Biochemist Michael Behe has stated:
“A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. In the same way biochemistry has opened up the cell to examine what makes it run and we see that it, too, was designed.”
One needs no probabilistic calculation to infer design before a car or cell. Why — as Behe says — “he immediately realizes that it was designed”? Because such dynamic systems show clear hallmarks of organization. Some of them are:
(1) hierarchy of devices and functions (see my previous post);
(2) hierarchy of tasks and actions, when the system is in operation;
(3) implementation of the control-power paradigm (see here);
(4) implementation of the communication paradigm between sub-systems.
Why organization implies intelligent design? Because chance and necessity cannot create organization in principle.
In fact chance is simply a brute force of un-correlation. Example, in coin tossing any outcome is unrelated to the previous ones. Since organization eminently implies relations, how can a producer of non relations create it? Not only chance can do nothing to organize, even it destroys organization if it enter into the systems.
The same, necessity (aka natural laws) per se cannot be the cause of organization because they don’t potentially contain it. Natural laws are relatively simple mathematical equations. These equations don’t implicitly contain the specifications of the least organized system, as the simple function y=x^2 doesn’t contain, say, Riemann’s zeta function, which is of a far higher order than the quadratic one.
Neither the couple natural laws + randomness can create organization. In fact natural laws are a processor. If randomness provides garbage in input to it this processor necessarily outputs garbage.
The usual objections to this non-probabilistic ID argument are:
Objection #1: “This ID argument may be ok for the machines but it doesn’t apply to biological systems because they self-reproduce”.
Reply: On the contrary, the ID inference applies to biology to greater reason, because self-reproduction needs organization of the highest order. That was mathematically proved by J. von Neumann more than half century ago.
Objection #2: “In biology natural selection creates organization by optimizing random variations”.
Reply: Natural selection is simply an additional post processor in the chain of chance and necessity. I said above they provide garbage, so natural selection cannot produce new organization from random variations, because again “garbage in garbage out”.
Objection #3: “Non-probabilistic ID arguments are not scientific because they aren’t quantitative”.
Reply: Science is full of non quantitative arguments. Even entire fields of mathematics are not quantitative. Also, in general, all quantitative arguments are necessarily based on non quantitative assumptions.
Objection #4: “Simple rules can create complex patterns”.
Reply: These patterns have nothing to do with the least organized system.
Objection #5: “Your arguments are only philosophical assumptions”.
Reply: No, they are pure technical, engineering issues.
Objection #6: “Devices, functions, tasks, control-power, communication are only ideas in your mind”.
Reply: No, they are real things you see with your eyes. You deny evidence.
Objection #7: “Organization is not a well defined concept”.
Reply: It is so well defined and known that all technology is based on it. In industry the descriptions of their internal organization are the starting point for the construction of all engineering products. More, some measures of complexity of a system indeed are based on its technical descriptions.
Objection #8: “Natural laws are able to produce ordered configurations”.
Reply: Organization is fully different and far higher than simple order.
Objection #9: “We know that a car is designed only because we see its designers”.
Reply: If we find a machine on Mars we infer design also without knowing its designers.
Objection #10: “Organization makes sense only if you can measure it”.
Reply: No, precise quantitative measures are only an add-on for a design inference in most cases. Similarly, to say that a woman is very beautiful I don’t need to measure her body exactly. It is true — as Norbert Wiener said — that “The amount of information in a system is a measure of its organization degree” but recognition of organization is possible also without precise measures of the amount of information (see here).