Lest anyone think that discussion of what Doug Axe calls the universal design intuition dates back only as far as the modern ID movement, James Gallant supplies some relevant historical references (“Modernity and metaphysics“). He writes in The Fortnightly Review: The New Series — a quaint and scholarly blog attempting to revive the famous 19th-century English magazine. The publication is rather what you would expect of several hoary-haired professors sitting around in overstuffed leather chairs, smoking cigars, and pontificating. Gallant’s article is no exception.

From Etienne Gilson to Alfred North Whitehead to Immanuel Kant, he catalogues a series of arguments for design in nature. Although quite a few of his citations are to the writings of natural theologians (and thus to a divine designer), many talk simply about mind and thus overlap with ID, which cannot determine whether design is from a natural or supernatural source. Gallant writes:

In natural theological musings, the purposive workings of the Divine Mind are likened to those of the human mind. The character Philo in David Hume’s eighteenth century “Dialogue on Natural Religion” complains about this, since human ideas “reach no further than our experience,” and “we have no experience of divine attributes and operations.” Philo grants that the universe probably did arise “from something like design,” but to say more than that on the subject would require “the utmost license of fancy.” But Neo-Thomist Etienne Gilson asks in God and Philosophy (1941) why we should assume that a projection of our own designing, purposive mentality onto Nature is erroneous since our mentality is itself in Nature. Why suppose that it exists to mislead understanding rather than guide it?

For anyone not predisposed to skepticism there is a good deal in Nature to suggest design. Alfred North Whitehead in Modes of Thought (1938) notes, as Plato and Aristotle had, the “large-scale preservation of identities amid minor changes” — people, squirrels, seeds, bananas, apple trees, stones. Swedenborg in The Soul, or Rational Psychology remarked that that there “is no entity and no substance in the universe without form; that it is anything, and that it is such as it is, is owing wholly to form.” The existence and perpetuation of distinct forms, and the relations among them, suggests intelligent design.

Kant and Darwin had both observed that when one studies the relationships of parts to wholes in living beings, one inevitably thinks in terms of design and purpose. As far as they were concerned that was just the way the human mind works, not a revelation of metaphysical reality. Darwin, though, had his metaphysical moments. The Duke of Argyll once remarked to him that he found it impossible to contemplate certain “wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in Nature” without envisioning them as expressions of Mind. Darwin responded with a haunted look before saying, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force, but at other times” — he shook his head vaguely — “it goes away.”

Interestingly, this conversation with the Duke of Argyll took place in the last year of Darwin’s life.

Gallant correctly explains that we deduce design because nature exhibits properties we know to come only from intelligence, and because species possess distinct forms. The latter we would not necessarily expect from biology if it arose just from blind shuffling. However, he misses that the design inference is scientific.

But there is really no way to get from science to natural theology — or to metaphysics of any kind — without taking seriously questions scientists, qua scientists, have no occasion to ask, and for which there are no empirical answers. [Phillip] Clayton [professor at Claremont School of Theology] describes many of the currently fashionable arguments against theism advanced by scientist-atheists like Richard Dawkins as “disappointing, even embarrassing, to those who know anything of the philosophical literature.” Alternatives to the idea of cosmic design popular among scientists have been principles like “blind force,” “chance,” and “sudden variation.” Gilson saw these as revealing only a preference for “a complete absence of intelligibility to…nonscientific intelligibility” — and what might seem unintelligible if only scientific explanations are allowed will not necessarily seem that way otherwise. But if one clings to the idea that only scientific explanations are acceptable, even the hypothesis of an aboriginal “Big Bang” — for which there is a scientific basis, and which the Catholic Church has assimilated to the dogma of Creation — may not seem a particularly solemn or mysterious event. The flippancy of the term “Big Bang” suggests accident rather than design, maybe even a practical joke. When Sky and Telescope magazine asked its readers in 1978 to propose other names for the hypothesized universe-generating explosion, among the entries was, “What Happens If I Press This Button?” [brackets added]

In The Mysterious Universe (a popular book of the 1930s), Sir James Jeans mentions the speculation first advanced in the eighteenth century that the solar system originated when a wandering star approached the sun closely enough to raise a great tidal wave on its surface. Fragments of the sun that split away cooled to form planets. What bothered Gilson was what Jeans, after describing this speculation, went on to say: unlikely as it might seem that life would have emerged on planet Earth, “into such a universe we have stumbled, if not exactly by mistake, at least as the result of what may properly be described as an accident.” This was “the surprising manner in which, so far as science can at present inform us, we came into being.”

That would certainly be surprising, Gilson agreed, but Jeans’ remark seemed an egregious example of the scientific preference for “a complete absence of intelligibility to…nonscientific intelligibility,” and as a speculation about how life forms emerged on earth less plausible, a priori, than supposing the operation of Mind.

Intelligent design, true, has both philosophical and scientific aspects (as does Darwinian evolution). In his new book, Undeniable, Douglas Axe defines the universal design intuition this way: “Tasks that we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.” Now, this is just an intuition — but it is backed up by data.

So how does the science work? Intelligent design theorists utilize the scientific method to come to their conclusions: Scientists begin by observing what human intelligence creates — namely, information that is both complex (unlikely) and specified (matches a given pattern). Next, these scientists analyze natural objects to see if they contain these elements. Those objects suspected to exhibit design are subjected to tests to see if they really do contain complex and specified information (for example, genetic knockout tests demonstrate the irreducibly complexity of the bacterial flagellum). Finally, scientists conclude that items displaying specified complexity are products of intelligent design. These investigations have resulted in numerous scientific articles in favor of intelligent design.

Intelligent design proponents often point to DNA as a product of design. They note examples of human-created code — computer code, for instance — which are extremely complex and yet convey a specific message. Finding this same type of digital code (nucleotide bases coding for a sequence of amino acids for a specific three-dimensional, functional protein) in the cell, scientists infer design. Douglas Axe has shown that only about one in 10⁷⁴ amino acid sequences produces a functional protein fold, demonstrating that DNA code is extremely specified.

Though this science is new, the argument for intelligent design is not. In fact, Cicero wrote, “Can any sane person believe that all this array of stars and this vast celestial adornment could have been created out of atoms rushing to and fro fortuitously and at random? Or could any other being devoid of intelligence and reason have created them?” Darwin himself sought to overcome his own design intuition. A century and a half later, the evidence confirming that intuition keeps getting stronger.

Image: Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.