How to Defend Intelligent Design Like a Boss

ID the future a podcast about Evolution and intelligent design welcome to ID the future I'm your host Andrew mcdermid how much do you know about intelligent design how would you define the term and are you prepared to defend intelligent design to friends family or Associates who may be critical of the idea or just don't know much about it today Dr Casey lusin provides the basics you'll need to confidently discuss and defend intelligent design with others Dr luskin is an attorney as well as associate director and Senior fellow of the Center for Science and culture at

Discovery Institute in this recent talk lusin shares with us the fruits of Decades of experience communicating about and arguing for intelligent design he explains why the commonly heard definition of intelligent design fails to adequately describe the theory he reviews all the ways intelligent design reasoning is already being used in science and then he shows us how to refute the common assertion that intelligent design isn't science by explaining how intelligent design uses the scientific method to detect design take notes if you can and feel free to listen to this brief lecture more than once now here's

Dr Casey luskin this talk is going to talk about how we can defend the theory of intelligent design what are some common objections that you might encounter and how to handle objections when they come up that maybe you don't know how to answer and this talk is going to assume a sort of a very basic level of knowledge about intelligent design um after all if you're going to defend ID then I'm going to assume that you probably already know a little something about it but if you don't know a lot about ID that's okay because

I think that as we talk about how to defend intelligent design you are going to get a good sense of what I is and exactly what it claims how many of you have ever had this happen to you you make a very careful compelling well-documented case for intelligent design perhaps based upon the presence of information in DNA or protein complexity molecular machines maybe based upon the fine-tuning of the universe but then you're immediately told this okay ID is not science but religion and you're not allowed to claim otherwise because a federal judge said so how

of you guys ever had this happen to you I've had this happen to me many times they don't even address the arguments that you're making they don't even try to respond to your scientific point so is ID really just religion and not science and what did that federal judge say and was he right I like to start off my talk sometimes with a survey of what do you think intelligent design is I'm going to give you two choices I want to get you to give me your honest answer of how would you define intelligent design

would you say that a life is so complex that it couldn't have evolved therefore it was designed by by a supernatural being or would you say B many features of nature are best explained by an intelligent cause because in our experience intelligence is the cause of their informational properties if you said a you're wrong but don't feel too bad because it just means that you read news articles because this is sort of the definition of intelligent design that gets recycled in news story after news story after news story so what is wrong with definition a

and why don't we like to use definition a well there's a couple of things that I would say are wrong with definition a first of all it frames intelligent design as if it is simply a negative argument against Evolution now don't get me wrong I'm a bit major skeptic of darwinian evolution and I think there's a lot of problems with it and intelligent design certainly is critical of many aspects of Darwin Evolution but ID is not simply or strictly a negative argument against Evolution it's also a positive argument so it doesn't just say life is

so complex that it couldn't evolved therefore was designed okay it's also a positive argument that's based upon finding in nature the kind of information and complexity which in our experience comes only from intelligence we're going to talk about that more as this presentation goes on the other problem with definition a is that it gets into sort of the nature and the identity of the designer ideas of scientific theory does not try to address religious questions about who the designer is so I personally am a Christian and I'm very open about this whether I'm I'm talking

to probably a largely Christian audience like this one or when I speak to secular audiences but I also make it clear that my view that the god of the Bible is the designer that's my personal religious belief it's not necessarily a conclusion of intelligent design and intelligent design as a science does not try to address those religious questions about who the designer is and in fact within the ID Community um I have colleagues who come from non-Christian backgrounds I have friends in the ID Community who are Jewish who are Muslims who are even agnostics who

aren't sure who the designer is what we all share as a conviction that the scientific evidence shows that there is real evidence for intelligent design in nature so this is how I would Define ID many features of nature are best explained by an intelligent cause because in our experience intelligence is the cause of their informational properties we're going to talk more about this but it basically comes down to finding in nature the kind of information and complexity which in our experience always comes from intell and so when people tell me that ID isn't science one

of the first things I like to remind them of is that ID reasoning is already being used in science for example archaeology if you're hiking and you find some kind of an artifact and you want to ask the question was this Stone object did it come into the shape through intelligent causes was it intelligently designed or is it just a natural object is just a just a normal everyday rock that has no intelligent design so if you find of course an arrowhead or you go to Easter Island and you find these strange Stone heads you're

