Is there conclusive evidence for intelligent design? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 13

Intelligent Design as a Scientific Theory

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, we're gonna be discussing intelligent design, how it compares to biblical creationism, what are its strengths, what are its possible weaknesses, et cetera.

What are some of the new things that people are discovering in science that point to evidence for an intelligent designer? And my guest on today's show is Dr. Casey Luskin. He is the Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.

He's got a PhD in geology, and he's a really smart dude. So have him on the show with me today. Casey, welcome.

Thanks a lot, Shay. And we can debate if I'm smart. I think more like I just spent too much time in school. That's probably what it comes down to.

Join the club. My wife says I'm a glutton for punishment when it comes to schooling.

Tell me about it, tell me about it. If only I listened to my dad advice and went out and got a job, you know, I would be much better along.

Exactly.

What the Discovery Institute Means by Intelligent Design

So Casey, tell us what is the Discovery Institute and what is, obviously this could take a whole show just defining it, but what is the intelligent design theory?

Sure, so Discovery Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy think tank. We're based in the Seattle, Washington area, and we do a lot of different activities. We deal with transportation issues, to communications, to foreign affairs, to various social issues, but we're most well known for our work on the issue of intelligent design and origins.

So what is intelligent design? Intelligent design is a scientific theory which holds that many aspects of the universe are better explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected cause like natural selection.

So it's essentially a scientific theory which seeks to find in nature the kind of information and complexity which in our experience only comes from an intelligence. And when we find that kind of intelligence, we infer that, sorry, when we find that kind of information, we infer that an intelligent cause was at work and that's the best explanation for the complexity we see in nature.

Fine-Tuning, DNA, and Molecular Machines

Awesome, so what would you say. Are some of the most powerful examples of intelligent design that you've seen in your scientific research and in your education?

Sure, so a few years ago, I put up a list of what I call the top six arguments for intelligent design in nature. And I would say that it starts with just the fact that the universe had a beginning. If you get back to the Kalam argument, which I'm sure many of your viewers are familiar with, essentially it says that anything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a first cause.

And of course, lots of scientific discoveries over the last hundred years have confirmed that the universe began to exist. Essentially the consensus model right now in cosmology for the origin of the universe is the Big Bang theory, which based upon a variety of lines of evidence from the redshift to the cosmic background radiation shows that the universe had a beginning.

And essentially what that shows is that the universe started from an infinitely dense, infinitely small point at some point in the past and that points to a need for a cause that is external to the universe.

So many intelligent design proponents see that as pointing to the need for an intelligent agent who's outside the universe to sort of generate the universe and be that first cause. But of course, it's not enough to just start the universe, you also have to account for the fine tuning of the universe.

It turns out that the physical laws and constants of the universe are very precisely tuned. So if they were only slightly different, then we would not be able to have a universe where life can exist. Essentially, we call that a habitable universe.

So if the strong nuclear force, for example, were slightly more powerful, then there would be no hydrogen, which of course is an essential element for life. But if it was slightly weaker, then hydrogen would be the only element in existence.

Again, you would not be able to have life. You can go through many of the various laws of nature and find that they are precisely and finely tuned. I think one of the most profound examples of fine tuning is the initial entropy of the universe, where cosmologists have found that it had to be fine-tuned to within one part in 10 raised to the power of 10 to the 123rd power, okay?

So we don't even have numbers or words to describe numbers that are that small, but many other aspects of the universe are finely tuned. The expansion rate of the universe, the mass density of the universe, the cosmological constant, the various ratios of the forces, for example, the electromagnetic force versus the force of gravity or the gravitational constant itself, all of these physical laws and constants are finely tuned.

And if they were just slightly different, we're talking one part in 10 to the 100th power, one part in 10 to the 50th power, if they were slightly different, then life could not exist in our universe.

And so that fine tuning, again, many people would argue that that points to the need for an intelligent agent to fine tune these laws of nature so that life can exist in the universe. And it turns out that it's not just the laws of nature that are fine-tuned, but actually biological systems themselves are also fine-tuned.

