In Our World, Multiple Levels of Intelligent Design
A few weeks ago, when the start of the fall semester brought to me a classroom full of new students for their first college physics course, I took a few minutes to get to know them by asking them a question. Since I currently teach at a Christian university, I asked the students to write out an example or two of how they see God’s hand in nature.
Reading responses to an open-ended question like this provides a valuable glimpse into what students are thinking and where they are in their understanding of science and faith. It was good for me to be reminded that nature offers poignant testimony to a designer, for those who have eyes to see.
Most students saw “God’s hand in nature” in a general way through order, beauty, and interconnectedness. Examples included seeing a sunrise or sunset and the feelings of peace that come when viewing these. The beauty of plants and flowers that thrive in nature. Autumn leaves changing colors, the first snowfall and other seasonal changes. The awesome beauty of mountains and the Grand Canyon. Animals and birds and the purposes they serve. The ocean and all the life it sustains. Clouds and how they bring the rain. The moon and stars at night. And the intricacy of the human body.
An Admission
I’ll have to admit that when I first read through these responses, the thought came to me that appealing to aesthetics or the calming effect of the ocean waves, the regularity of the seasons, or the awesomeness of a starry night sky as evidence would be quickly discounted by most atheists. And yet I realize that all these examples speak most deeply to my own heart not only of the existence of a designer but of his character.
Lest we become too focused on scientific evidence, to the seeking heart, a deeper question seeks for an answer. The 19th-century Scottish storyteller and theologian George MacDonald framed it this way in his novel Robert Falconer:
The Most Fundamental Level
Evidence from nature is at the heart of the intelligent design argument. As we examine the natural world, multiple levels of design become apparent. At the most fundamental of these we encounter designs that can be fully explained by the universal laws of nature. We’re all familiar with examples, such as exquisite six-sided snowflakes, rainbows across a misty valley, the rosy hues of a sunrise or sunset, or the rhythmic waves of the ocean washing over a sandy beach. Each of these examples of natural design can be fully explained by reference to the forces and laws of nature discovered.
Does explanation by natural cause negate intelligent design? Only if the existence of these prior causes can also be explained naturally. As it is, however, and despite the best efforts of many scientists to explain otherwise, the laws of nature that bring about beautiful instances of natural design have no other scientific explanation than that they just are the way they are. Postulating a designer for the particular suite of orchestrated natural laws that govern our universe has seemed to many scientists a more reasonable conclusion than simply ascribing everything to “dumb luck.”
Designs of Life
Within our world, we also find higher genres of design that cannot be explained by appealing to the actions of natural forces and laws of nature. In every case, these higher levels of design originate from or within living creatures. I address the evidential power of some of these designs in my book, Canceled Science:
Animals, even insects, can create designs that extend beyond the kinds of design produced by the forces of nature alone. Animal designs typically have the added hallmark of functionality — for example, a beehive, or a bird’s nest, or a spider’s web. However, these designs seem to be pre-programmed or instinctive, and do not originate from the individual creativity of the animal.
A creature’s instinctive ability to create a structure of functional design prompts us to investigate how this ability could have been brought about. Three questions regarding instinctive designs need consideration:
How did the information required to instantiate the design arise in the first place?
How did the information for the design become coded within the biochemistry of the organism?
How did an effectual, multi-generational information storage, retrieval, and implementation system come to exist within the living creature’s being?
These are profound questions that need more than a bobble-head nod to evolution to answer them. Complex, functional systems do not arise without intelligent guidance and direction.
A Naturalistic Point of View
The mystery of explaining design from a naturalistic point of view reaches an even higher level when we consider human designs that exponentially exceed anything else in nature. I wrote in Canceled Science:
Humans, in contrast, can and do create beautiful designs with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of creativity. Humans can endow their designs with functionality or whimsy, can express the complex emotions of the artist, or the mood and outlook of a people or culture at a particular time and place — the zeitgeist.
The fields of painting, sculpture, music, literature, architecture, and engineering all offer proofs in abundance of the human capacity and drive to produce masterful designs. Such work involves matter and a mastery of material forces, but it is more than this. Leonardo da Vinci said, “The painter has it first in his mind, and then in his hands.”1 Human-level designs far exceed anything the laws of physics and chemistry alone could produce. Nowhere do we find such laws producing, from scratch, anything approaching the Taj Mahal, or a racing yacht, or the Space Shuttle, or da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
The Highest Level
Within the physical universe, the highest level of design we encounter manifests in the functional biochemistry of a living creature, perhaps attaining its pinnacle in the human body. Even a single-celled organism exhibits masterful biochemical design properties that challenge the human ability to comprehend, let alone mimic with our most sophisticated technology. Asking for the origin of such exquisitely complex biological designs — designs that surpass the combined intelligence of the entire human race — surely points us to a designer far beyond nature.
And where we directly witness the creation of a form that is fundamentally new, information rich, and of great depth, there is always behind it an intelligent agent — an artist or poet, an architect or engineer. Based on this uniform and repeated experience, biological designs — themselves novel, information-rich, and of great depth — would appear to be the prerogative of creative intelligence.
Eric Hedin, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021, pp. 204-5)
Notes
Martin Kemp, ed. Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career as an Artist, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 32.
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