How did the designer do it?

From Summa Bergania

Deprecated

On August 3rd, 2009, David stated that he no longer believes some or all of the following. It is preserved here for historical purposes and if he gets around to writing further on the topic, a link to the new page will be provided. As always, feel free to prod him about his current beliefs.

Empirically, intelligent design usually has no means of telling us the process of how the designer did her designing. We can see a bicycle, know that it was designed by its irreducible complexity, and yet not know if the wheels were put on before the handlebars. We don't know how many sketches were tossed out before the final blueprint. We don't know if she used a crescent wrench or a ratchet to tighten the bolts. We don't know if she built it over a period of 1 hour, 6 days, or 4.5 billion years. We don't even know if the bicycle was assembled naturally or supernaturally. There's nothing in the physical properties of the bicycle to answer these questions, so they are therefore outside the scope of intelligent design.

When it comes to the origin and diversity of life, the same restrictions apply. Intelligent design (if successful) tells us that there was a designer(s), but it cannot tell us who or how.

Therefore when the how question comes up with regard to life, there are several alternatives. The major explanations involving a Christian creation story follow (with my opinions on each):

6-Day (Young-Earth) creation

My wife holds this position, and I can see its appeal: God doesn't waste any time getting to the humans. Surely a God that can pull off creation in 6 days is a powerful and wonderful God... and if He could do it in 6 days, why would He choose to take billions of years? However, physicists triangulate stars to be more than 10 billion light years away. Meaning that the universe must at least be 10 billion years old. So long as the physicists are accurate (and I see no reason to doubt their calculations), believing in a 6-Day creation also means believing in a deceiving or trickster God who went so far as to even create light beams that give the appearance of billions of years. That's not for me. So even though I agree with Melita, that God could create it all in six days (I believe in His omnipotence), it just doesn't seem like He did.

Theistic evolution

Many of my friends take this position, and I can also see its appeal. God wound up all the universe at the beginning such that it would play itself out into human beings after several billions of years. Using Kenneth Miller's analogy, sure it's a great pool player that knocks a ball in with every shot, but it's an even greater player who can knock them all in with one shot. A great and brilliant God, in this vein, would set it up such that in the initial creation act (the Big Bang) it would all be taken care of. He never needs to intervene. He never needs to "cheat", so to speak, and break natural laws. He's like a genius chess player who can solve all the problems with one move, and doesn't need to *poof* any new pieces onto the board.

However, here again, I don't see the scientific evidence. The "theistic" in theistic evolution is meaningless in terms of the science (as explained by Dembski in Mere Creation), since it limits God's action to only the beginning. (Some theistic evolutionists also believe that God created the first cell, but either way they accept the evolutionary process as being wholly unaided by God.) So when it comes to things like the human eye and the bacterial flagellum, a theistic evolutionist is no different from an atheistic evolutionist. They both think that it came out of a series of mutations with no outside help. But as it stands, I am currently convinced that irreducible complexity nullifies natural selection... leaving IC components only able to be formed by pure randomness.

Old-Earth creation

The evidence (to me) points to a God who basically put together a miracle for the creation of each "type"* of living organism. The fossil record points to this. (If you think about it, the fossil record for old-earth creationism would look identical to the fossil record for punctuated equilibrium.) Irreducible complexity points to this. But old-Earth creationism really has no imaginative appeal. In comparison to 6-Day, the Old-Earth God is a lazy bum dinking around for millions of years between creating each species... taking His sweet time before making humans, the "crown of His creation." And in comparison to theistic evolution, the old-Earth God is a cheater. He wasn't smart enough to pull it off in one move, so He has to meddle all the time. The only thing one can say about the old-Earth God is that He is mysterious. But I don't pick my beliefs based on how they appeal to my imagination.

And to make things more complicated, the evidence for common descent seems pretty convincing. (And Behe says he believes in common descent, too.) Thus, we now have species-creating miracles that somehow come out of other existing species. Eagles hatching out of chicken eggs.

*"Type" does not mean "species". Some species have been observed to evolve out of others... many species have lots of things in common and going from one to the next doesn't involve leaps over IC components. But at some point in the tree of life (especially at the kingdom/phylum level, and usually at the class/family level) these leaps have to be made. Vertebraes from invertebreas. Four-chambered hearts from three-chambered hearts. Multiple-celled organisms from single-celled organisms. Warm-blooded from cold-blooded. Sexual reproduction from asexual reproduction. Hollow bones from solid bones. I don't think that natural selection is wrong, but I do think it has a limit. And these sorts of leaps are on the other side of that limit.