Six Perplexing Problems in the Philosophy of Science

Mathematician Granville Sewell has a piece at Evolution News in which he lists six evidences of purposeful agency in the structure of the universe and the emergence of life. Not only are these strong evidences for what philosophers call intelligent design, but they also constitute six very difficult problems in the philosophy of science.

Sewell introduces his six with this:

The ACLU speaks for much of the media and of academia when it says the theory of intelligent design “simply says that some things that seem very complex could not have happened based on natural causes. So where it sees complexity, it declares that it must have been created by a supernatural entity. This is not science.”

Oh really? Is that all there is to it? Not exactly. Below is a modest attempt to provide a summary of the main scientific evidences for design in our world, for those who have been told that such evidence does not exist.

The six lines of evidence he lists and discusses are these:

1. The Fine-Tuning of Conditions on Earth
2. The Fine-Tuning of the Physical Laws of the Universe
3. The Origin of Life
4. The Evolution of Humans
5. The Origin of Human Consciousness
6. The Beginning of Time

He gives an explanation of each of these at the link, which the reader is encouraged to check out, and each of them is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic understanding of things.

Another example he could have mentioned (although perhaps he subsumes it under #1 and #2) is the extraordinary fitness for life of many of the atoms on the periodic table.

In his recent book The Miracle of the Cell geneticist Michael Denton explains how the chemistry of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous as well as several heavier elements is precisely what it must be in order for there to be living things of even minimal complexity and that this chemistry must've been baked into the universe at the very outset of its existence, long before any life appeared.

It is, Denton says, a "primal blueprint" for life.

Similarly to the other books in his series of which it is a part (Firemaker, Wonder of Water, and Children of Light) Denton takes us in The Miracle of the Cell on an excursus into the cell to show us that had not these elements had precisely the properties they do, living cells would be quite impossible.

He concludes his fascinating book (fascinating, but perhaps not for readers with scant background in chemistry or biology) with these words,

I believe that when the path [from chemistry to life] is finally elucidated, it will turn out to be extraordinary, one of the greatest scientific wonders, revealing a far deeper teleology [purpose] in nature than all the elements of natural fitness for the cell and for life documented so far.

Even more, I believe that the elucidation of that fateful route [to living cells] will be of far greater intellectual consequence than any other discovery in science since the birth of science in the sixteenth century. Indeed, I believe that the path, when discovered, will prove to be so obviously indicative of a profound teleology in the very ground of being that it will prove a watershed in the history of thought.

Conversely, if instead it is eventually established that there is no purely natural path across the great gulf from non-life to life, and that only the additional exertion of an intelligent agent could have assembled the first cell on Earth, that will be equally a watershed in human thought.

For readers with the equivalent of a high school education in chemistry or an undergraduate level education in biology almost every page of Denton's book contains captivating descriptions of the exquisite fine-tuning of the atoms and molecules necessary for the construction of a functioning biological cell.

I highly recommend it to readers with the appropriate background.