I want to demonstrate the logic behind why speculating that an intelligent agent created the universe is not an argument from ignorance or the God of the Gaps fallacy.  It just turns out that intelligent designers have an additional premise that qualifies it as an argument for the best explanation.  Physicists do the same when they posit an entity to explain observed phenomena.  This does not mean that I believe this hypothesis to be true.  Why is this important then?  Because we will want to be informed when arguing with an ID.  And for those who think that I may be giving credence to Intelligent Designer's arguments, I would not be threatened by any of this.

Abductive Reasoning

We have only two ways of determining what is true or not: by reasoning or observation.  What about the scientific method?  It involves both reasoning and observation, as well as experimentation, hypothesis formation, verification, and prediction.  There are different types of reasoning that we use when we try to establish something as true or likely to be true, such as deductive and inductive reasoning.  But what if we cannot directly observe something?  If we cannot directly observe something, we use abductive reasoning to determine the probability that something is true or not.  Detectives who work a murder case use this type of reasoning, as well as archeologists and many others.  But everything is circumstantial because we cannot directly observe what we are hypothesizing.  Here is some abductive reasoning that was used, probably often used, for a suspect who murdered his wife.

  • Observations (Evidence): We notice that the suspect's house was meticulously cleaned, possibly to hide evidence.
  • Expectation (Prediction): If someone were concealing a murder, then we would expect them to attempt to hide the evidence.
  • Conclusion (Hypothesis): There is reason to suspect that this individual murdered his wife.

This evidence, of course, is neither strong nor conclusive.  But that's the best we can do with abductive reasoning.  If we had more evidence to corroborate our hypothesis, it would become stronger.  To make it even stronger, we can compare it to the explanatory power of other competing hypotheses.  When the best one wins, then we call this enhancement argument the best explanation. The best hypothesis must be sufficient to cause the phenomena of interest compared to other hypotheses and have causal adequacy.  The phenomenon of interest for the murder is not the evidence of a coverup but what can be inferred from it.  That is, hiding evidence in itself does not cause murder, but from our everyday experiences, we know that people hide things for a reason.

Scientists' Reasoning

Stephen Meyer provides a few examples of scientists employing this type of reasoning before presenting his argument.  Here is how Richard Dawkins' evidence and others would appear when formalized to fit abductive reasoning.  We should "get" the logic after this.

Richard Dawkins:

  • "Logic: If "blind, pitiless" matter and energy rather than a Mind is the prime reality from which all else originated, then we would expect no evidence of intelligent design in life and the universe, rather only evidence of apparent design."
  • "Data: Life and the universe do not exhibit evidence of actual design, only apparent design.
  • Conclusion: We have reason to believe that life and the universe are the product of blind materialistic forces.

Cosmologists:

  • Observations (Evidence): There is background radiation and a value of the mass density of the universe.
  • Expectation (Prediction): If there were a beginning, such as the Big Bang, then we would expect to see evidence of it.
  • Conclusion (Hypothesis): There is reason to suspect that the Big Bang started the universe.
  • Competing Hypotheses: In light of this evidence, the steady-state and oscillating-universe models lack causal adequacy.

Charles Darwin:

  • Observations (Evidence): There are homologous structures, transitional fossils, and evolution recapitulating itself, among other evidence.
  • Expectation (Prediction):  If life evolved, then we would expect to see evidence of this in the fossil record, embryology, etc.
  • Conclusion (Hypothesis): All life forms came from a common descendent.
  • Competing Hypotheses: God, Lakmarck's theory, etc.

Intelligent Designers' Reasoning 

Intelligent designers are essentially doing, in one limited respect, what Charles Darwin did.  Darwin examined his everyday experiences and deduced that since artificial selection can rapidly produce changes in a species, natural selection with random mutation can do even more.  Natural selection requires time, making this reasoning convincing, considering the millions of years it has to work with.  Meyer says that within our everyday experiences, we know that it takes an intelligent agent to create the sophisticated things we encounter, aside from snowflakes.  This mode of thought makes up the first premise, and this is why it is not a God of the gaps fallacy.  So far, I agree with Meyer.  This still does not mean that an intelligent agent is behind it all.

  • Premise 1: Our everyday uniform experiences teach us that any system that has a function requires design inputs, such as digital code and boundary conditions, from an intelligent agent.  Since this is true, we would expect to find a universe that requires fine-tuning (boundary conditions) and life forms that require a digital code (DNA base pairs) to exist and function.
  • Premise 2:  We observe that the world is finely tuned with physical laws, constants, and parameters, and all of life requires digital code in the form of DNA base pairs.
  • Conclusion:  We have reason to think that an intelligent agent acted to design the universe and life forms.

A God of the gaps fallacy would preclude premise one and jump from premise two to the conclusion. Does this additional premise prevent ID from being a God of the gaps fallacy?  In the framework of arguments, it does. This is why I said the argument is not that bad because it obeys a certain logic.  But for all practical purposes, they are still invoking a designer into the argument, which resembles a God of the gaps fallacy in every other respect. Although an intelligent agent could be the cause, we would have to compare this causal hypothesis to others.  It cannot, however, be a theist God, namely the Judeo-Christian version, because that worldview is false through and through.  I am not going to debunk Christianity here; others have done it for us.