The laws of nature are necessary for life to exist, but what we have found is that they are not sufficient for life to exist. When we look at the information in DNA, we find that the nucleotide bases in our DNA have to have a very precise sequence in order to specify the amino acids which are in our proteins.

And essentially, the information in DNA encodes proteins, but if the nucleotide bases were just slightly different in their sequence, then you would not have proteins that could function in many cases.

And so this fine tuning extends not just to the laws of nature, but also to the sequence of nucleotides in our DNA, which themselves have to be finely tuned in order for life to function properly. And there is no known physical or chemical law which specifies the order in which our nucleotides in our DNA have to be specified.

Nothing dictates that they have to be in the particular order that they're in. And so what causes the nucleotides to be in the proper order? Well, this is information. And what ID theorists have found is that in our experience, information, high levels of what we call complex and specified information have only one known cause, and that is intelligence.

So I know I just threw out a jargony term there, complex and specified information. So maybe I can explain that real quickly.

Yeah, please do.

Something is complex, roughly speaking, if it is unlikely. And it's so, for example, the words and the sounds that you're hearing coming out of my mouth right now are very, very unlikely. But unlikelihood alone is not enough to infer intelligent design.

What makes us detect design is when they're not just unlikely, but they're also specified and that they match an independent pattern. So the words that are coming out of my mouth are not just unlikely.

You know, I could be speaking gibberish and you might say, okay, that doesn't sound very intelligently designed, but it turns out that the words that are coming out of my mouth also match the syntax of the English language.

And so they're also specified and that they match this pattern of sounds, which we know conforms to the rules of the English language. And you immediately recognize that the words and the sounds that are coming out of my mouth are intelligently designed.

Okay, well, let's translate that to living systems. Living systems have very unlikely orderings of nucleotide bases in our DNA, but they're not just, you can have a random sequence, which was very unlikely, but it turns out that the sequence of nucleotides in our DNA match these very rare and unlikely sequences that are necessary for functional proteins to exist.

And so this is complex and specified information in our DNA, and that points to an intelligent cause for its origin. Another aspect of biology that I think points to an intelligent cause is molecular machines.

It turns out that basically our cells are being run by micro molecular machines, which are performing most of the vital tasks within our cells. These multi-part machines in many respects resemble human design technology.

For example, in every one of your cells, you have mitochondria, and these mitochondria contain what are called ATP synthase molecular machines. Essentially, these are rotary engines which spin around, taking in ADP, which is a molecule that is sort of an expended energy molecule in your cell, and a protein, and using the energy, these rotary engines spin around and they churn out, they take the ADP and they convert it to ATP, which is adenosine triphosphate, the basic energy molecule, which living organisms use to power chemical reactions.

So we literally see these kinds of rotary engines in our cells, which are powering and controlling most cellular processes. Another example is kinesin, which is a sort of like a walking machine that walks along microtubules to transport various organic packages within the cell where they need to go.

So cells are full of these micro molecular machines, and biochemist Michael Behe has called these machines irreducibly complex, meaning that they require a certain core number of parts in order to function.

And if you don't have all of those parts present, then they don't function, they don't provide any functional advantage, which is what is required by Darwinian evolution. So Michael Behe has argued that these irreducibly complex molecular machines cannot be built up in the step-by-step gradual manner that is required by Darwinian evolution.

And these molecular machines, which are irreducibly complex, again, they show what we call complex and specified information. They're complex because they represent a very unlikely configuration of parts, and they are specified in that they have the exact configuration of parts that is needed for these machines to function and perform some important use within our cells.

I'll just give a couple more examples of what I think are good arguments for intelligent design. When we look at the fossil record, Shay, we see a pattern of explosions where we see new kinds of organisms coming into existence rapidly and abruptly in the fossil record without direct evolutionary precursors.

Well, how does that point to intelligent design? Well, intelligent agents can rapidly infuse larger amounts of information into a system. And that's exactly what we see in the fossil record, where we see these explosions of new kinds of life coming into existence without direct evolutionary precursors.

