The Evolution of Intelligent Design Theory

This past year, I have seen headlines flash across the start page of my Microsoft browser’s newsfeed that featured articles about the supposed chemical origin of life. Was it the result of aliens seeding our planet billions of years ago—a theory called Panspermia? Or an asteroid bombardment with trace amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA?

When I was a college student, one of my colleagues re-enacted the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, originally designed to show how unguided chemical evolution could have occurred on a primordial Earth. After assembling the equipment, he evacuated the air using a vacuum pump and charged the system with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. This was refluxed in the absence of oxygen for a week while a continuous electric spark was passed through the vapor.

The idea that oxygen-breathing organisms could evolve through random, unguided processes in an oxygen-free, reducing atmosphere was either poorly considered or outright overlooked by the original researchers. Equally ignored was the debunked theory of spontaneous generation, which shares a close relationship with chemical evolution. This once-popular belief held that life could emerge from non-life—people even thought that leaving rags in a dark closet could spontaneously produce mice. Scientists, most notably Louis Pasteur, had disproven this notion nearly a century earlier. Several days into the project, when I asked him how it was going. He turned to me, laughed, and said, “After this, I think I’ll write the Ten Commandments.”

His results failed to match those of the original researchers, which was the formation of trace quantities of amino acids in the mixture and voila! Life would shortly emerge thereafter, given a billion years or so.

Despite continuing efforts on the part of origin of life researchers to demonstrate a plausible mechanism for unguided chemical evolution leading to greater complexity and ultimately life, none have been successful—not even close.

Even the original Miller-Urey experiment was not unguided. It had been designed, utilized designed glassware, and conducted in a designed laboratory. Some intelligent designers collaborated and conducted the experiment. And there was an agreed-upon goal—a guided direction—that the researchers hoped to achieve. If it demonstrated anything, it showed that intelligence always precedes and then guides matter and energy.

Swiss watches are made by Swiss watchmakers. Computer code doesn’t write itself unless coders have initiated the process—even now with the advent of artificial intelligence.

The Gordian Knot of all origin of life research is that to make proteins and almost all other biomolecules that comprise cells, you need molecular machines—enzymes—to do the job of assembly. These are themselves unfathomably complex ensembles of proteins or RNA in some cases.

If you’ve ever watched “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel, you get the idea: things don’t assemble themselves. Machines—often robots—are designed by intelligent engineers who carefully manufacture each item. In other words, intelligence and planning always guide matter and energy.

When we start discussing protein synthesis, I use a thought experiment with my introductory biochemistry students. I show them a photo of my necktie drawer, which my wife spent an hour organizing by color and folding into neat rows. I then told them the ties spontaneously arranged themselves while I was out.

The best response I’ve received wasn’t scientific—one student blurted out, “I hope you bought her flowers!” No student has ever believed that my ties, given even “billions of years,” could have organized themselves through random, unguided processes. Common sense leads to common science.

The lesson is clear: someone intelligent, with an eye for color and a skill for artfully folding fabric, was behind the organized arrangement. One could say that my wife was acting as an intelligent designer.

Belief in God as The Intelligent Designer was the starting point for much of scientific inquiry through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

“The great pioneers in physics—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus—devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world,” writes Stephen C. Meyer in the Return of the God Hypothesis, his latest book in which he makes a convincing case for the Judeo-Christin origins of modern science. “The founders … assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos not a chaos.” ^[1]

Intelligent design as a theory for the origin of life, although not necessarily referred to as such, has been around for more than a century. C. S. Lewis alluded to it in his essay, “Two Lectures,” where he makes a similar argument for intelligent design after attending a lecture by an evolutionist who summarized evolutionary theory as:

the development, the slow struggle upwards and onwards from crude and inchoate beginnings towards ever-increasing perfection and elaboration—that appears to be the very formula of the universe … the oak comes from the acorn…[e]ach of us has grown, through slow, prenatal stages in which we were at first more like fish than mammals, from a particle of matter too small to be seen. Man, himself springs from beasts: the organic from the inorganic … The march of all things is from lower to higher.^[2]

Lewis went home that evening thinking about what he had heard. He fell asleep and dreamed of a second lecture; however, in his dream, the lecturer was “saying all the wrong things.”^[3] The lecturer explained that the acorn came from a fully formed oak, the Rocket came from the mind of a man, a genius, and the first cave paintings didn’t arise from earlier paintings but from “the hand and brain of human beings whose hand and brain cannot be shown to have been in any way inferior to our own.”^[4] The embryo came from two fully developed human beings. “The rude and imperfect thing always springs from something perfect and developed.”^[5]

The dream lecturer’s directionality in explaining that the march of all things was from higher to lower was backward or opposite to what Lewis had heard earlier that afternoon.

Lewis was making the perfect case for intelligent design. “For the first time in my life I began to look at the question with both eyes open,” he wrote.^[6] The development of life or civilizations could not have just happened. Development was a cycle in which it was the perfect, which produced the imperfect and the perfect. And if this were true, what was the logical conclusion?

