An Informed Cosmos: Essays on Intelligent Design Theory

By Peter S. Williams and Stephen C. Meyer

After a substantial author's preface recounting the author's life-journey with the question of science and design in nature, An Informed Cosmos pulls together essays that jointly cover the core arguments for a scientific theory of intelligent design. Along with a foreword by philosopher of science and leading design theorist Stephen C. Meyer, and a wide range of recommended resources, An Informed Cosmos offers an informed overview of the contemporary case for intelligent design.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jul 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666702972

Peter S. Williams

Based in England, Christian philosopher and apologist Peter S. Williams (MA, MPhil) is Assistant Professor in Communication and Worldviews' at NLA University College in Norway. Peter is a trustee of the Christian Evidence Society, and both a Mentor and Travelling Speaker for the European Leadership Forum. He has authored various books, including: (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Outgrowing God? A Beginner's Guide to Richard Dawkins and the God Debate (Cascade, 2020), Getting at Jesus: A Comprehensive Critique of Neo-Atheist Nonsense About the Jesus of History (Wipf & Stock, 2019) and A Faithful Guide to Philosophy: An Introduction to the Love of Wisdom (Wipf & Stock, 2019).

Book preview

An Informed Cosmos

Essays on Intelligent Design Theory

Peter S. Williams

Foreword by Stephen C. Meyer

An Informed Cosmos

Essays on Intelligent Design Theory

Copyright ©

2023

Peter S. Williams. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 978–1-6667–0295–8

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

An Informative Preface

Chapter 1: The Design Inference from Specified Complexity Defended by Scholars outside the Intelligent Design Movement

Chapter 2: Atheists against Darwinism

Chapter 3: Intelligent Designs on Science

Appendix I

Appendix II

Recommended Resources

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to my father,Stephen H. Williams.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

—Groucho Marx

In science, the only thing that counts is the evidence,and the logic of the argument itself.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos

This whole reductive programme—this mindless materialism, this belief in something called ‘matter’ as the answer to all questions—is not really science at all. It is, and always has been, just an image, a myth, a vision, an enormous act of faith.

—Mary Midgley, What Is Philosophy For?, 90.

informed adjective

1 a: having information 1 b: based on possession of information

information noun

1 a (1): knowledge . . . (2) intelligence . . . (3) facts, data b: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects.

cosmos noun

the universe especially when it is understood as an ordered system . . . "(from the Greek kosmos meaning an orderly arrangement; also adornment—cf. cosmetic, which shares this root. . . . A cosmos is something of beauty)."¹

1

. Definitions from Merriam-Webster Dictionary online (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%

20

cosmos) and Oakes, Chaos, Cosmos, and Logos,

1, 2.

Foreword

Stephen C. Meyer

²

It has been said that the best way to overcome a foe is to make him a friend. The next best thing, evidently, is to show that the opponents of intelligent design actually hold views that inadvertently support key tenets of ID theory. This is precisely what Peter S. Williams has done in An Informed Cosmos. Williams presents a deceptively simple argument:

ID Premise 1: There exist one or more reliable tests for detecting intelligent design.

ID Premise 2: Nature exhibits empirical data that pass one or more tests for reliably detecting intelligent design.

Core ID Conclusion: Therefore, at least one aspect of nature reliably signals intelligent design.

He also contends that

ID Premise 3: Inferring intelligent design from empirical evidence using reliable tests is a scientific enterprise.

Williams shows that a number of thinkers who stand against ID also believe that there are reliable means of detecting design, just as noted in premise 1. Williams also demonstrates that some otherwise hostile atheists also (inadvertently) confer scientific status on ID theory, as stated in premise 3. Thus, Williams deftly harnesses the work of atheists like Richard Dawkins, Thomas Nagel, Carl Sagan, and Victor Stenger in service of intelligent design. The enemies of ID turn out to be some of its strongest friends. Who knew?

But Williams also takes a step farther. He contends—as per premise 2—that nature exhibits empirical data that passes one or more tests for reliably detecting intelligent design. Williams explores cosmic fine-tuning, local fine-tuning, the waiting times problem, protein folding, specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and the like. Moreover, Williams also provides an exposition of key problems with Darwinism, an incisive critique of methodological naturalism, and a careful analysis of criticisms of ID, including the challenge of so-called junk DNA.

