Over at BioLogos, biologist Kathryn Applegate has offered what has to be one of the more creative alternatives to the intelligent design of the bacterial flagellum: Magic. I’m not kidding. Applegate readily concedes biochemist Michael Behe‘s point that the flagellum “looks and functions just like the outboard motor, a machine designed by intelligent human engineers. So conspicuous is the resemblance that it seems perfectly logical to infer a Designer for the flagellum.” But, wait, she says: “The bacterial flagellum may look like an outboard motor, but there is at least one profound difference: the flagellum assembles spontaneously, without the help of any conscious agent.” (emphasis added) 

Acknowledging that “the self-assembly of such a complex machine almost defies the imagination,” Dr. Applegate assures her readers that this is not really a problem because “Natural forces work ‘like magic.” Presto, chango, something appears!

Now Dr. Applegate admits that in our common experience things don’t just magically self-assemble without any guiding intelligence. “We’ve all put together toys, furniture, or appliances; even the simplest designs require conscious coordination of materials, tools, and assembly instructions (and even then there’s no guarantee that we get it right!).” However, Dr. Applegate assures us that with nature things are different. “It is tempting to think the spontaneous formation of so complex a machine is ‘guided,’ whether by a Mind or some ‘life force’ but we know that the bacterial flagellum, like countless other machines in the cell, assembles and functions automatically according to known natural laws. No intelligence required.” (emphasis added)

One wonders whether Dr. Applegate draws the same conclusion every time she opens a spreadsheet program and discovers that it “magically” adds and subtracts sums—no intelligence required. Or when her word processing program “magically” checks the grammar and spelling of her blog posts—no intelligence required. One further wonders whether Dr. Applegate has ever visited a modern assembly line, where robotic equipment “magically” assembles any number of amazing products—no intelligence required.

Of course, intelligence is required for each of these actions; the intelligence simply happens to be pre-programmed into the computer operations and assembly instructions. Similarly, the so-called magical assembly of the bacterial flagellum requires massive amounts of genetic information encoded in DNA, and as Stephen Meyer has persuasively argued in Signature in the Cell, that information cannot be accounted for simply as the product of a blind physical law. It requires intelligence.

In the words of C.S. Lewis’s admirable Prof. Kirke, “Logic! Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”