going to look at those and you're going to say you know what these objects did not simply come about by natural causes they were carved into the shape for a purpose and so archaeologists will regularly use ID reasoning whenever they conclude that an artifact was designed another field of science that uses ID reasoning is forensic science every single time our legal system convict somebody of a crime we are literally making a design inference we are detecting design we're saying that this intelligent agent is responsible for this particular fact pattern and we're convicting them of a

crime so these are very very important questions that our legal system has to address so we are very very good in our society already at making design inferences so what the theory of ID says is if we can detect design in forensic science archaeology and these other fields why not in biology where all of life is fundamentally based upon a language-based code can we also detect design in biology another field that uses ID reasoning is called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence well basically in seti they have an array of radio telescopes and it's scanning the

skies for radio signals hoping to find one that actually comes from some kind of an alien civilization trying to get our attention and now of course they have not discovered any aliens yet but what's important is that they are trying to detect design in radio signals that are coming from outer space so when people tell me that ID isn't science after I remind them that there's already a variety of scientific fields that use ID reasoning the next thing I do is I explain to them how we use the scientific method to detect intelligent design and

if you think back to maybe your high school biology class um the scientific method is often described as a four-step process of observation hypothesis experiment and conclusion and it turns out that ID uses this exact method to make its claims so ID begins with observations that intelligent agents produce high levels of what we call complex and specified information don't worry if this term is unfamiliar to you I'm going to Define it in just a moment here but the bottom line is that there's certain types of information and complexity which always comes from intelligence and that

allows us to identify when something was designed this is a quote from a famous information theorist named Henry quer he says the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity when we see new information coming into existence and almost always comes from intelligence and this is another very nice quote this is from Steven Meyer and this is what he says he says our experience-based knowledge of information flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity especially codes and languages invariably originate from an intelligent Source from a mind or a personal agent so

what's he saying here again he's saying that there are certain types of information he uses the term specified complexity that's basically a synonym for complex and specified information but what he's saying is that when we see this kind of information in our experience it always traces back to a mind or an intelligent being and he gives two examples of this codes and languages and we're going to talk about this in just a minute that at the very heart of life is a language-based code so we detect design by finding complex and specified information also called

CSI because in our experience CSI always comes from intelligence so let's define CSI and explain what it is when we say that something is complex roughly speaking that means that it is unlikely something that would be a a sort of potentially a random or unlikely event would be this sequence of zeros and ones that we see in this hypothetical microorganism that we're looking at under the microscope here 0 1 0000 1 0011 etc etc now the question then becomes is unlikelihood alone enough to detect design and the answer is no unlikely things happen all the

time and we don't necessarily detect design the likelihood of every one of you sitting in this exact spot in this room in each chair is probably very unlikely but nobody's going to say that this was exactly pre-planned or let's say that you play poker um if I were to deal each of you out a five card hand of poker the likelihood of you each getting the exact hand of cards that you get is very very low but even if you get a very good hand like a royal flush or a straight the likelihood of you

getting that hand of cards is very very low but let's say that n i I deal you each out a hand of cards and every one of you gets a royal flush and then I deal you out a a hand of cards again and you each get a royal flush now you're going to say you know what I think there's something special going on I think that the deck was stacked so we need something more than just unlikelihood to detect design we also have to be able to say that what we're looking at is specified

meaning that it matches some independent pattern in fact it turns out that this sequence of zeros and ones here it's not just a random sequence of zeros and ones it's actually computer code it's binary code uh codes for the asky characters that spell out this sentence in the English language this is of course a very famous quote from Richard Dawkins and he said biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose now Dawkins of course believes that natural selection did the designing that things just look designed

but what we would say in the ID movement is that the reason that many features of biology look designed is because they really were designed it's not just a parent design it's real design in any case the point is that this is not just a random sequence of zeros and ones it's actually computer code that spells out a sentence in the English language that means that it matches a recognizable pattern and we have something that is both unlikely and it matches a pattern then we have complex and specified information and we can detect design let

me give you guys maybe a more practical example of this to help you understand this is Johan Johan is going on a tour of mountains of the United States and so first Johan comes across this mountain and he says you know what this mountain has a very unlikely shaped the odds that there's going to be a ridge here a ridge here and a ridge here and a gully there and a gully there etc etc the odds of this mountain having the exact shape that it does is very very low however there's no special pattern in

this mountain this looks like a normally shaped Mountain so yes it has a shape that is unlikely or complex but it's not specified to match any pattern so he's not going to detect design he's going to say this mountain shape is natural it was not designed next of course Johan goes to this mountain and he says okay this mountain also has a very unlikely shape um it's complex but now there's something else going on it also matches a known pattern namely the faces of Four famous presidents so we have a specific pattern that is also