Williams’s book is as informed as it is timely. It is timely not just for the general reader, but for religious believers who are leaning toward affirming evolutionary theory. In an era when increasing numbers of secular evolutionary biologists acknowledge problems with neo-Darwinism and other contemporary evolutionary theories, many Christians and religious theists have been adopting theistic evolution, insisting that mutation and selection or other similarly materialistic evolutionary mechanisms are the means by which God created. But why accommodate theories that cannot explain the data? The problem with theistic evolution (or evolutionary creation) is that standard evolutionary mechanisms lack creative power, while alternative evolutionary mechanisms lack experimental support and/or conceptual precision. There is no need to wed the theological doctrines of creation and divine providence to moribund scientific theories of biological origins. Jerusalem need not defer to Athens when Athenians are skeptical of their own theories.

Consider just one example.³ In November 2016, I attended a conference organized by the Royal Society in London. The Royal Society is one of the most august scientific bodies in the world. The conference was called by leading evolutionary biologists who wanted to examine new trends in evolutionary theory.⁴ These evolutionary biologists increasingly reject neo-Darwinism and the idea that the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection can explain the origin of anatomical novelty and biological complexity. Instead, these biologists were exploring prospects for formulating new mechanisms to explain the advent of anatomical novelty and biological complexity in the history of life.

The opening talk at the conference was given by Gerd Müller, a prominent evolutionary theorist from Austria.⁵ One of his introductory slides was captioned The Explanatory Deficits of the Modern Synthesis. These deficits included problems like the origin of phenotypic complexity (the complexity of visible body types) and the origin of anatomical novelty (the origin of major new innovations in the history of life). Müller’s list of explanatory deficits also included the discovery that many of the mutational processes we observe are actually biased or directed toward propitious outcomes—in just the way that neo-Darwinism denies when it claims that all mutations are random with respect to an organism’s fitness. Müller also highlighted other explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism, including its inability to explain the origin of non-gradual modes of transition (that is, the abrupt appearance in the fossil record of major groups of plants and animals).

In addition, Müller has raised further problems with neo-Darwinism in a 2003 coedited volume from MIT Press with biologist Stuart Newman.⁶ In their opening essay, they stated that although neo-Darwinism is still the mainstream evolutionary theory, it has no theory of the generative.⁷ Indeed, many evolutionary biologists have recently explained that neo-Darwinism explains small-scale variation very well, but it doesn’t explain major morphological innovations—that is, the origin of novel forms of life. In fact, in their 2003 volume, Newman and Müller list the origination of novel Organismal Form as one of many significant unanswered questions in biology. When I first encountered their essay, it struck me as quite extraordinary because the origin of novel biological form was the fundamental question Darwin was supposed to have answered in 1859. Now, instead, we have leading evolutionary biologists telling us that question has not been answered.

Notably, after the 2016 Royal Society conference in London, one of the key observers, a sympathetic science journalist named Suzan Mazur, wrote a reflective retrospective about the conference and criticized it for its lack of momentousness.⁸ I came away with the same view. The presenters did a good job of explaining the problems with neo-Darwinism, but did not propose or formulate alternative non-neo-Darwinian mechanisms that could adequately account for the explanatory deficits of the mainstream theory or compensate for the lack of creative power associated with its main mutation-selection mechanism.

Of course, a number of proposals have been offered (both at the conference and elsewhere). These include evo-devo, self-organizational scenarios, natural genetic engineering, neutral evolutionary theory, and the like. Broadly speaking, these theories propose new mechanisms that either supplement or replace the mutation/selection mechanism of standard neo-Darwinian theory. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, none of these proposals solve the problem of the origin of biological information necessary to build novel forms of life. Indeed, an array of difficulties plague these proposals.⁹

So there is an irony here. At just the time when leading evolutionary biologists are explicitly acknowledging a crisis in the explanatory power of evolutionary theory, many Christians and religious scientists are urging fellow believers to accept evolution as the means by which God created. But why reconcile religious doctrines to a scientific theory just when key advocates of this theory are losing faith in their own theories?

By contrast, An Informed Cosmos shows that the foundational tenets of intelligent design are sound. With clarity and erudition, Williams provides an evidential and philosophical defense of the empirical and conceptual merits of intelligent design. And he does so by drawing on the work of the very thinkers who are critical of ID. Strikingly, secular biologists are not only raising difficulties with neo-Darwinism, they are also—if inadvertently—strengthening the key insights undergirding intelligent design.

