What will it take for intelligent design to be recognized as a legitimate mode of inquiry in science? First, scientists need to lose their insistence on strict materialism. Materialists claim there is nothing immaterial. We cannot measure it; therefore it is not real. I submit, if you can’t detect it, you can neither prove nor disprove its existence. Not by direct measurement, anyway.
But you can detect the effects that a non-material intelligence produces. We have considerable experience with detecting the signs of intelligence. We can infer the presence of an intelligent agent in forensics. It was the butler with the candle stick in the kitchen! A light-hearted example, but we see it played out in courtrooms across the nation every day.
We also see it in paleoanthropology. Is this flaked rock the product of intelligence or not? When did the first signs of agriculture appear? What constitutes the genuine use of controlled regular fire (i.e. hearths)?
The disciplines of forensics and paleoanthropology cannot conduct controlled repeatable experiments in the same way a molecular biologist can. A molecular biologist can control all known variables. A forensic scientist cannot. He has to consider all the possibilities and then decide which explanation fits the data best. A paleoanthropologist has to examine the data that remains after tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and consider what options are possible. Have other remains been found in the area? Do the fossils resemble those? If they are unique, are there diagnostic bones present that might shed light on the fossil’s likely origin or uniqueness?
Then both disciplines must make an inference to the best explanation. The husband was seen at the scene of the crime, his fingerprints were on the gun that shot his wife, and she was known to be having an affair. The man involved in the affair was in Omaha the night she was killed and he was in love with her. The best explanation? Of course, a good detective would keep looking. The husband claims he was framed.
You get the idea.
So, billions of years ago, a genetic code was established, that needed a stable substrate to store the information, then a way to copy the information, and a way to convert the information into a molecular form that could adopt thousands of shapes and catalyze thousands of different chemical reactions.
Even better, if the information-bearing code was very stable, but could specify a variety of the subunits from which the chemically reactive molecules were made. Even better than that, the intermediary molecules were unstable and degraded quickly, so any copies of the information would not hang around.
Let’s give these things the names scientists have assigned them. The substrate that stores information is DNA, and it is composed of four different nucleotides, A, C, T, and G. These nucleotides can be arranged in any order. The stuff the chemically reactive molecules (called proteins) are made of are amino acids, and there are about 20. Mathematically the code is optimal if the nucleotide codons are 3 nucleotides long. If the code was 4 or 5 nucleotides long, there would be more possible codons than are needed, and the genes would be much longer. 4 nucleotides using 3 nucleotide codons is 64 possibilities (roughly 3 codons for each amino acid and 3 stop codons)
What do we call the intermediary molecule that carries information from DNA to protein? We call it messenger RNA. And how does the messenger RNA get converted into protein? For that, we need a complex molecular machine made of proteins and RNAs called a ribosome, and we need transfer RNAs to match the RNA code with the right amino acids. And we need proteins called tRNA synthetases to make the transfer RNA.
Got that? Oh, and as far as anyone can tell the code used in almost all cells is the optimal code. The best possible code. Yet it is ancient and is sometimes referred to as a frozen accident. That is because once the code was established it would be nearly impossible to change. Having multiple codes at the same time would lead to chaos. There would be little possibility of trial and error. A one-off perfect code?
Taking into account the intricacies of the genetic code, its perfection, and the inference to the best explanation that we referred to earlier, which explanation is best?
random trial and error
intelligent design
This is not God of the gaps. Intelligent design is a logical inference to the best explanation. That is, provided an immaterial, ancient, very powerful, intelligent agent is not ruled out.
A lot of this language is over my head but I really appreciate this idea. I love how deeper understanding of nature/science usually makes the existence of God *more* likely, not less.