This represents rapid infusions of new information into the biosphere, which I think is best explained by intelligent design. So we can go on and on. There are other examples of good arguments for intelligent design, but I think these are some of the top ones I would cite.

The Cake Analogy for Biological Complexity

Well, that's powerful. For the less scientifically minded people, I mean, a good illustration that was taught to me, I remember back in youth year, way back when I was a teenager, was someone is like baking a cake and there are ingredients that have to be in a certain order, that's to be cooked at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time.

All this stuff has to happen exactly as the recipe dictates or the cake is not going to happen. And that's such a crude illustration in that the things you're talking about are infinitely more complex than the ingredients in a cake.

So just as we would never have all the ingredients to a cake and set them on fire and expect it to result in a cake, how much more difficult would it be for all the ingredients required to create the universe and biological life in that universe could happen by chance or by unguided process.

So it's just amazing to hear, I mean, the odds of even a single protein molecule happening in an undirected manner, it's the odds are so minuscule that it's equivalent to impossible.

But I do think that the cake analogy is a good one, Shay, because in a similar to a cake, you can take all the ingredients for a cake, you can put them in a bowl, you can have everything you need right there in front of you for a cake.

You're not gonna get a cake because it's not enough to just have the ingredients, you have to have the assembly process, you have to have them ordered in the right ways so that they can actually form a cake, right?

Well, the same is true for the ingredients that go into life. Biologists have talked about the fact that you can take all the parts that are necessary for a living cell, put them in a test tube, you're not gonna get a living cell, you have to have them ordered in the right way and assembled properly in order to get a living cell.

So yeah, there's a lot more that goes into life when we talk about the origin of life, even if you had all the components available, that alone is not enough to guarantee that you're going to get them put together in the right way to get a living cell.

There's so much more going on in the complexity of life than just the mere parts being present.

Exactly, so my sister-in-law is the best chocolate chip cookie baker I've ever met and she has lovingly given me the recipe for it and I have tried on multiple occasions to make the chocolate chip cookies and they never come out as good as she makes them.

I don't know if that is displaying a lack of intelligence in this particular designer, but again, it's just such an argument for the beauty we see in nature, the complexity we see in life, to think that could come across by, whether you call it random chance, undirected process, whatever, it's impossible.

And like I said, the cookies, cakes, so less complex and yet, as I've been proven with my chocolate chip cookies, equally impossible, so to speak. So Casey, what are some of the more recent developments that you've heard about in science that you think argue for an intelligent designer?

Junk DNA and New Scientific Predictions

Sure, so I've been around the debate over intelligent design for quite a few years. I pretty much got involved with this debate when I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego in the late 90s and the early 2000s.

And I remember when I would talk to people, they would say, well, look, our cells are full of this non-coding DNA, what they call junk DNA. And at that time, very little was known about this junk DNA and what it actually does and whether it's important for our cells.

And we were being told at that time that, look, no intelligent designer would load up our cells with all of this useless garbage DNA. And that's proof that intelligent design is wrong, essentially. I used to hear this argument all the time.

And my response back then was, well, okay, well, we don't really know exactly what this non-coding DNA is doing. At that time, there was that statistic that I'll say 2 of our DNA codes for protein.

So what is the other 98 good for? Is it just basically useless genetic garbage, the result of millions of years of random mutations producing genetic junk that we don't need? And ID theorists used to say, look, we don't really understand what is going on in the genome, so let's take a wait and see approach.

Rather than assuming that this quote unquote dark matter of the genome is unimportant or useless and that we really don't need it, let's actually wait and see. And ID is gonna predict that we're gonna, as we learn more about the genome, we're gonna find that that non-coding or junk DNA is actually very important.

Well, fast forward now, say about 20 years, and there's been a complete paradigm shift in biology, Shea, where today it's widely recognized that the vast majority of non-coding DNA is hugely important for living systems.

And now the idea of junk DNA is actually becoming passe. Even Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins who had used junk DNA to argue against intelligent design, they've now acknowledged that it looks like a very large proportion of our genome is actually functional.