It’s a fine thing to make one’s foes into one’s friends. And it’s also a fine thing to show—even if many theistic evolutionists don’t yet realize it—that the tide is turning away from evolutionary speculations and toward a robust case for intelligent design.

2

. Stephen C. Meyer received his PhD in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. A former geophysicist and college professor, he now directs Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. See https://stephencmeyer.org/ and https://www.discovery.org/id/.

3

. For more complete coverage of The Royal Society event, which I draw upon here, see Meyer, Do Christians Need to Reconcile.

4

. See New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives, a conference attended by Stephen C. Meyer on November

7–9

,

2016

, Royal Society.

5

. Gerd Müller’s lecture on The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, attended by the author on November

7

,

2016

, Royal Society: http://downloads.royalsociety.org/events /

2016

/

11

/evolutionary-biology/muller.mp

3

.

6

. Müller and Newman, eds., Origination of Organismal Form.

7

. As they explain in more detail: Although this theory can account for the phenomena it concentrates on, namely, variation of traits in populations, it leaves aside a number of other aspects of evolution. . . . Most importantly, it completely avoids the origination of phenotypic traits and of organismal form. In other words, neo-Darwinism has no theory of the generative. As a consequence, current evolutionary theory can predict what will be maintained, but not what will appear. Müller and Newman, Origination of Organismal Form,

7

.

8

. See Mazur, Pterosaurs Hijack Royal Society. Cf. Evolution News, Why the Royal Society Meeting Mattered.

9

. Meyer et al., Theistic Evolution. See also Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt,

291

–

335

.

An Informative Preface

We live in an information age. The reader may have downloaded this book from a cloud onto their tablet (a statement that would cause past generations some perplexity). If so, what they downloaded was information. To be more precise, it was complex specified information or specified complexity, terms that refer to events that have high probabilistic complexity [i.e., they are very unlikely] but whose identifying patterns have low descriptive complexity.¹⁰ The natural and rationally warranted inference from this specific type of information is to the conclusion that it is the product of intelligent design (that is, of genuine rather than merely apparent design). As the influential American philosopher William Lane Craig observes:

in a poker game any deal of cards is equally and highly improbable, but if you find that every time a certain player deals he gets all four aces, you can bet this is not the result of chance but of design.¹¹

To give another illustration, imagine you are watching someone drawing Scrabble tiles out from a bag, sight unseen. On the one hand, a long string of random letters would be complex (i.e., unlikely), but it wouldn’t exhibit specified complexity. That is, it wouldn’t conform to an independently given, simple, easily described¹² pattern (such as a grammatical sentence). On the other hand, a short string of letters could easily turn out to be specified—like this (which is a word)—but it wouldn’t be complex enough to outstrip the ability of the available probabilistic resources to plausibly explain this conformity. Neither complexity without specificity, nor specificity without complexity signals intelligent design. However, if you observed an event like that portrayed in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent gets a sequence of Scrabble tiles spelling out the sentence What do you get when you multiply six by nine,¹³ you’d naturally and quite rightly infer design.

Even if you couldn’t work out how the trick had been pulled off, you’d be sure there was a trick involved and that this contingent arrangement of Scrabble tile parts had somehow been informed by some intelligence or other. Arthur’s sequence of tiles is specified, because (aside from the missing question mark) it conforms to the independently given rules of English spelling and grammar. It is also a sufficiently complex arrangement of contingent parts to make it unreasonable to attribute this conformity to chance. Indeed, this combination of specificity with sufficient complexity warrants an inference to intelligent design, because in our experience the creation of new information [i.e., complex specified information] is habitually associated with conscious and rational activity.¹⁴

The Information Revolution

To the discomfort of anyone invested in the ancient Greek belief that the natural world can ultimately be explained without remainder in terms of the blind, intelligence-free interplay of physical Chance and Necessity,¹⁵ since the middle of the twentieth century science has discovered a rising tide of counter-evidence.

