In a previous post on common-sense reasoning and the new book by David Klinghoffer, Plato’s Revenge, I tried to show that it is possible, using only common-sense reasoning, to at least understand why biological reproduction poses such a difficult paradox for materialistic science. But for 25 years now I have been making an even simpler common-sense argument relating to the debate between intelligent design and evolution.

Peter Urone in his 2001 physics text, College Physics, writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.” As I have often noted, if you don’t believe in intelligent design, you must accept the materialistic view, prevalent in science today, that everything is the result of unintelligent forces. My recent video, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” based on a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, dramatizes this through reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that if you don’t believe design was involved somewhere in the origin or evolution of life, or the evolution of human intelligence, you essentially believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into computers and spaceships and smart phones.

A Pretty Good Understanding?

Many people are not impressed. They believe science already has a pretty good understanding of how civilizations can arise on barren planets. But we really have no idea how the first life formed on Earth (we are “clueless” according to Rice University chemist James Tour) and my previous post on Plato’s Revenge shows we are clueless as to how living things can pass their current complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation without significant degradation, much less how they evolve even more complex structures. 

Image source: Discovery Institute Press.

How the intelligent, conscious humans who created spaceships and smart phones arose is an especially difficult problem. I tried to highlight the difficulty of explaining human consciousness in a video, “A Summary of the Evidence for Intelligent Design,” by pointing to a picture from my youth and saying: 

Here is a picture of three children in the 1950s. One of them is me, the other two are not. I saw the world from inside one of these children. I saw every picture that entered through his eyes, I heard every sound that entered through his ears, and when he fell on the sidewalk, I felt his pain. How did I end up inside one of these children? … Even if evolutionists could explain how animals with mechanical brains evolved out of the primeval slime, that would leave the most important question still unsolved: How did I get inside one of these animals?

Photo source: Granville Sewell.

 Valuing Simplicity

Near the end of the video “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” I noted:

Mathematicians are trained to value simplicity. When we have a simple, clear argument, and a long, complicated, counterargument, full of unverified points, we accept the simple argument even before we find the errors in the complicated argument. We know the errors must exist and if we look for them, we will eventually find them.

I trust the very simple, clear argument of this video for intelligent design, knowing that there must be errors in the long, complicated counterargument, which is full of unverified points, to put it very mildly.

Since most scientific problems of course require expertise in the relevant fields, many people understandably don’t believe you can reach a conclusion in the ID-evolution debate without carefully studying the biological and biochemical evidence. But if you are not persuaded by my simple arguments, I would urge you to watch videos 3-6 of Michael Kent’s “12 recent discoveries that have changed the debate about design in the universe.” No reasonable person could believe that the astonishing biochemical machinery at work in every cell, described in those videos, could be explained by chance and selection. Are you convinced now, after viewing these videos? What, you thought maybe there was a way the unintelligent forces of nature alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into smart phones? 

The Phenomenon of Life

At this point I hope it is clear that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone cannot “account for all known phenomena” as materialists believe; at least they cannot account for the phenomenon of life. Clearly, something is still missing from the gigantic computer model imagined in my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article and video, but what? Do we have to assume the supernatural intervention of a designer at specific points in the origin and development of life? When, where and how? Mathematical biologist Richard Sternberg, whose thinking is the subject of Plato’s Revenge, sees scientific evidence that, in life, there is design in real time, not just at specific times in the past. 

If we define the supernatural to be that which is forever beyond the ability of science to predict or explain, then according to quantum mechanics there is already a supernatural element in all “natural” phenomena. The equations of quantum mechanics do not describe exactly — even in theory — the effects of the fundamental forces of physics on the fundamental particles of physics. They only provide us with probability distributions. In my imagined computer simulation, I assumed this “supernatural” element in physics was always truly random, and thus suggested we could “perhaps use random number generators to model quantum uncertainties.” Perhaps that was the only flaw in my model.