How Did the Designer Do It?
https://evolutionnews.org/2025/07/how-did-the-designer-do-it/
n 1852, several years before On the Origin of Species came out, the famed biologist Herbert Spencer defended the theory of evolution and made a broadside attack against the idea of “special creation” in his essay “The Developmental Hypothesis.” He wrote:
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all… If they have formed a definite conception of the process, let them tell us how a new species is constructed, and how it makes its appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do its limbs and viscera rush together from all the points of the compass? or must we receive the old Hebrew idea, that God takes clay and moulds a new creature?
This argument has had considerable staying power. Skip ahead to 2015, and we find biochemist Larry Moran asking intelligent design advocate Stephen Meyers some very similar questions:
Did the gods nudge some of the species toward being arthropods in the first million years but waited until the last few years to create the information required to make chordates and vertebrates? What kind of information did they insert? What did they insert it into? Do we have any evidence of new god-created genes that sprang into existence during this period of time? If so, which ones?
And how old are these gods, anyway? Did the same ones stick around for the entire 10 million years to see if their experiment worked or were there several generations of gods?Why were the gods so active in the Cambrian? Why didn’t they create all this new information 100 million years earlier or 100 million years later? Have they created any new information since then or did they front-load everything into genome during the Cambrian then turned their attention to some planets in other galaxies? These are all legitimate questions that deserve answers. They’re just like the questions you ask of scientists when you demand detailed evolutionary explanations.
It seems the debate has not progressed much in a century and a half. Clearly, these evolutionary theorists think they have an unanswerable line of attack here. And, admittedly, there is a certain superficial reasonableness to their demands. If we expect evolutionary theorists to explain how unguided evolution created life, shouldn’t design theorists be expected to explain how the designer created life?
Stonehenge and Smartphones
But if you mull the argument over, you begin to find it strangely unsatisfying. This may have something to do with the fact that, setting the more controversial subjects aside, there are many cases in which everyone agrees design occurreddespite not knowing the means by which it occurred. The Easter Island heads and Stonehenge are good examples. Scholars might debate exactly how ancient people managed set those massive stones in place without the aid of modern technology, but no one doubts that they did so. So clearly, there are instances where design can be inferred without precise knowledge of the methods of construction.
The analogy becomes even more applicable to the case at hand if we flip it around, and imagine that instead of analyzing artifacts constructed by more primitive societies, we are trying to analyze something more complex and sophisticated than anything we have ever dreamed of making. Imagine, for example, that you are a hunter-gatherer in a stone-age society who is suddenly taken out of the Amazon and brought to New York City. Could you provide even a sketch of the means of construction for a smartphone, a skyscraper, or an airplane? Absolutely not. You wouldn’t even know where to begin. But would that detract from your ability to infer design at work? No, it wouldn’t.
That is exactly where we stand in regard to biological life. Compared to a living organism, our best technology is like stone spears. We have no notion of how to make even the most basic cell. But we would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of design on that account.
Somewhat perplexingly, perhaps, the same does not seem to hold true for explaining something by natural processes alone. When someone tries to do that, we always expect hard details. If someone insisted that the Easter Island heads could be explained by unguided natural processes, you would certainly expect them to give you a clear explanation of how, or why such improbable shapes were demanded by the laws of nature. And you probably wouldn’t be much moved if they started complaining along the lines of Spencer and Moran that you weren’t being fair because you hadn’t explained how your beloved designers created the heads either: “Did they carve them with iron picks, or stone hammers? Were the carvers men, or women? Or little children, perhaps? Why did they make a few dozen heads, not one or several thousand? And where are they now? Did they quit making heads, or perhaps just move on to other islands…?”
In a fresh context, it’s obvious that this argument is not worth anything. So all that remains is to determine why the argument is not worth anything. And the answer is simply that it rests on a false equivalence: different types of explanation impose different burdens of evidence on their proponents. There are evidentiary burdens that lie on design theorists alone, and there are evidentiary burdens that lie on Darwinists alone.
“Will” vs. “Chance and Necessity”
The important distinction lies in the difference between agents and natural laws. Designers are free agents, by definition, and can do whatever they want. In fact, that’s where the explanatory power of design lies. Natural processes, by contrast, can only do the same predictable things. That is why humans constantly invoke designers to explain things that we would be at a loss to explain by the laws of nature alone — everything from ant hills to cave paintings. But because the explanatory power of free agents is produced by the very thing that makes them hard to predict, it’s no use demanding to know exactly how a free agent went about doing something. Unless you were there, you can’t know. It’s different with natural processes, which are uniform and therefore predictable.