Cosmic and Local Fine Tuning

In the words of Nobel laureate in Physics Arno Penzias, Astronomy leads us to . . . a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life.¹⁶ Starting with astrophysicist Fred Hoyle’s 1953 prediction of a finely tuned resonance state in the carbon-12 atomic nucleus (later verified and known as the Hoyle state), scientists have reached a consensus recognizing that the existence of complex material states up to an including organic life depends upon a staggering degree of cosmic fine-tuning (which is another way of saying complex specified information). As cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) ruminated with coauthor Leonard Mlodinow: the initial state of the universe had to be set up in a very special and highly improbable way.¹⁷

There are multiple aspects to cosmic fine-tuning, including physical constants such as the force of gravity, and initial conditions such as the amount of entropy in the early universe. Philosopher Roger Trigg reports one estimate that there are 30 constants in basic physics and modern cosmology that must be fine-tuned for the emergence of life.¹⁸ Multiplying together the odds of these individually unlikely factors all falling by chance within the specification provided by the narrow, life-permitting range of possible values gives an improbability that’s literally beyond astronomical. Physicist Lee Smolin "has calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance is 1 in 10

²²⁹

."¹⁹ Prima facie, cosmic fine-tuning is an example of specified complexity that’s best explained by intelligent design.²⁰

Moreover, in addition to this cosmic fine-tuning, life also depends upon or benefits from a complex set of finely tuned local conditions concerning contingent properties of our galaxy, solar system, planet, and sun.²¹

The leading objection to the design inference from cosmic fine-tuning is the speculative hypothesis that "our universe is just one universe in a multiverse."²² This is like the player who keeps getting quad aces whenever they deal saying we should forego any suspicion they are cheating because there might be lots of other card games going on, which would increase the odds of someone getting very lucky. Note that adding the selection effect of a gunslinger who will shoot everyone at the table dead if our suspected cheater is about to reveal any hand besides quad aces (so that our suspect having quad aces is a precondition of our observing his hand) does nothing to alleviate our suspicion, because it does nothing to explain why our suspect is so conspicuously beating the odds.

To return to our Scrabble illustration, the multiverse response to the argument from cosmic fine-tuning is like saying that Arthur Dent’s Scrabble-tile question doesn’t indicate design because if Scrabble letters were thrown together into some receptacle²³ before being randomly taken out one at a time enough times, then the same result could in theory be produced without design. Somehow making the emergence of a grammatical sentence a precondition of our observing anything wouldn’t help explain the fulfilment of this precondition.

Clearly, in the absence of independent evidence for the existence of enough card games, or enough Scrabble letters being drawn for long enough, the many chances hypothesis is ad hoc and the design hypothesis remains preferable. Likewise, even granting that if a large enough multiverse exists then it would produce the fine-tuning of our universe by chance, in the absence of independent evidence for the existence of enough differently tuned universes, the design hypothesis remains preferable. However, in the words of astrophysicist Adam Frank, There is no empirically grounded scientific reason to believe there is such a thing as a Multiverse of parallel realities.²⁴

In fact, the multiverse hypothesis is in general disconfirmed by the amount of order found in this universe, because Our universe is far more special than we would expect it to be, even if it were merely a random member of the subset of universes compatible with our existence.²⁵ Atheist cosmologist Roger Penrose highlights the overly special nature of our universe by asking us to:

consider how ridiculously cheaper (in the sense of improbabilities) it would be simply to produce, by mere random collisions of particles, the entire solar system with all its life ready-made, or even just a few conscious brains. . . . So the problem is: why did we not come about this way, rather than from an absurdly less probable . . .

1

.

4

x

10¹⁰

tedious years of evolution? It seems to me that this conundrum simply points to . . . the incorrectness of the bubble-universe idea.²⁶

Theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist Luke Barnes comments that If only very special multiverses avoid this problem, then the multiverse itself is fine-tuned.²⁷ And, of course, an objection to the design inference from cosmic fine-tuning that postulates the existence of a very special (i.e., finely tuned) multiverse is self-defeating. Indeed, as philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer points out,

In order to explain the origin of the fine tuning in our universe, both inflationary cosmology and string theory (and versions of the multiverse that combine them) posit universe-generating mechanisms that themselves require prior unexplained fine tuning.²⁸

Moreover, Meyer argues that not only does the universe-generating mechanism in inflationary cosmology require prior unexplained fine tuning. It actually requires more fine tuning than it was proposed to explain.²⁹

Biological Fine-Tuning

Pure reductionism will not work, precisely because it does not analyse the kind of complexity organisms display. —Mary Midgely³⁰

British chemist and molecular biologist Leslie Orgel, a pioneer in the study of the origins of life, observed that: Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.³¹ In the words of cosmologist and origin-of-life researcher Paul Davies: Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.³²

Francis Crick and James Watson announced their discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953 (see Fig. 1).

