Science ought to be about seeking and finding out what is true, and it is quintessentially unscientific to pre-judge what is true, or to rule out some causes before the evidence speaks.  It would seem to be unintelligent too, not to recognize the clear signs of intelligence at work, or even to allow that there could be a design behind what is seen.  Indeed, design reasoning is an academic discipline, which holds that information rich systems arise from intelligent design.  Clearly the information in every living cell qualifies.  There simply is no naturalistic explanation for where the information comes from.  We are only beginning to understand this in a way that Charles Darwin couldn’t, because we are after all living in an Information Age.  Scientists in the Nineteenth Century knew of two fundamental entities, matter and energy.  They did not recognize a third entity of information at work in cell formation or the development of complex organisms.  But whereas matter and energy are inanimate so far as we know, information is an artifact of Mind and something that can only be understood by intelligent design. 

Indeed, human beings have so much bit storage capacity for data in a single brain, that he or she would have to learn something new every single second for the next 3 million years to fill it up.  There’s room left for knowledge in other words.  In our chemical makeup we may resemble the dust of the earth, but in the will and the spirit we have is a capacity that exceeds mere function—the capacity to comprehend existence.  It might even be scientific to suggest that our purpose is to do so, to learn through both formal education and personal experiences to understand the universe and by inference our Creator.  Albert Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.  He felt that scientific inquiry presupposed rationality of the universe, and he inferred intelligence behind the design.  Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a computer program, only much more complex than anything man has devised, inferring likewise intelligence behind the software engineering that transmits instructions for life.

We ought to refrain from the pretense and hubris of pronouncing a theory final concerning great metaphysical questions of existence and the purpose for being.  It is hard to place a period at the end of Eternity or even to start it with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.  Don’t ask what happened the day before.  Sir Isaac Newton said that in the absence of other evidence, the existence of his thumb were sufficient to prove the existence of God.  He saw in his thumb such remarkable engineering design and precision, that to him it suggested intelligence of a Higher Being.  Nothing today disproves or would disabuse him of that prejudice.  The position is not anti-scientific per se, just out of favor in some quarters.  While useful inside of a narrow context, it is irresponsible to suggest that natural selection could have given rise to life in all its forms on earth (and potentially elsewhere), when Darwin himself had more to say about the so-called branches of the tree of evolution than its trunk or its root.  That is, he had much to say about the relation of certain species to each other but almost nothing concerning the first organism or self-replicating cell, and nothing about the spark that began the whole process.  To insist otherwise, and close the door on complementary or alternative explanations, serves no other purpose than to limit knowledge and stifle the exercise of free thought. 

The possibility of life in outer space points to another irony about the state of science on our planet today.  For almost five decades now the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), with considerable support in the hard science community, has involved listening devices to pick up transmissions that show patterns distinct from background or random noise.  The inference is that intelligent life creates highly improbable and objective patterns that can be recognized as such, for example a string of prime numbers broadcast over space or a solo from an electric guitar.  If you looked at Mount Rushmore, SD you might conclude it wasn’t carved out by just wind and rain.  The carving is too highly improbable and objectively relates to recognizable patterns found on coinage and paintings of four known presidents who lived.  The same criteria for deciding whether intelligent life exists in outer space and used by every human being on the planet, is singularly dismissed in biological science. 

Quantum physics didn’t exist in Darwin’s day, nor astronomy in its advanced state with views into the far reaches of the universe.  Advances in astronomy and quantum physics are leading to new conclusions that must also affect biology.  There are twenty numbers called constants that constitute essential forces and 92 elements that establish parameters of our known universe.  The fundamental constants are adjusted like dials to just the right frequency to give rise to organization and life.  If any one of them were to change even a little, the world would disappear.  Again the natural inference might be that the universe is fairly carefully calibrated!  While that is not the same as proving the existence of God, it doesn’t rule Him out.  Moreover, it seems remote that our existence is the result of total random events.  Science is even shedding light as it were, on what the omniscience of God might conceivably look like.  Quantum physics posits the idea of non-locality.  Recall that Einstein showed us how time and space are related by light, and at the speed of light time stops.  At the speed of light one can see the past and future simultaneously.  Not only that, but in 1997 scientific experiments actually demonstrated how twin light photons seven miles apart instantaneously reflected the same change in direction.  Theoretically, information at any point of the universe is accessible to any other point in the universe without any time delay.  Moreover, just as matter and energy can be related by mathematical equation, there is increasing evidence of a missing equation that will relate electromagnetic energy to something else “immaterial,” what we might call spirit or the stuff of consciousness. 

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.  Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

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