Intelligent Design Icon Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design in Explosions?

Old Faithful.jpg

Design advocates need pithy illustrations to communicate ID principles to lay people. The tried-and-true Mt. Rushmore example is good, but there are many more you can add to your arsenal. We’ve shown how to do it with a Rubik’s Cube or a geoglyph. But explosions? Can we infer design in things that go bang? Absolutely. It’s all about goal and control.

Give a round of applause, for example, if you think this is one of the most beautiful fireworks shows you’ve ever seen:

Alas, we regret to inform you it’s fake. It’s a simulation someone made on his computer. As you will see, though, it doesn’t ruin the point of the story.

After enjoying your next fireworks show, ask your friends, “What’s the difference between fireworks and volcanoes?” They might think you’re telling a joke, but this is serious fun. The answer is not as intuitively obvious as it sounds.

Beauty is not the answer. Some people find volcanic eruptions beautiful. They travel thousands of miles to Hawaii to watch Kilauea, or to Italy to watch Vesuvius. Photographers will risk their lives to capture the awesome power of volcanic eruptions, especially the stunning fireworks at night. Sometimes the glowing fountains lighting up the clouds of smoke are accompanied by lightning — electrical explosions in the atmosphere.

Moreover, not all intelligently designed explosions are beautiful. Some are downright ugly, like pipe bombs and IEDs built to terrorize people. It is not the role of ID theory to judge morality. Like the coroner deciding if the victim was intentionally killed or died of natural causes, ID can only answer one question: designed or not designed? Sadly, pipe bombs are constructed for a purpose, so the ID theorist must call them products of intelligent design.

Now let’s consider the case where a pyrotechnics expert is running a show, but an accident happens, and all the fireworks blow up at once. That happened in California a couple of years ago.

Has your kid ever done this to your house?

While we can infer fireworks are designed for a purpose, the designer can lose control of the situation. Some terrorists have lost their lives the same way, when their bombs detonated prematurely. Whether that constitutes karmic justice is beyond the capabilities of ID theory.

So far, we’ve seen that beauty, morality, and purpose are not enough to make a robust design inference. Random events can turn design into non-design. To discern that the California disaster was an accident and not a plan, we need to see control. Even then — and this is where ID can miss a false negative — how sure can we be that the operator in a disastrous fireworks show is not a terrorist pretending to be a pyrotechnician, but rigging the rockets to hurt the audience? The parallels to 9/11 come to mind; many thought the first plane was an accident, but they quickly inferred terrorism when the second plane exploded into the other tower. ID theory is robust against a false positive (calling something designed when it isn’t) but not necessarily against a false negative.

Back to our volcano. As beautiful as it is, there is no guidance or control. It just happens. It can all be explained by natural laws. Some people may find the eruption beautiful; others will decide it is terrifying, especially if a pyroclastic flow is headed their way. Most fireworks shows, though, are designed to please a crowd with guided choreography that requires planning and control of all that explosive power. That is no less true when a programmer designs a fake show with FWSim software. Perhaps you were one of the few who suspected a simulation when you sensed some of the explosions violated the laws of physics. Real or fake, good fireworks shows are intelligently designed.

You can think of other examples. Here’s one. Huge crowds of people travel to see the following two explosive water shows. What’s the difference?

Old Faithful geyser vs. the synchronized fountains of the Bellagio Hotel:

So there’s a lot to think about in our simple question, “What’s the difference between volcanoes and fireworks?” Explosions can be natural, or they can be intelligently designed for a purpose. You have to understand ID theory to answer the question; it’s not always obvious. Now, if an orchestra conductor could command a volcano to respond on cue to Beethoven’s Fifth, or if natural laws routinely caused the Bellagio’s synchronized water ballets to pop up randomly in Nevada deserts, we would have to infer things differently.

Try your design inference skills on these explosions:

  • Building demolitions

  • Solar flares

  • Supernovas

  • Atomic bombs

  • The Big Bang (trick question)

This leads to a further consideration. Some living things use highly controlled explosions for a purpose. What about them?

  • Bombardier beetles mix two explosive chemicals in specialized chambers in their abdomens that, when mixed with an activator, send a controlled explosion out their rear ends. They can steer the explosion and its intensity to deter predators. The pulsed jets overcome Newton’s third law (action/reaction) so that the explosions don’t rocket the beetle forward.

  • Electric eels can send focused electrical shocks toward their prey to immobilize them.

  • Archer fish can spit bugs off of twigs five feet above the water, using tightly focused bursts of water.

  • Many plants use explosive forces generated by water tension to send their seeds flying through the air. This improves distribution of the seeds away from the parent plant.

Why is it fair to infer design in these cases, but not the volcano or Old Faithful? For one, we see purpose; for another, we see control; and most important, we observe that each of the structures is produced by irreducibly complex molecular machines guided by information-rich genetic codes. From our uniform experience, we know that such things are designed: “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” That’s a sentence worth memorizing.

Finally, we can use the design filter in analyzing another explosive event — the Cambrian explosion. Even with a figurative rather than literal explosion, you can make a valid design inference. As Stephen Meyer makes clear in Darwin’s Doubt, a design inference is warranted when we see the abrupt appearance of complex body plans in a geologically “explosive” time frame. That explosion was no natural happenstance like a volcano; it was a fireworks show with implications that generate philosophical fireworks to this day.

Image: Old Faithful geyser, Yellowstone National Park.

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