questions. If complexity points to the work of a designing intelligence, then who designed the designer? According to Dawkins, the designer would need to be as complex (and presumably as information-rich) as the thing designed. But then he argues, by the logic of the ID advocates, the designer must also be designed. But that would settle nothing, because we then would have to explain the origin of a designing intelligence by reference to a previous designing intelligence, ad infinitum, always leaving unexplained something as mysterious as we started with. Thus, “the design hypothesis” fails, says Dawkins, because it “immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.”27
When I read Dawkins’s version of this argument, I could see why it sounded plausible to some people. As I thought about it more, I became intrigued by the fascinating philosophical issues it raised. I realized that Dawkins had posed a serious philosophical objection to intelligent design, even though his objection failed for several obvious and fundamental reasons.
Dawkins’s objection fails, first, because it does not negate a causal explanation of one event to point out that the cause of that event may also invite a causal explanation. To explain a particular event, historical scientists often cite or infer past events as causes (see Chapter 7). But the events that explain other events presumably also had causes, each of which also invites a causal explanation.28 Is the original explanation thereby vitiated? Of course not. Pointing out that the past event cited in a causal explanation also has a prior cause—typically, another event—does not render the explanation void, nor does it negate the information it provides about past conditions or circumstances. It merely raises another separate question. Clearly, the young inquisitor in our neighborhood could decide to ask why it was hot after I told him I was going swimming on account of the heat. But his decision to do so did not negate the information he received about my reasons for going swimming or my prior state of mind. A proximate explanation of one event is not negated by learning that it does not supply a comprehensive or ultimate explanation of all the events in the causal chain leading up to it.
Nevertheless, Dawkins’s objection to the design hypothesis presupposes precisely the opposite principle, namely, that causal explanations of specific events count as explanations only if there is a separate and comprehensive causal narrative that explains how the cause cited in the explanation itself came into existence from something simpler, and only then if the narrative does not involve an infinite regress of other past causes. Yet Dawkins cannot seriously apply that principle in any other case without absurdity. If applied consistently, Dawkins’s principle would, for example, prevent us from inferring design in cases where no one, not even Dawkins, questions the legitimacy of such inferences.29 One needn’t explain who designed the builders of Stonehenge or how they otherwise came into being to infer that this complex and specified structure was clearly the work of intelligent agents. Nor would someone need to know how the scribes responsible for cave markings in my opening parable came into being in order to attribute those inscriptions to a designing intelligence.
Imagine you have traveled to Easter Island to view the famous Moai statues. A child beside you asks no one in particular, “Who carved these statues?” A man standing next to the kid looks over the top of his glasses and asks, “Why do you assume they’re sculpted?” Dumbfounded by the question, the kid has no reply, so you rush to his aid. “The carvings manifest a pattern that conforms to the shape of a human face. The match in the patterns is too close and the figures are too intricate, for it to be mere coincidence.” The man scoffs. “Don’t tell me you’ve been reading intelligent-design propaganda, all of that rubbish about specified complexity? Let me ask you this: Who sculpted the sculptor? Who designed the designer? Do you see the problem? Your reasoning leads to an infinite regress. Who designed the designer’s designer’s designer’s designer’s…” The child, appropriately unimpressed by this display of erudition, rolls his eyes and mutters under his breath, “Yeah. But I know someone carved these.” And, indeed, someone did.
