Evolution
Faith & Science
Intelligent Design
Here’s the Other Common Objection to Intelligent Design — Answered

In an earlier post at Evolution News, “To Reject ID, Here’s What You Have to Believe,” I pointed out that to not believe in intelligent design you essentially have to believe that four unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into computers, spaceships and smart phones.
ID is in fact being taken more and more seriously in the scientific world, but the majority of scientists still hope to explain how the first living things arose by chance chemical reactions and then evolved into intelligent, conscious humans without design. Although the simplest living things today do much more than self-replicate, we with all our advanced technology are still not close even to constructing self-replicating machines ourselves, so we are clueless as to how life could have arisen by pure chance. And Darwin’s implausible theory as to how these first living things evolved into intelligent, conscious humans becomes more implausible with every new biological and biochemical discovery. So why is the alternative of intelligent design not making even faster progress in the scientific world?
Of course, the primary reason most scientists give for rejecting ID is that it is “not science,” an objection that has been discussed often at Evolution News. But there is another reason that ID is not yet popular with this majority that is less often discussed, probably because the objection itself is not scientific, but theological. Nevertheless, it is a powerful objection in many people’s minds: there are many things about the history of life, such as the long periods involved and the similarities between species, which make us think “a Creator would not create things this way,” an argument often made by Darwin himself.
Do You Believe in Evolution?
If you asked me, “Do you believe in evolution?” rather than an easily misunderstood yes or no answer I would reply “I believe in the evolution of life, and the evolution of automobiles, but I don’t believe either could have happened without intelligent design.” As discussed in the second half of the video “Why Evolution Is Different,” this is actually a very informative answer and is very relevant here. We talk about the “evolution” of automobiles, yet we know there was design at every step of this evolution. Humans didn’t create modern, self-driving, cars first. The earliest automobiles were simple, and more complex cars gradually evolved over the years. Well, not that gradually: when major new features appeared, they appeared more or less suddenly. If you line up all the old models, you won’t find a really gradual transition between steam engines and internal combustion engines, for example. Intermediate forms, with incipient internal combustion engines, would have had puzzling new but not yet useful features.
We see the same pattern in the evolution of software, as I highlighted in my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution.” The major advances made during the 45-year evolution of my partial differential equation solver PDE2D all appeared suddenly in new versions. Intermediate stages between my 2D solver and the first version (4.0) able to solve 3D problems would have been full of new, but not yet useful, features and so they existed only in my mind or on paper. If we look at the evolution of any type of human technology, we see this same “jerky” record, with steady advances but large gaps where major new features appear, and smaller gaps where less major new features appear. And if we think about what gradual transitions would have looked like, we can understand why they only existed in the minds and blueprints of the inventors.
The Same Jerky Progress
The evolution of life shows the same jerky progress seen in the evolution of human technologies, for the same reasons. Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (quoted in the Mathematical Intelligencer article) writes, “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.” And again, if you think about what gradual transitions between major groups of animals would have looked like you will understand why we don’t see them in the fossil record. Gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. The development — gradual or not — of new organs through their initial useless stages could only be guided by a process with foresight, able to think ahead and envision their future uses. In other words, a mind.
The first part of the video “Why Evolution Is Different” has further documentation, including a New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting of “nearly all of the leading evolutionists” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, for the claim that major new features generally do not appear gradually in the fossil record and could not be explained by natural selection even if they did. A 2022 article in The Guardian — “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?” — retells the traditional Darwinian story for how eyes evolved and then says
This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading. For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place… And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”
The Similarities Go Deeper
But the similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology go even deeper. With automobiles, if you try to sketch an evolutionary “tree” showing which models evolved from which, you may be able to produce a tree that is generally reasonable. But closer inspection shows that car species do not really fit so nicely into a tree structure: often even the designers might have a hard time identifying the “ancestor” of a particular model because it inherited ideas from several very different automobile lineages. Contrary to Darwinian expectations, and to common belief, the evolutionary “tree” of life is similarly blurred. Here convergence also confuses things greatly: similar new features (e.g., the echolocation abilities of bats and dolphins) and even similar new genes often appear independently in distant branches of the supposed tree of life. Convergence suggests common design rather than common descent: a designer could take a good design and apply it multiple times to distantly related species, while with common descent a species only inherits from its ancestors. In fact, Winston Ewert has shown in a 2018 BIO-Complexity article that rather than a tree, the history of life is better modeled by a dependency graph like we see in the evolution of software!
Only Very Minor Adaptations
So, the similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technologies are actually quite striking. Yet for Darwin and other evolutionists, this is precisely the strongest argument against design. Why? Because even though evolution looks much like the way humans, the only other known intelligent beings in the universe, design things, this is not the way we think God should have designed things. It is so obvious to them that God would not have done things this way that they prefer to attribute it all to an unintelligent process that has never been observed to produce anything new and complex, only very minor adaptations.
Well, why would God create like humans do, through careful planning, testing, and improvements? Now we are getting into theology, of course, where we can never be sure of our answers, but the objection itself is also theological. The most obvious answer is: for the same reasons we do. It seems to me that no matter how intelligent a designer might be, design necessarily requires getting involved in the details, not just waving a magic wand.
If you don’t like that answer, I have another possible theological answer at the end of an essay — “Is God Really Good?”— which primarily addresses a different theological objection to design, and the answer may seem reasonable to you only after you read the entire essay. If neither answer satisfies you, and I’m not entirely satisfied myself, remember what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design. Then maybe you can come up with your own theory.
Editor’s note: See also Robert Shedinger’s article here, “Darwin’s ‘God Wouldn’t Do It This Way’ Argument.”