Professor Granville Sewell appeals to common sense and the limitations of natural forces to argue the obvious: “Unintelligent forces cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones.” One who disbelieves in intelligent design, however, has to accept the notion that hydrogen gas, given enough time in our universe will be converted by the four forces of nature into every technological innovation ever seen. The unguided process can be summarized as follows: hydrogen gas coalesces by gravitational contraction into stars, that produce heavier elements via nuclear fusion, that get exploded into space during supernovae, that become part of earth-like planets, where millions of atoms arrange themselves by the blind, push-pull action of electric forces into complex, functional cells, that mutate by accident into humans who invent and produce technology and then attribute it all to chance.
The scientific establishment is slowly beginning to allow scientists who believe in intelligent design to have a platform. Why? It may be because the theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many realities that theories based on chance do not.
Perhaps the simplest and best argument for intelligent design is to clearly state what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, as I did in my book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Peter Urone, in his physics text College Physics, writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.”
This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design: that the origin and evolution of life, and the evolution of human consciousness and intelligence, are due entirely to a few unintelligent forces of physics. Thus you must believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into computers and science texts and jet airplanes and nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.
These four unintelligent forces of physics may indeed explain everything that has happened on other planets, but let us look at three essential elements of our human existence and examine whether the currently believed origin theory can explain them.
1. The Origin of Life
To appreciate that we still have no idea how the first living things arose, you only have to realize that with all our advanced technology we are still not close to designing any type of self-replicating machine; that is still pure science fiction. We can only create machines that create other machines, but no machine that can make a copy of itself.
Maybe human engineers will someday construct a self-replicating machine. But if they do…it will not show that life could have arisen through natural processes. It will only have shown that it could have arisen through design.
2. The Origin of Advanced Life Forms
The idea that it could even be remotely plausible that random mutations could produce major improvements relies completely on the observed but inexplicable fact that, while they are awaiting rare favorable mutations, living species are able to preserve their complex structures and pass them on to their descendants without significant degradation. We are so used to seeing this happen that we don’t appreciate how astonishing it really is.
Also, here we have not even discussed what is generally considered to be the main problem with Darwinism: its inability to explain the appearance of major new, irreducibly complex features that consistently appear suddenly in the fossil record. (I discussed this problem in my article “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” and in the second part of my video “Why Evolution is Different.”)
3. The Origin of Human Intelligence and Consciousness
But even if they could explain how animals with mechanical brains evolved out of the primeval slime, that would leave the most important question — the one evolutionists never seem to even wonder about — still unsolved: How did I get inside one of these animals?
The argument for intelligent design could not be simpler or clearer: Unintelligent forces alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones, and any attempt to explain how they can must fail somewhere because they obviously can’t. Perhaps this is the best way to understand why explanations without design will never work, and why science may finally be starting to recognize this.
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