The absurdity that results from consistently applying Dawkins’s implicit principle of reasoning has invited parody from various quarters. In a popular YouTube mock interview, the fictional Dr. Terry Tommyrot argues that Richard Dawkins is himself a delusion, despite the extensive textual evidence for his existence in his many books. As Dr. Tommyrot asks his interviewer, “If Dawkins designed the books, then who designed the Dawkins? Just tell me that!”30
Of course, Dawkins insists that the problem of regress does not afflict properly scientific (read: materialistic) explanations, even explanations involving ordinary human designers. Why? Because as a scientific materialist, Dawkins assumes that physical and chemical processes provide complete materialistic explanations for the thoughts and actions of human agents, and that Darwinian evolution can provide a comprehensive and fully materialistic account of the origin of Homo sapiens from earlier and simpler forms of life. Thus, the materialists’ answer to the question, “Who designed Dawkins?” is, “No one.” Dawkins descended by material processes from a series of human parents, the first of whom evolved by natural selection and random mutation from lower animal forms, which in turn did the same. Further, the evidence of intelligence in Dawkins’s books that points proximately to the activity of a mind, points ultimately to simpler physical and chemical processes in his brain. These processes make his conscious mind—like all human minds—either an illusion or a temporary “epiphenomenon” that has no ability to affect the material world. Material processes can explain everything simply and completely without any appeals to mysterious immaterial minds and without any regress equivalent to that implied in appeals to intelligent design.
But is this true? Is there really such a seamless and fully materialistic account of reality available? Oddly, Dawkins himself has admitted that that there is not. As noted in the previous chapter, Dawkins has acknowledged that neither he nor anyone else possesses an adequate explanation for the origin of the first life.
Yet the Darwinian explanation holds that every living thing ultimately evolved from the first self-replicating life-form. Thus, by Dawkins’s own logic, one could vitiate the entire edifice of Darwinian explanation simply by demanding an explanation for the cause of the cause it cites—that is, the cause of the process of natural selection itself, the origin of the first self-replicating organism. If human life evolved from simpler forms of life, and if biological evolution commences only once a self-replicating organism has arisen, couldn’t the skeptic ask, “What evolved the evolver? How did the first self-replicating organisms arise?”
Of course, the lack of a materialistic explanation for the origin of life does not invalidate Darwinian explanations of the origin of higher life-forms. Logically, it’s perfectly possible that some unknown, non-Darwinian cause produced the first life, but then natural selection and random mutation produced every living form thereafter.31 But Dawkins’s criterion of a satisfying explanation seems to imply otherwise.
There is an additional problem. Suppose scientists did formulate a completely adequate materialistic explanation for the origin of life. Couldn’t a skeptic of Dawkins’s materialism still ask for an account of the origin of matter itself? If every material state arose because of the laws of nature acting on a previous material state, then materialistic causal narratives would seem to have their own problems with infinite regress. From whence came the first material state? No physical cosmology now provides a causal explanation of how matter and energy came into being. But suppose one did. How would it do so without invoking a regress of prior material (and/or energetic) states? But what then would become of Dawkins’s insistence that causal explanations of particular events fail unless all such regresses are eliminated?
There is still another difficulty with Dawkins’s argument. Part of the force of his objection lies in its implicit accusation of inconsistency in the case for intelligent design. If specified complexity always points to intelligent design, then the existence of a designing mind in the past would, by Dawkins’s understanding of the logic of the design inference, necessarily point to a still prior designing mind, ad infinitum. In asserting this, Dawkins assumes that designing minds are necessarily complex (and, presumably, specified) entities (itself a questionable proposition).32 He then argues that advocates of intelligent design can escape the need for an infinite regress only by violating the rule that specified (or irreducible) complexity always points to a prior intelligent cause. Inferring an uncaused designer, he seems to be arguing, would represent an unjustified exception to the principle of cause and effect upon which the inference to design is based.
But positing an uncaused designer would not constitute an unjustified exception to this principle, if it constitutes an exception at all.33 In every worldview or metaphysical system of thought something stands as the ultimate or prime reality, the thing from which everything else comes. All causal explanations either involve an infinitive regress of prior causes, or they must ultimately terminate with explanatory entities that do not themselves require explication by reference to anything more fundamental or primary. If the latter, then something has to stand as the ultimate or primary causal principle at the beginning of each causal chain. If the former—if all explanations inevitably generate regresses—then all explanations fail to meet Dawkins’s implicit criterion of explanatory adequacy, including his own. Since, however, most cosmological theories now imply that time itself had a beginning, and further imply that life itself first arose sometime in the finite past, it seems likely that every chain of effect back to cause must terminate at some starting point. Either way, materialistic explanations as well as those involving mind are subject to these same constraints. If so, why couldn’t an immaterial mind function as the ultimate starting point for causal explanation just as well as matter and energy?