complex then we can detect design we just use complex and stfy information to detect design so again remember we started with this observation that intelligent agents will produce high levels of complex and specify information so because this observation we can now make a hypothesis and the hypothesis says that if a natural object was designed then it will contain high levels of CSI this is the next step in the scientific method and we can then perform a variety of different kinds of experimental tests to determine whether or not natural structures contain High CSI and one type

of experiment we can do to test for high CSI is something called a mutational sensitivity test we can determine basically whether or not the sequence of amino acids in a protein is very very precisely ordered in order to allow that protein to function what is a protein proteins are basically the Workhorse molecules in your cells and in your body they perform many enzymatic functions and they also uh form many the structures in your cells and a protein is basically a very long chain of amino acids that then folds up into a very particular shape in

order to perform some very particular function and the question that we're going to ask and this was act by asked by my colleague Dr Douglas ax is how precisely ordered does that sequence of amino acids have to be in a protein in order for it to be able to perform its function and other words he's saying how common or rare are functional sequences of amino acids in order to yield a functional protein and what Dr ax basically did was he took a protein called betal Lacamas and as he mutated it basically moving along different sequences

through what we call sequence space he found that only at very very precise sequences of amino acids will that enzyme actually give you high level of activity where it's functional so what he basically found is that you have to have a very very precisely ordered sequence of amino acids in order for the protein to function in fact he found that the likelihood of a random chance sequence of amino acids giving you a functional protein like betal lactamase is one in 10 to the 77th what this means is that proteins are high CSI features in biology

we have these very unlikely sequences of amino acids that have to be exactly right in order for proteins to be able to function now the question then becomes well is that possible for something that is this unlikely to evolve well let me give you a picture of just how unlikely it would be for something like this to evolve there have only been about 10 of the 40th organisms that have lived over the entire history of life on Earth so that means that if we were to give this sort of extremely generous assumption to Evolution that

every single organism that ever lived was sort of magically gifted a 150 randomly ordered sequence of amino acids hoping that you would get a functional protein like this you would still be short by about 10 to the 37th trials just to get a single functional protein like betalactamase what this means is that there are vastly insufficient probalistic resources across Earth's entire history to produce the kinds of complex and specify information that we observe in proteins okay so conclusion because X exhibits high levels of CSI a quality known to be produced only by intelligent design we

conclude that this structure was intelligently designed again to recap how does ID use the scientific method we start with the observation that intelligence is the cause of high CSI we then predict or make a hypothesis that life will contain high levels of complex and specifi information we can then experimentally test for high CSI through things like mutational sensitivity tests and protein and we uncover astronomical CSI and biological systems and we conclude that life was designed so ID is using the scientific method here to make its claims and the basic logic is basically like this first

an ID scientist finds that mind is the cause of certain types of information or CSI as we call it then she goes down to the natural world and finds that same kind of information in nature and infers that a mind was at work in causing that type of information so this is what I like to say you could disagree with the conclusions of ID but you can't reasonably claim that the argument I'm making today is based upon religion or faith or divine revelation okay even if you disagree with the conclusions I haven't been invoking the

Bible or faith or scripture or any of that I made an argument based upon science so when somebody comes to you and says ID is not science you can explain to them how ID uses the scientific method make its claims okay so what about that Federal Court ruling because the critic is often going to tell you well a federal judge this happened in in a court case called the kitsmiller versus Dober case it happened in 200 5 it was from the lowest level of the federal courts so it's not the Supreme Court this is not

binding precedent all over the country it's only in really the lowest level of the federal courts and it's only binding the Middle District of Pennsylvania but it is true that one federal judge did rule that ID is religion and not science so this is what I like to say to folks don't think that federal judges are an errand just because a federal judge said it doesn't mean it's true but we have to be willing to think critically in fact if you spend one single day in law school I did go to law school I'm an

attorney um you spend a single day in law school you'll learn that law professors make careers out of telling you what federal judges got wrong okay so federal judges get things wrong all the time and in this case the court got a lot of things wrong we could spend hours going over what the court got wrong but let me give you a little summary of what the court got wrong in this case first of all the judge misdefined intelligent design he didn't even Define intelligent design properly he wrongly claimed that it requires Supernatural creation which