Intelligent design moved out of the realm of philosophy and solidly into the realm of science with the 1996 publication of Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, in which the author explains the interdependency of biochemical systems in the cell as being “irreducibly complex,” a term he coined to explain the interdependency of biochemical pathways and the molecular machines that produce the molecules we need for life.

Behe describes in elegant detail the staggering complexity of what were once thought to be simple biological processes. He demonstrates the impossibility of such processes arising gradually through random mutation and natural selection.

“If you search the scientific literature on evolution,” he writes, “and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines — the basis of life — developed, you find an eerie and complete silence.” Behe likens these molecular machines to “black boxes — a whimsical term for a device that does something but whose inner workings are mysterious.”

Living Cells

In Darwin’s day, very little was known about biochemical processes. Two of Darwin’s contemporaries, Schwann and Schleiden, had discovered that plants and animals consisted of small bodies called cells. But even they concluded: “The primary question is, what is the origin of this peculiar little organism, the cell?”

Since the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thompson in the late nineteenth century, a window was opened into the “Lilliputian world” of the living cell. The development of the electron microscope and, following shortly thereafter, X-ray crystallography, allowed scientists to peer several levels deeper—into a series of smaller and smaller black boxes.

Behe comments, “What was seen was more complexity. It was thought that proteins would turn out to be simple and regular structures like salt crystals. Upon observing the convoluted, complicated bowel-like structure of myoglobin, however, Max Perutz groaned: ‘Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral an object?”’

By the late twentieth century, biochemists realized that there were a series of smaller black boxes, one inside the other. Things that were once thought to be simple—the flagellum of a bacterium, for example—were revealed to be driven by an extraordinarily complex biochemical machine consisting of multiple parts.

How Life Works

“This level of discovery,” writes Behe, “began to allow biologists to approach the greatest black box of all. The question of how life works was not one that Darwin or his contemporaries could answer. They knew that eyes were for seeing but how exactly do they see? How does blood clot? How does the body fight disease? The complex structures [involved] were themselves made of smaller components. What did they look like?”

Irreducible Mousetrap

Behe introduced the most important concept in his book—“irreducible complexity,” illustrated using a mousetrap. A mousetrap can be described as irreducibly complex because it requires several essential parts to work together for it to function.

The trap is composed of five basic elements: a hammer, which impacts and kills the mouse; the spring, which drives the hammer; a trigger, upon which the mouse steps; a latch, which keeps the trap from springing closed until triggered; and a wooden base, on which the whole contraption is assembled. A mousetrap is irreducibly complex because for it to work, all of its components must be present and assembled in the correct relationships. Remove any one of the five components, and you will no longer have a functioning mousetrap. Could such a trap evolve from a simpler device?  No. The simpler device would either still have all five components and not be simpler, or it would lack one of the parts and not be functional. In evolutionary terms, if it wasn’t functional, it would have no reason to exist in the first place.

Frustration

Behe extended this simple notion of the irreducible complexity of a mousetrap to a number of complex biochemical systems – vision in the human eye, the clotting of blood and the immune system as examples.

Writing about the cascade of biochemical events necessary for the coagulation of human blood, Behe explains, “The absence of (or significant defects in) any one of a number of components causes the system to fail: blood does not clot at the proper time or at the proper place.”

Writing about the immune system, Behe says, “Whichever way we turn, a gradualistic account of the [evolution of the] immune system is blocked by multiple interwoven requirements. As scientists we yearn to understand how this magnificent mechanism came to be, but the complexity of the system dooms all Darwinian explanations to frustration.”

Will reason ultimately prevail in the origin of life community? Researchers are starting to question seriously neo-Darwinism and some are turning to embrace the theory of intelligent design as the better explanation for the origin of life.

Venki Ramakrishnan was one of three collaborators awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009 for studies in the function and structure of the ribosome, the production site for proteins in the cell. Writing in Gene Machine, the Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, his own research led him to ponder the deeper question of life’s origins:

How life began is one of the great remaining mysteries of biology… the problem [is] that in nearly all forms of life, DNA [carries] genetic information but DNA itself [is] inert and made by a large number of protein enzymes, which [require] not only RNA but also the ribosome to make these enzymes. Moreover, the sugar in DNA, deoxyribose, [is] made from ribose by a large, complicated protein. Nobody [can] understand how the whole system could have started.[7]

I am an eternal optimist. Just this past week, an article entitled “How Science Suggests God May Have Created the Universe” flashed across my newsfeed. This almost sounds like Genesis 1:1: “In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.”

[1] Stephen C. Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, (New York, N. Y. Harper Collins, 2021)

[2] C. S. Lewis, “Two Lectures,” in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper, 209.

[3] Lewis, “Two Lectures,” 209.

[4] Lewis, “Two Lectures,” 209.

[5] Lewis, “Two Lectures,” 209.

[6] Lewis, “Two Lectures,” 211

[7] Venki Ramakrishnan, Gene Machine, (NY: Basic Books, 2018).

Image created by Jared Gould using AI Text to Image, featuring assets from Sergey Novikov (Adobe Stock, Asset ID: 415790935) and a photograph of C.S. Lewis at Magdalen College, 1950, by Levan on Flickr.