With all our technology, our understanding, our progress, our super-computers and lifetimes of work, we cannot even come close to creating anything anywhere near as complex as an earthworm.
Yet these super complex organisms, with more complex parts than any super-computer, supposedly came together by chance, without anything intelligent guiding their way.
When that giant, Charles Darwin roamed the earth so long ago, most “scientists” held the view that the universe was infinite and eternal. However, in the middle of the twentieth century, the universe, according to science, got much cozier.
As evidence mounted for the Big Bang hypothesis, the specter of a beginning of the universe, and thus, a finite universe, the limits of time and space ruled out the possibility for infinite chance events.
Without infinite chance events, the highly improbable events associated with the theory of evolution stretch the boundaries of probability, and the imagination, past the breaking point. In light of a finite universe, in light of the impending collapse of naturalism, how should science come to view life?
Enter, Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is the philosophical, theological, scientific, and mathematical theory that all biological organisms are far too well ordered, or, too complex to have been created by any simple unintelligent chance event or series of chance events.
The Intelligent Design hypothesis is premised on what is called specified complexity. Specified complexity uses reason, science and math to detect design in highly improbable, complex, independent patterns.
For example, we detect design at the cellular basis for life because cells are so complex and molecules are so independent. “Cells are machines of stunning complexity. A single cell is like an entire assembly line of molecules, operating in perfect harmony.”
Another indicator that the “universe might have some sort of design was the gradual discovery, starting in the 1950’s of dozens of ‘fine-tuned’ parameters in physics and cosmology, that were seemingly arbitrary values; yet, if those values were varied by even the tiniest amount, the universe simply wouldn’t ‘work’ in anything like the way it actually does.
The Big Bang would have been immediately followed by a big crunch or atoms and molecules could not have formed, or galaxies, stars, planets could not have formed; or carbon and other heavier atoms -all necessary for life- could not have formed. There is a long list of such parameters that have been identified, and the probability of getting the “right” values for all these by blind chance so as to enable life on our planet is so astronomically high that is raises some obvious and weighty questions about whether the cosmos bears the mark of design.
Interestingly, in response to this scientific case for cosmic design most working cosmologists have accepted an ad hoc escape valve called the ‘multi-verse.’ The idea is that there must be an infinite number of universes, each with a random set of physical laws, constants, constraints, etc. Supposedly, we just happen to have “won the universe lottery!” We’re sitting in a single one of these infinite universes that just happens to have all the right conditions that makes life possible. Now, doesn’t it take a lot of “faith” to believe in this multi-verse hypothesis?”
Even is trillions of years went by, I don’t believe that any super-computer, or a pencil for that matter, could come into existence without an intelligent designer. Do you?
Intelligent Design is a far more plausible explanation for the universe and life, if one observes nature, if one practices the scientific method.
Ryan Sorba
-All text in quotes was taken from either page 396 or 397, of Senator Rick Santorum’s book “It Takes a Family.”