The question that follows from this is, when are we allowed to invoke a free agent as an explanation? Famously, the principle of parsimony, or “Occam’s razor,” says that you shouldn’t invoke unnecessary entities as part of your explanation. When we invoke an intelligent designer to explain a phenomenon, we are invoking a new entity. Darwinian evolution, to its credit, does not propose any new entities — it tries to explain life using only matter and the observed laws of nature. According to Occam’s razor, however, there is a reason to invoke a new entity: if the entities you already have can’t explain the phenomenon. Of course this is so — otherwise, we would never be able to discover any new entities at all, and would be stuck with only believing in the first thing the first human baby happened to notice. Anyway, that is why intelligent design theorists spend so much time arguing against Darwin’s theory. It’s not that design and evolution are incompatible or that we think disproving evolution automatically proves design; it’s that there’s no need to invoke a new entity such as a designer if the laws of nature that we already know about can explain everything that exists. So to avoid violating Occam’s razor, intelligent design advocates need to show that the laws of nature cannot produce everything that exists. That is the evidentiary burden that lies on design theorists only; evolutionists, by contrast, do not need to somehow demonstrate that intelligent designers are incapable of creating life.
Conversely, Darwinists argue that there is no need to invoke a designer or any other new entities, because the entities we already know about (matter, chance, and the laws of nature) are a sufficient explanation for every observed phenomenon. So they must be able to show how the phenomena that do not seem like they could be produced by natural processes actually can be produced by natural processes. That is the evidentiary burden that lies on Darwinists alone; design theorists, by contrast, do not need to prove that the proposed designer is capable of producing life. The designer is capable by definition, because the designer was proposed specifically to fill in the explanatory gap left by the insufficiency of matter, chance, and the laws of nature alone.
A Case in Point: The Discovery of Helium
This may all become clearer if we consider an analogous case. The element helium was first discovered by an astronomer, not a chemist, because its existence was inferred from observations of sunlight before it was actually found on earth. The astronomer, Norman Lockyer, noticed that there was a wavelength of light produced by the sun that was not produced by any element yet discovered. He inferred that there must therefore be an undiscovered element in the sun. This was a perfectly legitimate inference, Occam’s razor notwithstanding, because no already-known entity could produce that wavelength of light. And it made no difference that no one knew exactly how or why different elements produced different wavelengths of light. If any chemist had insisted that there was not a new element in the sun, he or she would have needed to show that you actually can get that wavelength using only the already-known elements. In fact, the English chemist Edward Franklin attempted to do this by putting hydrogen under extreme heat and pressure, but was unsuccessful.
The same goes for evolution. The evolution of highly complex biological systems has never been observed, and there are certain theoretical arguments that purport to show that it is essentially impossible (statistically speaking) for random variation, natural selection, and the laws of nature alone to produce those systems. So any scientist who wants to argue that the already-known entities in nature could produce all of biology needs to show how this could occur, in spite of the theoretical hurdles. If they can’t do this, then we are perfectly justified in proposing a new entity, such as a designer.
One final objection must be answered. If we don’t know exactly how the designer crafted life, then how do we even know that a designer is the right explanation? Couldn’t it just as easily be something else?
Once again, the story of helium is illuminating. Helium and intelligent design are both parsimonious explanations regarding the broad type of cause, yet non-parsimonious regarding the specific entity. Lockyer proposed an element, rather than something else (e.g., a new law of nature), because it was already known that elements can produce light. But he proposed a new element, because it was known that none of the old elements could produce that particular wavelength of light. Likewise, ID theorists propose a designer to explain the specified complexity of life because it is already known that designers (i.e., minds) can produce specified complexity. But we must propose a new designer, because none of the old designers (ourselves, beavers, etc.) are capable of having created the systems in question.
By now it should be clear why it is the height of silliness to demand proof that the designer could create life, or to expect detailed explanations of how it could be done. If chance and necessity are insufficient to produce life, then we must conclude that something beyond chance and necessity was involved. The proof of that entity’s capability is simply the fact that life exists.
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