Fig.

1

. Key structural features of the DNA double helix.³³

In 1958, Crick theorized that the sequence specificity of amino acids in proteins derives from a prior specificity of arrangement in the nucleotide bases on the DNA molecule,³⁴ which functioned just like alphabetic letters in an English text or binary digits in software or a machine code.³⁵ Experiments in the 1960s established that the sequential arrangement of amino-acids in proteins is indeed derived (via messenger RNA) from information encoded within the nucleotide rungs of the DNA ladder (see Fig. 2).³⁶ Hence Richard Dawkins’s striking observation that

at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air [containing] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees. . . . It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs. . . . That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth.³⁷

Fig.

2

. Protein synthesis.³⁸

That said, we now know that things are rather more complex than biochemist Jean Brachet’s simple mantra that DNA makes RNA makes protein.³⁹ Instead, DNA is becoming known as a more of a team member in a society of biomolecules. In some ways, it is more a patient than a doctor. It gets operated on by numerous machines that alter its message.⁴⁰ As Meyer reports,

Biologists still affirm that DNA contains specified information, but they have discovered . . . that the information for building a given protein is not always (or even usually) located in just one place along the DNA molecule. They have also discovered that . . . depending upon how the cell processes the information stored in DNA, a single gene may contribute to the production of thousands of proteins and other gene products. . . . The cell also uses genetic information to produce critical RNA molecules that do not undergo translation, but instead direct the processing of other genetic information. Further, during the translation process, additional processes edit the chains of amino acids produced before they fold into their final functional forms. Equally revolutionary is the discovery that biological information beyond (not resident in) DNA plays a critical role in the development of organisms. . . . As molecular biology and genomics have revealed new features of the cell’s information storage and processing system, they have inspired a new conception of the gene—one in which the gene is no longer understood as a singular, linear, and localized entity on a DNA strand, but rather one in which the gene is understood as a distributive set of data files available for retrieval and context-dependent expression by a complex information-processing system.⁴¹

In sum, as American physicist and information theorist Hubert P. Yockey (1916–2016) explains:

Information, transcription, translation, code, redundancy, synonymous, messenger, editing, and proofreading are all appropriate terms in biology. They take their meaning from information theory (Shannon,

1948

) and are not synonyms, metaphors, or analogies.⁴²

Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry

Starting with Hungarian-British scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s landmark 1967 paper Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry,⁴³ the recognition that information lies at the heart of biology has formed the basis for increasingly sophisticated arguments against reductive explanations of life framed in terms of blind physical chance and/or necessity.⁴⁴ As William B. Collier, senior professor of physical chemistry at Oral Roberts University, explains:

The specific structure of DNA was figured out by James Watson and Francis Crick in

1953

at Cambridge University. It took another

10

to

15

years to understand how that information was coded into the DNA strand and then translated and transported to the ribosomes to produce new protein machines. By the mid

1960

’s Polanyi realized that this information was independent of the DNA strand, and that in fact it had to be. The DNA code could be recorded on paper, magnetic tape, computer hard drives, or books like any other kind of specified information. . . . This information was extrinsic and independent of the medium that carried it . . . and completely unexplainable by any known chemical or physical phenomena, implying that the living cell could never be reduced or explained by natural laws.⁴⁵

In the words of Neil Broom (emeritus professor of chemical and materials engineering at the University of Auckland):

The sequence making up a particular DNA strand is not dependent on any preferred bonding between the individual bases. Each base is the molecular equivalent of the dot or dash in the Morse code and can be arranged in any linear combination without breaking the rules of chemical bonding. . . . The structure of DNA therefore contrasts with ordinary chemical molecules or crystals, whose structures reflect the most stable arrangement of their constituent atoms . . . on this basis alone life is inexplicable in terms of the lower-level laws of physics and chemistry. Some other, higher level of control that transcends the purely material laws is required.⁴⁶

Indeed, according to John C. Lennox, emeritus fellow in mathematics and the philosophy of science at Green Templeton College, Oxford: results from theoretical computer science . . . point towards the existence of something like a law of conservation of information that would preclude biogenesis by unguided processes.⁴⁷

On the