was a position that ID proponents refuted during testimony during the trial he also ignored this positive argument for design that we just talked about using information to detect design and he falsely claimed that ID uh makes its case strictly by arguing against Evolution so he's basically misdefined and misrepresented what intelligence Z is he also wrongly claimed that ID was refuted in his court when in reality he was presented with credible scientific Witness and Publications on both sides of the debate showing evidence of a scientific controversy not that one side had refuted the other um he

used very dubious philosophy of science where he took the level of support for a theory in the scientific Community as evidence for whether or not it's scientific if you always said that if the majority of the scientific Community believed something and in this case yeah it's true the majority of scientists probably do disagree with ID that doesn't mean it's therefore wrong if we took a philosophy of science like that then science would never be able to progress because every new scientific theory starts off as a minority scientific view before it then takes over and we

have a scientific revolution we have to allow minority scientific views to be heard we can't just have courts ruling that they're not science um he also sort of just denied the existence of peer-reviewed pro ID scientific papers that were documented before the court and the court just basically ignored them and pretended that they didn't exist he explicitly just denied them and the court also adopted what I would say is an unfair standard of legal analysis where religious implications beliefs and motives and affiliations they always counted against intelligent design but never against Darwinism so it was

very very sort of one-sided biased way of approaching this issue but not everybody agreed with this Court ruling this is really important there's a leading anti- AI legal scholar named Jay Wexler he called this ruling that ID is not science quote unnecessary unconvincing not particularly Su suited to to the judicial role and perhaps even dangerous both to science and freedom of religion so uh I would say that federal courts cannot settle scientific debates the day after the do ruling ourselves were still full of language-based digital codes and miniature factories that produce micromolecular machines and the

universe remained exquisitly fine-tuned to sustain life so this debate it can be settled only by the evidence not by legal declarations so don't let anybody tell you that this court case somehow refuted intelligent design you've got to think more critically than that I know you guys would do that but don't don't let the critics get away with that so let's talk a little bit more about the evidence I want to now go into some scientific objections to intelligent design one of the most common objections that we hear when we talk about intelligent design is something

called co-option so we have in biology these complex molecular machines that require all of their parts to be present in order for them to be able to function we call these irreducibly complex they're irreducibly complex because if you try to reduce their complexity they won't work they won't function and they challenge a darwinian explanation darwinian Evolution requires a structure to remain functional at every little small step of its Evolution but these molecular machines that we have in our bodies they require lots of parts to be present before they give you any function and they can't

evolve one small little step at a time it's kind of like an All or Nothing Game either all the parts are there and they function and they give you an advantage or it's missing a part and it doesn't give you any function so that's basically a major challenge to Darwin Evolution and it's good evidence for intelligent design so one of the criticisms that we hear one of the responses that we hear is that you can evolve these complex molecular machines through something called co-option basically what this objection says is that as you are evolving these

molecular machines you can borrow parts from other places in the cell and somehow kind of magically retool those proteins to come together and spontaneously form a totally new system so this is the way that I would describe co-option it's kind of like saying you start off with a hammer and that hammer somehow gets co-opted to turn into a key and then you start off with this sort of this clamp or this trap and this clamp or this trap suddenly gets co-opted to turn into a lock and then somehow that lock and that key are able

to work together to open one another okay it's kind of like you're starting off with one type of tool turning it into another and then suddenly after you've done this a bunch of different times those parts can interact with each other to perform some complex function and I want to make some responses to co-option very quickly well first of all if you're going to borrow a part you have to have some place to borrow it from we have no idea where many of the parts that we find in these molecular machines could be borrowed from

because they're unique they don't look like anything else in biology when you do get an argument that they could be borrowed the evidence-based basically comes down to this they will say that this protein and this molecular machine has an amino acid sequence that is kind of similar to another protein okay it's not identical it just has some degree of similarity well sequence similarity what we often call homology does not demonstrate a stepwise evolutionary pathway okay because these parts are very different from one another you cannot just you know make one or two little changes to

a protein to get it to suddenly then perform a totally different function in cell remember that uh study we just talked about that only one every 10 the 77th sequences would give you this functional betal lactamase enzyme well it's like that with a lot of proteins functional protein sequences are very very rare and it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to just you know have a couple of changes to a protein to then be able to radically change it to perform some totally different function so what this means is that these parts in

the cell are not necessarily easily interchanged many changes have to happen many mutations have to occur and this is very unlikely to happen by Darwin Evolution another thing that proponents of co-option often don't talk about is the assembly instructions you see it's not just enough to have the parts to build a machine I could put all the parts necessary for a computer in a box right I could even shake it up or you know shake it for a million years you're never going to get a computer you have to be able to properly assemble those

