Intelligent Design

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“It is characteristic of the thoughtlessness and ignorance which plagues the discussion of these issues that Darwin’s book On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection is often thought, by theists as well as anti-theists, to be an explanation of the origin of life and of living forms generally — when of course nothing was farther from Darwin’s own mind.”¹

-Dallas Willard

Can life spring forth from non-life? This is the fundamental question we must answer when discussing evolution and the origin of life.

Darwin in no way thought his theory of Natural Selection accounted for abiogenesis — life springing up from non-life.² He believed he had accounted for how life evolved, but not how it came to be in the first place. Since Darwin (at least), scientists have been trying to prove that abiogenesis did indeed occur.

Abiogenesis has never come close to being proven, but nearly all textbooks point to the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment to say that it is at least possible. In this famous experiment the supposed atmospheric conditions of primordial Earth — which we now believe were inaccurate — were recreated in a closed system and subjected to heating, cooling, and electricity. After the experiment, a number of amino acids were found in the soup. Amino acids are not living, they are building blocks for proteins — no life was produced in this experiment, and no life has been produced in subsequent abiogenesis experiments.³

Paul Davies, astrophysicist and director of Arizona State University’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science writes that, “In spite of intensive research, scientists are still very much in the dark about the mechanism that transformed a nonliving chemical soup into a living cell.”⁴

In the preface to one of his many books, Davies writes that scientists are reticent to admit that they still can’t explain this:

“Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There seem to be two reasons for their unease. First, they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalists….Second, they worry that a frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding…”⁵

There you have it. We still have no (scientific) proof showing how life could have sprung up from non-life. Yet, an unproven theory is fed to millions of American students every year as fact so that scientists will get more funding and not lend any credibility to religious arguments about the origin of life. Let’s take a look at how this argument is presented in one of these textbooks.

Abiogenesis in a Modern Textbook

One widely used textbook explains the origin of life as follows:

“Hypothesis 1: The common ancestor arose on another planet and was imported to Earth.

Hypothesis 2: The common ancestor arose on Earth abiotically, that is, through natural processes from nonliving materials.”⁶

The authors quickly move past the first hypothesis and focus on how they think Hypothesis 2 happened:

“1. Nonbiological processes assembled the simple molecules that were present early in the history of the solar system into more complex molecules.

2. These molecules then assembled themselves into chains that could store information and / or drive chemical reactions.

3. Collections of these complex molecules were assembled into a self-replicating ‘cell’ with a membrane and energy source. This cell fed on other complex molecules” (my italics).⁷

Did you notice how the authors’ very language betrays the incoherence of their argument? They insist that non-biological things “assembled themselves” into biological organisms. How many steps are they skipping here? Even simple bacterium display staggering levels of complexity on a molecular level.⁸ Let’s explore their assertion by way of analogy. If they maintain life could spring from non-life by self-assembly, they would surely have to concede something inorganic and less complex could assemble itself, right?

Imagine, if you will, a giant gorge in a beautiful mountain range. A white water river rages through the chasm, tall pine-trees and green meadows cover the mountainside, and snow graces the slopes high above. Now Imagine that the gorge must be bridged. Luckily, everything to build the bridge is standing by on one side of the gorge. There are heaps of iron beams, powdered concrete, and other building blocks just waiting to be used. How did the iron get formed into beams? How did the concrete get produced? How did any of this get onsite? Well, it’s simply a matter of time and chance. If the universe exists for long enough, these conditions would certainly happen, eventually. It should suffice to say that after billions and billions of years the iron and concrete had appeared onsite. It took another few billion years for the iron to be formed into beams, and another few billion years for the concrete to become mixed with water in just the right ratio for use (luckily, it somehow did not dry). But eventually all was ready.

And then the next stage occurred. Over billions and billions of years, the iron beams, concrete, and an assortment of other supplies assembled themselves to bridge the gap. How did the beams move into position? How were they secured? How were the concrete sections formed and then dropped into place on the beams? Well, if you have billions and billions of years, eventually such things will happen.

