Who designed the intelligent designer?

By: William Mulgrew

Posted: 2/16/07

Some oppose intelligent design because it doesn't explain who designed the intelligent designer. It's a metaphysical objection. It demands an answer that scientific observation, analysis and experimentation cannot provide. It presupposes that the Intelligent Designer was designed or had to be designed, and that it was designed by a "who" - some person or sentient being. Whether it's a god or gods, space aliens, or a time traveler who went back in time to create life, ID simply does not speculate on that question.

In the past, it was religious theists who suppressed scientific pursuits because they didn't conform to their beliefs. Now the tables have turned. Opponents want to suppress ID because it doesn't conform to their materialist beliefs. Your religious views don't dictate what's taught or not taught in the science classroom. I'm sorry that ID makes light of scientific evidence in a way that puts atheists in an uncomfortable position, but please don't force your materialist religion on us.

It's all part of that wonderful t-word I hear so often, tolerance. The religious discomfort that life originated naturalistically is something theists learned to tolerate in the classroom for almost a century. Welcome to the club.

Sarcasm aside, if religious implications are the standard by which we allow or disallow origin-of-life subject matter in the classroom, then the Big Bang simply has to go.

Science has proved that the universe is not eternal. It has a beginning, what scientists call the "Big Bang."

Einstein reached this conclusion with his Theory of Relativity, which showed that time, space and matter are interdependent; they cannot exist without the others. The scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang by accident in 1965. NASA astronomer George Smoot and his team observed ripples in the temperature of that background radiation through the COBE satellite. The ripples were so precise that they allow galaxy formation without causing the universe to collapse on itself. "If you're religious, it's like looking at God," Smoot would describe the findings. The universe is still expanding, which suggests a point of origin.

The evidence that the universe had a cause, and was not eternal, is overwhelming. Besides, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy is finite. If the universe were infinite in age, it would have used up all usable energy by now.

Since everything that has a beginning had a cause, the Big Bang has to have a cause. In logic form it looks like this: Everything that has a beginning had a cause. The universe had a beginning. Therefore, the universe had a cause. If you disagree, what caused you to reach that conclusion? This is called the Law of Causality, and science, broadly speaking, is the search of causes.

So instead of asking who designed the intelligent designer, one should ask, what caused the Big Bang? Scientists simply don't know! They know that all time, space and matter began with the Big Bang, so something outside of time, space and matter caused the Big Bang. In short, it was something supernatural.

Astronomer Robert Jastrow, director of the Mount Wilson observatory and founder of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said in an interview, "Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all of this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. … That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact."

Jastrow observed that the Big Bang is very similar to the Biblical account of Genesis strictly in the sense that creation began suddenly in a flash of light and energy and in a definite amount of time. Jastrow admitted this even though he's an agnostic.

Curiously, I don't hear any objection that the Big Bang violates the Establishment Clause or is religion in disguise.

There are several atheistic explanations for the cause of the Big Bang, but they've all failed. First was the Cosmic Rebound Theory, the idea that the universe is expanding and contracting forever. This fell out of favor because there's not enough matter and energy for that to happen. Contracting also requires energy. The universe is still expanding and there's no evidence that it will contract. Moreover, even if there were a finite number of bangs, you still need the first one.

Some tried to explain the Big Bang with quantum physics such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Since the causality of subatomic particles is unnecessary because we cannot predict their speed and location, trying to understand the causality of the Big Bang is likewise unnecessary. This confuses causality and predictability. The Uncertainty Principle doesn't prove that the movement of electrons lacks a cause, only that we can't predict their speed and location at any given time.

The bottom line is that it's an either- or scenario. Either the universe is eternal or there is a supernatural agency that caused the universe. Science overwhelmingly disproves the former.

Asking who designed the intelligent designer confuses the Law of Causality. The law states that everything that had a beginning has a cause. If the universe was created by a supernatural agency, it's likely that agency never had a beginning. But this also is metaphysical speculation.

Jastrow discusses scientists' willful denial in his book, God and the Astronomers. He writes, "Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind - supposedly a very objective mind - when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of faith in our profession. It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence. We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phases."

I sensed this irritation among some students when Mark Lamontia gave his second ID presentation in the Bossone auditorium Feb. 7. But irritation does not justify suppressing evidence and discussion.

If one is concerned that students won't properly learn the scientific method if ID is taught in the classroom, consider whether origin of life belongs in a biology course at all. No one has observed the origin of life or the evolution between types. The question of what happened in the past doesn't fall under the purview of natural science, but forensic science. Forensic science follows the logics of law and is not confined by the scientific method. Macroevolution, ID and any other origin-of-life hypothesis should be taught in a separate course on biological origins, independent of biological systems. This is the only reasonable compromise between Darwinism and ID.