My purpose is not to critique ID's argument but to explain it. What makes this argument strong, according to Meyer, is that it is an argument for the best explanation because it has causal adequacy.  It is only an argument for the best explanation because the competing hypotheses from science have failed to be causally adequate. That is, they fail to be likely candidates for the causes of how the information in DNA formed, along with an explanation for why the universe appears to be finely tuned with parameters.  Meyer raises the point that all the RNA experiments, which could reveal the origin of information in DNA, have thus far been plagued by setups that require input from an intelligent agent, such as artificial conditions.  He also points out that the information conveyed by DNA cannot, in principle, be described by physics or chemistry.  I would need to hear what biologists say about this.

Since natural laws describe situations in which specific outcomes follow specific conditions by necessity, they neither generate nor dictate the generation of new information. Indeed, to the extent a sequence of symbols or a series of events results from a predictable law-bound process, the information content of the sequence will be limited or effaced by redundancy. Thus, natural laws cannot, in principle, generate or explain the origin of information, whether specified or otherwise. [1]

Can't Get Something from Nothing

The argument above dealt with the creation of lifeform and the appearance of the fine-tuning of the universe.  What about the beginning of the universe?  If there was a beginning, then how could something come from nothing?  The problem that science faces is that it defines naturalism as a closed system of cause and effect that prevents the supernatural from intervening.  This was never a problem, of course, and turns out to be a very real and natural metaphysics.  According to Stephen Meyer, the problem arose when atheists recognized that there was more evidence in favor of the universe having a beginning than simply existing from all eternity.  Meyer asserts that there must be a cause for the beginning of the universe, but naturalism is insufficient to explain what it is.

What caused the whole of nature or the physical universe itself to come into existence?  All materialistic theories of the origin of the material universe face a fundamental problem, given the evidence we have of a cosmic beginning. Before matter and energy exist, they cannot cause or be invoked to explain the origin of the material universe. Instead, positing a materialistic process to explain the origin of matter and energy assumes the existence of the very entities—matter and energy—the origin of which materialists need to explain. No truly materialistic explanation can close this particular causal discontinuity or gap—the gap between either nothing or a preexisting immaterial or mathematical reality, on the one hand, and a material universe, on the other. [1]

Sean Carrol, a professor of natural philosophy who is an atheist, says that "naturalism can offer no cause of the universe, but it may 'just be,' "that is, it requires no causal explanation.  But this would violate the scientific assumption that "whatever begins to exist must have a cause."  I do not pretend to speculate on how something can come from nothing.  That is not my aim in the post.  It is to show the logic behind ID's hypothesis.  There is more to their logic as well.  For example, Meyer brings up how the current hypotheses offered by atheists, such as the physicist Laurance Krauss, are contrived because they gerrymander the results.  This means that the models used to explain the origin of the universe require initial conditions and assumptions to function.  In other words, they know what fudge factors are needed to get the results they would like.  I haven't explored Krauss's theory in depth, but I am familiar with how models work and don't doubt it (3).  Perhaps this is the best science can do right now, which is OK.

Notes

1) I intentionally exclude intelligent design reasoning from the science category because it does not constitute science.  Formulating a hypothesis from an armchair may qualify as abductive reasoning, which science employs, but in every other respect, Intelligent Design is not science and only hinders scientific progress.  We also know that their ultimate goal is to sneak a theist God in, namely a Judeo-Christian God.  In other words, I am doing my best to be neutral when analyzing their arguments, but I cannot qualify intelligent design as science.  Stephen Meyer would argue that this is due to my bias towards metaphysical naturalism.  And I would partly agree.  To this, I would say that naturalism as a worldview is true, and it just works.  Theism as a worldview, especially the Judeo-Christian version, fails on multiple accounts.  No, I don't have time for a detailed explanation.  I leave this task to other experts.

2) I have always thought of metaphysics as an abstract philosophical concept with no overlap with science.  But science deals with metaphysical questions all the time.  Metaphysics literally means "what is real" and deals with questions about "being" and "existence."  An example of a metaphysical question is if a copper wire conducts an accelerating charge that produces an electromagnetic field, how do we know the field is real?  We use abductive reasoning to say that if it were real, we would expect it to have x, y, and z effects.  Metaphysics may take this further and ask if the EM field qualifies as being "real." For our purposes, we can adopt an instrumentalist approach, stating that if we can predict its behavior, then it is considered authentic.  We will use this fact later on.

3) This does not mean that they are not doing science.  Problems require assumptions to be made and conditions to be set.  We do not even have to be cosmologists to realize that replicating a period billions of years ago will inevitably require some assumptions to be made.  If they make the model unrealistic, then so be it because they may still provide insight into the nature of the problem.   As more knowledge is gained, then the better our models will be.

References

[1] Return of the God Hypothesis.  Stephen Meyer.