Psalm 139:13-18 For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
John 1:1-5 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Discussion
The Greek word for “Word” in John’s gospel is Logos, which means, in its most basic sense, the expression of a thought. When Logos is used as the name of Christ it is understood that Christ expresses the thoughts of the Father through the Spirit. Of course, as John carries this concept forward, Christ, as Logos, is the voice of the Father that spoke all of creation into existence in the six days of creation. The power and intelligence of the creation is so far beyond our own feeble comprehension that we can barely grasp the magnitude of the work involved such that we are easily impressed by what we think is the wonderful magnitude of our own creations.
David, in Psalm 139, expresses his deeply personal wonder of God, who not only called the world into existence, but also the incredible origination of himself as a thinking, believing witness to the image of God in himself. David, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, perceived that there was no aspect of his own development and formation as a human that was not fully known and literally spoken into existence by God. Through the poetry of this psalm, David describes with beautifully evocative language the wonder of God’s handiwork, and his supreme brilliance. The utter humility of David before God, serves as our example when we consider all that God has done and is doing.
Un-Intelligent “Design”
In one sense, the field of study referred to as “Intelligent Design” is a sad commentary on modernism. Why would the word “design” need to be described as “intelligent?” Such a juxtaposition is only necessary in a world where a self-described, intellectually-fulfilled atheist can write a bestselling screed titled The Blind Watchmaker. Imagination is good when it is applied to understanding the world, but when imagination is not restrained by reality then its fevered output is detrimental to true understanding.
Fortunately, a group of brilliant scientists, mathematicians and philosophers have developed a framework (herein referred to as “Intelligent Design” or ID) that places a guardrail around unrestrained imagination in order to tether it to the natural world where the order of events is cause then effect. In the “willfully ignorant” imaginations of certain popularizers of natural evolution the order of events is first effect followed by “well, we’ll work out the causes later.” In Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker he proposed a process for transforming a series of 28 randomly selected letters into the perfectly appropriate phrase “ME THINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.”
This transformation will occur by randomly substituting the original letters with other letters and then “selecting” those that conform to the desired outcome, repeating this until the desired phrase is achieved. There are only a couple of (devastating) problems with this model. First, evolution has no goal (that is the mantra of evolution, i.e. there is no purpose in evolution). Therefore, there can be no conceivable selection criteria that will result in selecting for that specified phrase, because you cannot know what that phrase is when you start the process. Second, evolution can only work on existing life which means, for this example, that rather than starting with 28 randomly selected letters the exercise must begin with a legitimate phrase having rational meaning. Third, every step in evolution must be an improvement over the prior step, which means that, for this example, every randomly selected substitution of one or more letters must result in an “improved” rationally understood phrase (whatever “improved” means). Other than these few issues, there is no problem with evolution whatsoever. However, I believe the only way I would purchase a watch from a blind watchmaker is if I were blind as well.
Intelligent Design
To understand what intelligent design is we can start with the word “design.” Fortunately, our dictionaries still have a very good definition of “design” meaning to “fashion in the mind” or “formulate a plan” or “graphically represent a plan, e.g. a drawing of a structure.” Design is the exact opposite of evolution. In design there is first purpose, then planning, then representation. All of these require the proper execution of thought and mind.
Perhaps William Dembski has provided the most rigorous criteria for recognizing design when he published his landmark work The Design Inference first published in 1998 but recently updated in a new release in 2023 that extends the rigorous foundation of ID with even greater analytic inference tools. Fundamentally, design can be recognized via “specified complexity” when a process or function is both improbable (by chance) and specified (having purpose and directionality of function). (My glosses in parentheses.)
A closely related concept known as “irreducible complexity” was first proposed by Michael Behe, a tenured professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. In his book, Darwin’s Black Box, first published in 1996, Behe identifies numerous examples of irreducible complexity in a multitude of nano-scale machines that maintain the life of biological creatures. Machines so miniscule that they could only be observed with the most powerful probes of the modern era. And each nono-machine, all of which are composed of numerous interconnected and interdependent components, requires all of the components to be present and properly assembled for the function (i.e. purpose) of the machine to be realized, such that, if a single component is missing or “broken” the machine is not just inoperable but also a waste of resources and energy. Behe has numerous books to his name, all which delve into different aspects and evidences of irreducible complexity and related ID concepts.
Stephen Meyer, a co-founder of the Discovery Institute, the leading ID organization worldwide, has written several books that delve into various topic areas such as the Cambrian explosion of life, the intricate nano-mechanisms and functions of the biological cell, and the preponderance of logical, philosophical and scientific support for the “…God Hypothesis.”
Another prolific writer of ID materials is Michael Denton who’s latest books include Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, and his five-book series on the Privileged Species, which include The Miracle of Man, The Miracle of the Cell, The Wonder of Water, Children of Light, and Fire-Maker. Denton’s series is an incredible compilation of the intricacies of the fine-tuning of the cosmos, nature, biology and man that demonstrate that these seemingly independent realms of reality are all finely coordinated and structured to facilitate the existence of mankind. While conceptually, the integration of these finely-tuned and interrelated principles would suggest a religious perspective, Denton has no particular religious affiliation and would likely describe himself as an agnostic. Somewhat surprisingly, Michael Denton seems to suggest that there is some, as yet undiscovered but certainly not “Darwinian,” natural principles that will explain this incredible integration of function and phenomena across all of existence.
While ID was first formulated and organized in the mid-to late 1990s, it has now grown to broad horizons with dozens and perhaps hundreds of scientists and authors producing thousands of technical books, articles and video products that support and expand the ever-growing assertion and evidence of purposeful and intricate design at all levels of the cosmos and life. Creationists of various stripes typically support the conclusions of the ID community regarding the failure of any natural evolutionary process to explain the origin of life, let alone its sustained existence on this planet and in this universe.