parts into a machine and the same is true with these molecular machines and our bodies you have to be able to explain the assembly instructions for how these molecular machines assemble and proponents of co-option never talk about the assembly instructions for these molecular machines but here's what I think would be probably the most fundamental problem is that co-option requires Great leaps of complexity okay this is kind of again another example of what co-option would be like it would be like saying okay I've got a laptop here and my laptop has a power cord actually I

didn't plug the laptop in but I've got the power cord right here okay so if I were to take this power cord and I were to plug it in and I were to say okay because this power cord could also be used to power my toaster therefore I can explain how my laptop can evolve no maybe I can explain how one part of the laptop came to be maybe I can explain how the power cord evolved but there's a lot more complexity going on in the laptop than just the power cord right there's a lot

more that you have to explain and so co-option almost always involves great leaps of complexity uh one of my colleagues in the ID movement has said it's kind of like finding the Hawaiian islands and then claiming that you found a way to walk from Los Angeles to Tokyo okay that's just not a very good evolutionary explanation need a lot more of detail to provide a proper evolutionary explanation for how these complex systems evolve so cooption requires Great leaps of complexity it also faces a quch 22 and that is that the more similar the precursor is

in these co-option explanations to the final system the more te logical the explanation begins to sound okay so you start to actually have these co-option explanations that sound very goal directed very purpose D driven very te logical um and so I don't think that they're very good um finally uh where our experience do things like co-option happen well I love this quote this is by two of my colleagues William dempy and Jonathan wit they say what is the one thing in our experience that co-ops irreducibly complex machines and uses their parts to build a new

and more intricate machine intelligent agents so whenever we see co-option going on in the real world it always involves intelligent design um let's talk about another very common objection to Intelligence on this is called Junk DNA this is an objection that I've been hearing for many years I've been around the ID debate for a couple of decades and very frequently I've heard people say you can't claim that our cells are designed because the vast majority of our genome is actually genetic junk it's not doing anything it's just there because of random evolutionary mutations filling up

our genomes with evolutionary debris and garbage and no designer would ever put this kind of random useless genetic junk in our genomes this is evidence against intelligence design and in fact many ID critics uh Ken Miller Francis Collins um uh Richard Dawkins have all argued that the presence of junk DNA in our cells refutes intelligent design however um the good news for ID proponents is that the evidence for Junk DNA is actually very very weak and in fact the evidence has shown that most of the DN in our bodies is not in fact junk there

was a major study that came out in 2012 called en code and what they did was they studied this DNA in our cells that is not coding for proteins and what they found is that over 80% of our genome shows evidence of biochemical functionality so the evidence in biology right now is strongly trending the direction that our genome is not full of junk DNA and that our DNA is actually functional you might say well why only 80% does that mean that 20% of our genome is actually in fact junk DNA well no when they did

the encode project they only studied about 150 cell types in the human body and we have thousands of different cell types and one of the lead encode researchers predicted that as they study more and more cell types they're going to find that every single nucleotide base in our DNA in fact is associated with a function consider this article that came out in the journal science it said that the encode project wrote the eulogy for Junk DNA and it said that 30 research papers including six in nature and additional papers in science sound the death Nowell

for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases in fact there was a paper that came out just a couple years ago that said the days of junk DNA are over so this is a very popular argument we've in fact we still hear evolutionists making this argument I see these folks kind of like you know at the end of World War II you had those hold outs who were still living in caves and would acknowledge that the war was over I think this debate is over but some evolutionists are so committed to

junk DNA they just don't want to see it okay finally dealing with new objections you might hear an objection you never heard before and I want to encourage you guys if you don't know the answer to an objection it's always okay to say you know what I don't know the answer let me research that and get back to you thank you guys very much that was Dr Casey lusin speaking recently on how to defend intelligent design I hope you found it as helpful as I did even if we've been around the arguments of intelligent design

for years as I have Dr lus can provide some great reminders of just how compelling the case for design and biology really is now this is just a taste for more videos articles and other resources on intelligent design that you can enjoy yourself as well as share with others check out intelligent design.org that's intelligent design.org thanks for listening today we created this podcast to help you learn more about the evidence for intelligent design and the debate over Evolution if you're enjoying our content leave a review at Apple podcasts and share an episode with a friend

thanks for your support for ID the future I'm Andrew mcdermid thanks for listening visit us at idthe future.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and culture [Music]