Naturalism and supernaturalism

Response to a Quora Question

3/16/2022

Anil Mitra

link to my website

Contents

Introduction

The question

Response

Comment

Response to comment

Introduction

The following question appeared on Quora—”Do we see evidence of intelligent design in the human body? How can something that shows clear evidence of intelligent design come by chance? (quora.com)“.

What follows is (i) my response, (ii) a comment, and (iii) my response to the comment.

The question

Do we see evidence of intelligent design in the human body? How can something that shows clear evidence of intelligent design come by chance? (quora.com)

Response

Evidence is (i) perceived (direct) or (ii) inferred (indirect).

We don’t see an agent designing or building our bodies, so direct evidence is out.

Can we infer that there must have been a designer? Well, the body has good apparent design but it’s not perfect. So a designer could not have been perfectly intelligent. The Christian God is out because it’s supposed to be perfect. So maybe you will argue “where there’s designer, there must be a designer”.

The problem with that argument is with the word “must”. You can only use the word must for an explanation if it is a valid explanation and there is no other possible explanation. Before we understood evolution we might have thought that because we do not know any other possible explanation of apparent design, there is none. It’s not an entirely unreasonable error—we often confuse our ignorance with reality. But it is an error—not knowing an alternate does not mean that there isn’t one.

But we now know there is another explanation. And it isn’t chance. It is evolution and the mechanism of evolution was first stated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. The mechanism is that genetic material has small changes which result in changes in the form of the organism. If the changes are beneficial, they confer better ability to live and reproduce and the changes spread in the population. This was contested in the beginning but subsequently the kinks were worked out by around 1940 and the objections addressed. That includes the problems of evolution of complex organs and organisms. Chance is not a factor—when evolutionary biologists and popular writers use the word ‘chance’ they mean that the small changes (mutations and recombination) themselves show no preference for improvement. Some are advantageous, some neutral, some ‘deleterious’. Selection (survival and spreading of the advantageous genes), which is not chance or random, is how the advantageous spread through a population.

Are we 100% logically sure in the sense of formal deductive logic? No theory is sure in that sense. But the conceptual consistency and explanatory success are so strong that we are practically sure that evolution is the mechanism of how life forms emerge and change. And it’s not about chance.

Comment

(Chidi Okezie)

Thank you so much for this well written response. My worry though is the fact that while I do agree that from a human standpoint, there might be what could be termed as “flaws” in the design and we thus eliminate an “intelligent designer”, could it be that its just because we do not understand why the “designer” put in what looks like a “flaw” to us? When you see a beautifully designed Mercedes Benz, we do not immediately conclude that it does have a designer simply because we expected a key hole for an ignition rather than a button, or maybe the spare tire is place somewhere else than where we would reasonably expect it to be. Do we consider the fact that the Manufacturer could well have a solid reason why certain things are exactly how they are? Or are the so called “flaws” so incurably flawed, that there is no possible explanation rather than to reject the idea of a designer or manufacturer and conclude that the Mercedes somehow coupled itself up over millions of years?

The world and indeed the Universe just seems too intricately complex to have just attained this level of immense complexity through aeons of “random selection”.

Response to comment

In turn, thank you for your well thought out response, which, unlike many other comments, is reasonable and respectful.

Interestingly, I had thought of the idea that what seems like a flaw to us, is not a flaw. But I thought to not put it in my answer because I did not think it would be well received by naturalists and would be already known to others.

In the first place, evolution and the theory of evolution do not recognize the concept of ‘flaw’. Human beings look at the world, we have values—we would like life for everyone to be decent, we do not like killing and so on—and we measure perfection in those terms. As you say, what we see as flaws may not be flaws from the point of view of a more intelligent designer. But neither are they flaws from a strict evolutionary account. In population genetics there are selected vs de-selected genes and organism-types and (to repeat myself) it is we, in our all-too-human subjective state that assign good / bad and flaw / perfect judgments.

At this level, i.e., thus far in what I say, the world could, with equal rationality, be naturally formed (e.g., evolution) and more than naturally formed, e.g., a very if not perfect designer, named God.

Now, you argue that the Universe seems to intricately complex to have been arrived at by random selection. The theory of evolution does not, strictly, talk of random-selection. As I said in my answer, the variations themselves show no preference for survival (in populations). In fact, most of them are ‘bad’. But the good ones propagate while the bad ones do not (because the ‘good’ organisms survive to procreate). Now the question is “can that process really produce the intricate complexity, the beauty, the horror-which-is-but-our-interpretation…” ? Just as we may not understand the purpose of an intelligent designer, also we may not understand the intricacies of variation and selection. I find, for example, that there are reasonable explanations of the origin of complex eyes. It is true that half an eye is not functional as a full eye (half being useless). But the actual process may be a series of stages each functional in itself and it is the organ and the function that evolve together.

What is more, the theory of evolution explains so much that we could not explain without it. Once explained, the individual who prefers the ‘God’ explanation could say—but that could be God. However, it is evolutionary explanation that is the driving force and that is part of what makes me think that, in our world, evolution reigns.

Thus far, I have presented only the standard account in my words.

I happen to further hold—and this is my thinking, not standard—that while naturalistic explanation of our world (science) has truth and validity, it has not revealed the entire picture of the universe. For, science is a fit to the known; but we do not know what is beyond the known; and what lies beyond could be limitlessly (e.g., infinitely greater, than what we see in science). What is that infinite greatness? The limit is the realm of possibility. Possibility in what sense? The most inclusive sense is ‘logical possibility’, i.e., that, which if it does not hold, cannot obtain in any conceivable world (i.e., conceivable even by a perfect intelligence). Does the universe achieve that level of limitlessness? How can the question be answered? What are its implications? What are the possibilities of beings—limited and limitless—in that universe? What is the meaning of ‘god’ in that universe and what is our relation to that God? I have attempted to answer these questions and you can find my tentative answers beginning here—The essential way of being (horizons-2000.org).

Thanks for reading my answer and this rather long comment.