In Dawkins’s worldview, matter and energy must stand as the prime reality from which everything else comes. Thus, Dawkins simply assumes that a material process must function as the fundamental explanatory principle or first cause of biological complexity and information. His “who designed the designer” objection shows this. Why? Dawkins assumes that explanations invoking intelligent design must either generate a regress of designing minds or that such explanations must eventually account for mind by reference to an undirected material process. Either way, Dawkins simply presupposes that mind cannot function as the ultimate explanation of biological complexity and information. For Dawkins and other philosophical materialists, matter alone can play this role. But that begs that fundamental question at issue in the debate about the origin of life.
A more philosophically neutral way to frame the issue would be to simply ask: What is a better candidate to be that fundamental explanatory principle, the thing from which specified complexity or information ultimately comes? What is a better candidate to be the first cause of this phenomenon: mind or matter?
Based upon what we know from our own experience, as opposed to deductions from materialistic philosophical doctrine, the answer to that question would seem to be mind. We have first-person awareness of our own minds. We know from direct introspection what attributes our minds possess and what they can do. Our uniform experience shows that minds have the capacity to produce specified information. Conversely, experience has shown that material processes do not have this capacity. This suggests—with respect to the origin of specified information, at least—that mind is the better candidate to be the fundamental explanatory entity, the thing from which such information comes in the first place.
In any case, explanations invoking intelligent design do not necessarily imply either an infinite regress or the need for further reductionistic accounts of intelligence as a cause. A self-existent immaterial mind might well function as the ultimate cause of biological information, just as prior to the acceptance of the big-bang theory matter functioned as the self-existent entity from which everything else came for philosophical materialists. Intelligent design—defined as a choice of a rational agent to actualize a possibility—might well be a fundamental cause that requires no prior explanatory cause of itself. Agents have the power by their choices to initiate new sequences of cause and effect. Most human agents reflexively assume (and intuitively know) they have this power. Perhaps an uncaused agent with similar powers generated the first biological information. Dawkins cannot foreclose that possibility without first assuming an answer to the question at issue, namely, whether mind or matter stands as the ultimate explanation of biological information. Thus, his “who designed the designer” objection commits, among other errors, the logical fallacy of begging the question. It, therefore, fails as an objection to the design inference based upon DNA.
Conclusion
Over the years, I have encountered each of the objections discussed in this chapter. Initially, I responded to them in great earnest, hoping to persuade the objector. I continue to make every effort to do so, but I’m no longer surprised or disappointed when I don’t. Eventually, I realized something odd about all of these objections. None of the alleged logical errors involved in inferring intelligent design from DNA would prevent any reasonable person from inferring or detecting the activity of intelligent agents in any other realm of experience. Even in exotic situations like the one limned in my opening parable or in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, most reasonable people would not dispute the possibility of detecting intelligence. In the case of SETI, many scientists doubt that the program will ever discover extraterrestrial intelligence, since they doubt that our galaxy holds other technological civilizations, but few would question the premise of the search, namely, that we should treat information-rich radio signals as a signature of intelligence. The discovery of specified information alone would suggest antecedent intelligence as the best explanation for the origin of that information, without independent evidence of designing agents existing in the relevant places or times, remote though they might be. Nor when we detect intelligence in more ordinary situations do we worry about making arguments from ignorance, or generating infinite regresses, or running afoul of Hume’s critique of analogical reasoning. Neither would we deny that something as interesting as specified digitally encoded information requires explanation.
Instead, in hypothetical and real-world cases, the inference to intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of specified information is straightforward and unproblematic—except, for some, when considering the origin of life. This suggested to me that perhaps many of these objections to the design inference actually constituted a form of special pleading, perhaps on behalf of a favored idea. Someone once said, “Behind every double standard lies a single hidden agenda.” What might that agenda be? As it turns out, I did not have to wait long or do much detective work to find out.