Perhaps no issue causes more confusion in the debate over intelligent design than the connection—real or alleged—between ID arguments and arguments for the existence of God. Critics frequently contend that modern ID arguments are nothing but Trojan Horses for theocracy, or at the very least, are just sneaky ways to inject God, religion, and traditional views of marriage into the public square. But when ID theorists distinguish ID from theological arguments, they do it, first, to highlight the basis on which modern ID arguments are made, second, to avoid making arguments for design do more than they can really do, and third, to distinguish showing that something is designed from showing who designed it.
ID Focuses on Evidence of Design but doesn’t identify the Designer
What do Catcher in the Rye, the Mona Lisa, Mount Rushmore, and a love note etched on a sandy beach have in common? They are all signs of design. That is, they all reflect the work of an intelligent agent. If you understand that, you understand the first claim of modern intelligent design arguments: intelligent agents sometimes leave traces of their activity behind, like fingerprints on evidence.
The second ID claim is like unto the first, only different: there are signs of design in nature—in the stuff biologists and physicists and astronomers study. It’s this second claim that can get you in trouble with the authorities and cause you problems with your tenure committee. Design theorists, like forensic detectives, have developed methods and arguments for separating out the effects of impersonal processes like gravity or wind erosion from signs of design like Catcher in the Rye. Some ID folks have also argued that certain “impersonal” processes and properties of nature, like the force of gravity and the initial state of the early universe, are themselves evidence of an intelligently designed universe. Notice that the focus of design arguments is on the effects themselves, not on the designer.
For instance, we can tell that Mt. Rushmore was sculpted by the complex and highly specific patterns of faces we see on the mountain. We can tell that it was designed, even if we’ve never heard of Gutzon Borglum and the 400 workers he employed to sculpt the faces of four American presidents on a mountain side in the Black Hills of South Dakota. You’ve probably never even heard of Gutzon Borglum. If you’ve heard his name, you probably don’t know anything about him. Did you know that Borglum and his crew toiled on the granite structure from 1927 until 1941? Probably not. You still know it’s designed, right? Even if a smart alien landed in South Dakota and saw Mt. Rushmore, he would recognize that it was designed. And even if he didn’t, it would still be designed and would still provide evidence of design for those with the proper background knowledge to recognize it.
OK, but let’s say God (defined as a maximally great, transcendent personal being) sculpted Mt. Rushmore with lightning bolts in 2023 BC but the federal government made up the story about Borglum to help Americans have better self-esteem during the Great Depression. Would that make it impossible to tell it was designed? Would that mean that to recognize the design, one would need to do theology rather than simply observing the mountain? Of course not. The evidence for design is the same either way. No one would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by saying: “That ain’t no ordinary mountain. Somebody designed it.”
When Michael Behe argues that design is the best explanation for molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, he hasn’t demonstrated who the designer is. This is simple logic. Anyone without an axe to grind should be able to get it. The evidence for design in biology is consistent with different types of designers. For instance, Behe has said it’s possible that intelligent aliens are responsible for the design of life on earth. He’s not saying he thinks that’s true. He’s saying that the evidence he’s talking about is consistent with that possibility. The bacterial flagellum doesn’t have a copyright symbol on it. It doesn’t have an inscription that reads: “Made by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” So by itself, the most Behe’s argument can show is that the flagellum is designed, not who designed it. ID theorists aren’t being evasive when they point this out. They’re being honest.
To summarize: you can often tell that something is designed even if you don’t know anything else about the designer, and regardless of the identity and metaphysical status of the designer. If you understand this, you’ve already understood more than 95% of the smartest ID critics and more than virtually every reporter who has ever written about ID.
Follow-up Questions Are Okay
Of course, if we want to, we can go on to ask questions about the designer and get some pretty good if generic answers. First, the designer must be an intelligent agent. An agent isn’t a process, a mechanism, or a blind force. An agent has purposes, intentions, and a will.
Looking at integrated machines like the bacterial flagellum, we can see that the designer of nature has foresight. The designer has the ability to build things that are first envisioned and then brought into existence, to see separate parts performing a function that none of the parts can perform on its own.
Second, given the scope of evidence for design in nature, from biology to cosmology, the designer must be able to create self-replicating nanotechnology, and to set up the basic properties of matter (or to set up other processes that give rise to these realities). This agent is, to say the least, really creative, really smart, and really powerful.
This is especially true when we look for evidence of design in nature as a whole. We see information technology and molecular machines inside cells, we see physical laws that look like they were set up for the existence of complex life, and we see distant galaxies receding away from us, implying the universe had a beginning in the past. So, the physical universe didn’t always exist. That rules out materialism, which claims that matter is the most basic reality. And it means that the origin of the physical universe must lie beyond the universe.
Now we’re dealing with design far beyond the pay grade of your average space alien. We’re talking about a designer that transcends the physical universe, and yet has the power to bring that universe into existence. We’re also dealing with a designer who takes an interest in the details. The designer is in the details. Design isn’t just evident at the largest scales (the universe as a whole) but at the small scales (in tiny molecular machines). To a lot of people, and not just the snake handling crowd in Appalachia, that skill set sounds a lot like God. Somewhere beyond this point, we pass from narrowly scientific matters to more philosophical or theological matters, from talking about the publicly available evidence of nature to reasoning about the likely nature of the designer. So what? Only the most fanatical secularist should be terrified by this prospect. All this means is that some evidence drawn from science has theological implications. But even Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins concede that point.
My own view (speaking now as a theist rather than merely a design theorist) is that we can’t deductively prove God’s existence with evidence for design. But for explaining that evidence, the four main options—materialism (matter is all there is), pantheism (the universe is God), deism (a transcendent God created the universe but otherwise ignores it) and theism (a transcendent God created the universe and cares about the details), theism seems to have the most explanatory power. Still, I would want more than just the evidence for design to make the case for theism itself.
Of course, at the most, we’re still talking about public evidence, which taken together, can provide evidence for what some have called the “god of the philosophers.” We can’t squeeze all the rich claims about God from various religious traditions out of the data derived from telescope and microscope. We can’t discover that God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans, spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai, came to Earth as Jesus, or spoke to the prophet Mohammed, by looking at stars and bacteria. These ideas, whether true or false, come from history and recorded testimony, not natural science per se.
That is why ID can be properly considered in public scientific discussions and be distinguished from arguments for God’s existence, while nevertheless have positive theological implications. No wonder materialists don’t like ID.
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