This excerpt from our STR University course “Unlocking the Mystery of Life: Origin” explains how the world points to an intelligent mind and points out a major flaw of materialistic theories.
Transcript
Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson: Often, when I’m reading the origin-of-life literature, considering some proposal for the formation, let’s say, of RNA or proteins, and even the author admits it’s chemically implausible, and I ask myself, how did he get himself into this jam—invoking an implausible pathway for something that, for all the world, looks to be designed? Well, he got himself into this jam because a philosophy told him that’s the only acceptable answer. And at that impasse, I want to say to the author, “Look, you know it’s implausible, I know it’s implausible. The reason that you ended up here, standing at the edge of this cliff, staring at implausibility, is because, way back down the road, you decided that only a materialist explanation would work.”
Biologist Timothy Standish: How many different explanations that fail within the materialistic box do we have to have before we decide maybe we need to move outside of that box? Maybe we need another kind of explanation.
Paul: When one surveys the various theories of science—theories of physics, theories of chemistry, theories of star formation—these are theories about the world out there. But when we come to the origin of life, we’re talking about a theory that involves us—ultimately, where we came from, our ultimate origins. Our worldviews, our philosophies, our science—they’re all interconnected. And that separates the question of the origin of life from every other question in science.
Natural science is not divorced from everything else that we know or believe about the world. So, a very narrow, apparently technical question like “How did RNA first come to be?” can end up connecting, through the fabric of reality, to a very different question like “Might there be a God? Is God possible? Is God possibly real?” If life, in its full richness, did not come to be via a strictly physical or natural process, we ought to have indicators of that. And I think the origin of life is the central pivot point on which a great deal ends up turning. So, I come at nature as a curious human being, and I say, what do I regard as the normal, everyday indicators of intelligence? Do I see them in life? And the answer is yes—in abundance.
Developmental biologist Ann Gauger: What we see in biological systems is a marvel. It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, and the more we learn about biology, the more obvious design becomes.
I graduated from MIT and went on to University of Washington and did a postdoc at Harvard. When I first started out in intelligent design, there were people posting things on the internet like, “Well, she used to be smart. What happened?” Actually, materialism puts blinders on science, and we miss what’s most significant about the world. So, it’s a very exciting time to be a scientist because we have this opportunity to look at things with new eyes, with fresh vision.
Paul: Intelligence is extraordinarily helpful if we’re looking for an explanatory framework for the origin of life that actually works with what we observe in nature. Nature looks designed. Life looks designed. Design—intelligence—explains things like all of the information that we find inside a cell. There’s nothing magical about living things. I’m a scientist. I don’t really believe in magic. I believe in mechanisms and causes that are sufficient to achieve the phenomena that I observe. Intelligence is sufficient. Intelligence is necessary. Therefore, intelligence is the conclusion that I come to.