God-of-the-Gaps?

Intelligent Design

A lot of people allege that the ID movement is nothing more than the old God-of-the-gaps idea, dressed in new clothing.  But is this the case?  I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why.  IDers aren’t merely waiting for evolutionists to say “We don’t know” so that they can jump in and say “Ah ha!  That must mean God did it!”  That would amount to an argument from ignorance and wouldn’t be persuasive to (almost) anyone.  Instead, what people like Stephen Meyer and his friends over at the Discovery Institute (not all of whom are Christian, by the way) are doing is making an argument from what we do know, not from what we don’t.  True, some of what they do is pointing out what we don’t know, but that’s only half the story.  I just finished reading a short essay by Meyer called “DNA and the Origin of Life: Information, Specification, and Explanation” (find it here) in which he explores the three naturalistic explanations of the origin of life and its information content [1)chance, 2)necessity, and 3)a combination of chance and necessity] and shows convincingly that these explanations are both woefully inadequate and implausible. However, having shown that naturalistic explanations fail, he doesn’t simply just say “God did it!” and throw down his pen. What he does do is go on to make a positive case for ID. Here it is in a nut shell:

We know that living organisms contain within their cells huge quantities of information, information being defined as specificity and complexity.  We also know that no naturalistic means are adequate to account for this information.  Further, wherever we have seen information of this type before we know or can deduce that an intelligent source was behind it. For example, we know that lines of computer code, that are both specified and complex, come from and intelligent programmer because we see programmers programming. We also know that the lines of language on the Aztec pyramids come from an intelligence, even though no one is alive who saw it being written and we only figured out how to read it a few decades ago. How do we know that, given no one saw it being done?  We infer design from things around us all the time without necessarily knowing who it was that designed it because we recognise a designing intelligence at work. Our experience tells us. People who see the carved faces of Mt Rushmore know intuitively that these are not the products of wind and rain erosion over time.  We know the same way a poker player knows that his opponent might get four aces once by chance, but not twice, or three times in a row. Something else is going on! Some intelligent force is at work, carving faces out of rock and stacking the deck. This is called making an “inference to the best explanation”.  It is possible that wind and rain alone carved the faces of those presidents, it is possible that those four aces were dealt out by chance, but is that explanation the best one?  The most reasonable one?  I don’t think so, and I don’t think that anyone would disagree with me in those cases.

Why is it, then, having exhausted all naturalistic explanations (a negative case), with universal human experience showing us that specified, complex information only comes from a designing intelligence (a positive case), that we are not within our rights to claim an intelligence behind the origin of life’s information? Seems like fair inference to me!