In fact, there was an article in the journal Nature that came out just a couple of months ago, I think it was in February of this year, 2021, and it found that over 130 ,000 genetic elements have been identified now in the human genome that were once considered to be junk DNA.

And now we know it's functional and important for performing some function in our genome. And we've just barely begun to scratch the surface of what's going on in our genomes with junk DNA. So I think that's a recent scientific discovery that confirms a prediction of intelligent design.

I mean, ID theorists were predicting on the basis of their theory of ID that we would discover function for junk DNA. And that is exactly what has happened over the last 10 or 20 years. And it's exciting to see positive predictions of ID being fulfilled like this.

No, so that's great. So just to help make sure I'm understanding you correctly, so there's a lot of our DNA that we didn't, several years ago, really know what it was there for. And then now it's been discovered that it does indeed have a purpose.

When I read your article, I think you mentioned that it plays a purchase in the function of our limbs, so to speak. Without these things, we would not be fully functional. So just because we don't always know what every part of the DNA does doesn't mean it's junk, so to speak.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, a junk DNA is involved in the formation of our brain. A lot of what junk DNA does is, if you look at protein-coding DNA is sort of like making the bricks. Well, what controls where you make the bricks or when you make the bricks and how many bricks you make and what you do with the bricks?

Well, that is in the non-coding DNA. And we say that it regulates gene expression. So yes, we've got maybe only 2 of our genome that is actually encoding proteins, but a very large percent of the genome is now controlling when those genes are expressed, when those proteins are constructed, how they're used, where they're made, how much is made.

These are all very important aspects of our cells' operation. So yeah, the non-coding DNA is sort of controlling gene expression. That's a big part of what it does.

Intelligent Design and the Christian View of the Designer

So, well, thank you, Casey. Thank you for explaining that to us who love science, but definitely aren't quite on your level in our understanding of these things. So with intelligent design, I find it hugely valuable.

Even with my limited knowledge, I've been able to explain using intelligent design to several people who are skeptical of the Christian faith, who are very scientifically minded. But what would you say, and both of us are followers of Jesus Christ, what would you say to those other, our brothers and sisters in Christ who tend to frown upon the intelligent design theory because it does not specify who that intelligent designer is?

Sure.

So, and you asked the question, what would I say to those who say that intelligent design does not go far enough? Well, as you said, I'm a Christian, that's correct. I believe that the designer is the God of the Bible.

I am very open about that, whether I'm speaking before religious or secular audiences. However, I don't know how to go from, for example, the evidence in biology to identifying who the designer is. So for example, let's take the DNA that encodes the ATP synthase molecular machine, okay?

That DNA represents a very highly specific and unlikely sequence of nucleotides that encodes a number of different proteins that are necessary to build an ATP synthase molecular machine. Now, I think that that DNA is pointing towards, very strongly pointing towards intelligent design.

But that DNA itself does not say made by Yahweh or made by Allah or made by Buddha or made by Yoda or made by whoever you think the designer is, okay? It's not specifying who the designer is. It requires an intelligent cause for its origin, but it doesn't actually tell us who the designer is.

So when I say that intelligent design doesn't identify the designer, that's me trying to keep the discussion on a scientific level. I'm just saying, look, from a scientific perspective, we can say that this molecular machine was intelligently designed, but we can't go beyond, if we're gonna use a scientific argument, we can't go beyond that and say who the designer is because the data just isn't telling us.

It's not saying who the designer is. It's saying that it didn't arise by chance. It didn't arise by unguided law-like natural processes or a combination of chance and law. It arose by an intelligent agent.

In all of our experience, where do things like language-based code and micromolecular machines come from? In all of our experience, those things have only one known cause, and that is intelligence. So we can make a strong argument for intelligent design of the origin of that machine, but we don't have the ability to identify the designer who made that machine.

Okay, so intelligent design is trying to keep the conversation on a scientific level. It tries not to go beyond what the science alone can tell us as a scientific theory. It doesn't tell us who the designer is.

So as a Christian, I would say to those who say that intelligent design does not go far enough,.