Friends, to believe that the gulf between non-life and life was bridged by time and chance is even more ridiculous than believing this bridge was built by time and chance — this is scientific mysticism, plain and simple.

Paul Davies elucidates further about why abiogenesis is so unlikely:

“The underlying problem is complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is, at the molecular level, staggeringly complex. Although we have no idea of the minimal complexity of a living organism, it is likely to be very high. It could be that some sort of complexifying principle operates in nature, serving to drive a chaotic mix of chemicals on a fast track to a primitive microbe. If so, no hint of such a principle has been found in laboratory experiments to re-create the basic building blocks of life. On the other hand, if life arose simply by the accumulation of many specific chemical accidents in one place, it is easy to imagine that only one in, say, a trillion trillion habitable planets would ever host such a dream run. Set against a number that big — and once you decide a series of unlikely accidents is behind the creation of life, you get enormous odds very easily — it is irrelevant whether the Milky Way contains 40 billion habitable planets or just a handful. Forty billion makes hardly a dent in a trillion trillion.”⁹

The creationist view, or what is called Intelligent Design, is rather simple, and it could be summed up by something like: Behind every design there is a designer.

We know how this bridge would be built. First, the iron beams and concrete must have been designed by things with minds; designed to fit together, to conform to the engineer’s plans, and to support the weight of the bridge. We also know that someone must have dropped them off at the building site. Anyway, you get the idea. I don’t need to walk you through the whole thing.

An About Face

One of the books I have been quoting from in this chapter, Does God Exist, features sections from both theists and atheists. At the beginning of the book these scholars present their arguments, and later in the book they respond to what the opposing view wrote. One of these sections was written by an atheist named Antony Flew who began publishing atheistic articles in 1950. Well, in 2004, Dr. Flew actually became a theist because he came to realize that, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.”¹⁰ When Flew announced his divorce from atheism to the world, he told us he did so because, “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”¹¹ That’s wise advice for us all.

I have not, in this article, even scratched the surface regarding the complexity of life and the unlikelihood of abiogenesis. I recommend the following resources to learn more:

Peer-reviewed articles supporting Intelligent Design

“Notes for Two Talks on Intelligent Design, Evolution, and the Purpose of Education,” by Dallas Willard

Calculations regarding the improbability of abiogenesis, by computer scientist David Plaisted (PhD, Stanford)

Seven Days that Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science, John Lennox

Thank you for reading! This book will be published serially right here over the coming months. If you enjoyed or are intrigued by this chapter, please clap and share!

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1. Willard, Dallas. “Language, Being, God, and the Three Stages of Theistic Evidence.” Essay. In Does God Exist?: The Debate Between Theists & Atheists, edited by J.P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen, 197–217. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993. 208–209.
2. Peretó, Juli et al. “Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life.” Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere: The Journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. vol. 39:5. October, 2009. 395–406. doi:10.1007/s11084–009–9172–7
3. Even if the Miller-Urey experiment had produced life we would have to admit that the underlying structure of the experiment exhibited design. Miller and Urey made key choices that determined if amino acids would be produced or not. These choices include: “(1) the choice of a complex apparatus; (2) the choice of chemicals used: (3) the use of an electrode; (4) the elimination of oxygen, which would have negated the results; and (5) the choice to have a heating and cooling procedure.” Quotation from: Geisler and Brooks, When Skeptics Ask, 234.
4. Davies, Paul. “Are We Alone in the Universe?” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 18, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/opinion/are-we-alone-in-the-universe.html.
5. Davies, Paul. The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1999. 17–18.
6. Belk, Colleen M., and Virginia Borden. Biology: Science for Life. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2006. 252.
7. Belk and Borden, Biology, 252.
8. Davies, Paul. “Are We Alone in the Universe?” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 18, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/opinion/are-we-alone-in-the-universe.html.
9. Ibid.
10. “There Is a God, Leading Atheist Concludes.” NBC News, December 9, 2004. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6688917.
11. Ibid.