Well, I agree with you.

I mean, I would love to make apologetic arguments to take people to Christ on the cross. As a Christian, I think that's a very noble thing to do, but intelligent design is not going to be that vehicle to take you all the way to arguing for Christ on the cross.

All that intelligent design is going to do is it's going to tell you that some intelligent cause is needed for the origin of this natural structure that we're talking about. If I wanna talk to people about why I think that the God of the Bible is the best candidate for the designer, well, there are a variety of other apologetic arguments that can be used.

It's just intelligent design is not going to be part of that argument. It's not going to be, sorry, I gotta turn off something here on my computer that's starting to make noise.

Okay, sorry.

Netflix started beeping at me, sorry. So if I'm going to take somebody to argue to them that the God of the Bible is the designer, I'm going to need arguments that go beyond intelligent design. Arguments maybe from history or theology or prophecy or other apologetic arguments, and that's fine, but those are going beyond intelligent design, getting into other areas.

The theory of intelligent design on its own does not tell us who the designer is. So I agree with those people who would say ID doesn't go far enough, but I would say that we take ID for what it is. It's a scientific argument which says that many aspects of life and the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause.

That's good for many discussions that you have with folks who might be skeptics, and if you want to go beyond just arguing for an intelligent cause, then you can use other arguments.

Intelligent Design as a Bridge to the God of the Bible

So in my experience, intelligent design has been a powerful bridge in a sense of getting people who are very scientifically minded, who have been convinced that Darwinian evolution is the answer to the origin of life, et cetera, and helps them to realize that now things are far too complex to have happened in an unguided process.

And the vastness of the universe, everything that we point to, the fact that everything has to be so programmed down to such a precise number in order for life to even exist, all these things. Okay, so you get that accepted, you get someone convinced that intelligent design is a far superior theory than Darwinian evolution, and from there, you start arguing, okay, if these things are true, then what must this intelligent designer be like?

He must be incredibly intelligent, must be incredibly powerful, must be all these different things, and that's when you can start to going, building another bridge from intelligent design to who the intelligent designer is, and as you said earlier, we believe it's the God of the Bible.

It's the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the universe who best fits this profile of what an intelligent designer would have to be like in order to create everything that we observe in science.

Yeah, I mean, I would argue that intelligent design is a scientific theory that has larger implications, okay? And in that respect, it's no different from many other scientific theories, like Darwinian evolution, which is a scientific theory that has larger implications, or the Big Bang model of the universe is a scientific theory which has larger implications.

So yeah, we can talk about those larger implications, but if we're gonna keep the conversation on a strictly scientific level, then we're gonna say, look, the most we can argue for is that an intelligent cause was at work in the origin of this natural feature.

Human Origins and the Hominid Fossil Record

So wow, Casey, powerful. Anything else you think our readers need to know before we sign off, and what's keeping your brain engaged these days?

Oh, well, there's a lot to talk about, and we could go much deeper on all this. I'm working a lot these days on the topic of human origins, and I've done a lot of studying up on that while I was living in South Africa, going to various hominid fossil sites, and I've done a lot of reading of the technical literature of that, and quite a bit of writing that I'm working on in that area as well.

So I'll just maybe leave your viewers with this. As I've studied the hominid fossil record, what I've found is that there is a distinct gap, or a distinct break between ape-like species and human-like species.

And the hominid fossil record does not document the evolution of humans, in particular our genus Homo, we're species Homo sapiens. So our genus Homo appears abruptly in the fossil record, and does not, which does not document the evolution of our genus from ape-like precursors.

So that's sort of a topic that I've been researching and studying a lot over the last few months.

Wow, Casey, it sounds fascinating. So thank you for being on the show. Thank you for your expertise, your knowledge, and your ability to explain it so well. So for those who wanna learn more about Casey Luskin and his work, there'll be links to some of his material on both the YouTube description field, and also on our podcast page.

So thanks for tuning in. Casey, thank you again for being on the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Hope to have you again sometime. So this has been the Got Questions podcast. Got questions? The Bible has answers. We'll help you find them.