Did Intelligence Design The
Earth?
THE BOOK OF GENESIS describes the inception of the world in terms of a series of six successive acts of separation. In doing so, it ascribes the origin of earth's patterns to the activity of a Supreme Intelligence — a description that is in remarkable alignment with our modern insight into the inability of natural forces to produce such patterns. But how often do we pause and consider the interplay of the vastly complex patterns of physical matter that enable the earth to function as a sophisticated life-support system? This interplay, known as "coherence," is what keeps us alive.
To explain the origin of these complex paradigms, we must uncover the source of the organizational coherence that they manifest. But this goal can be easily misunderstood, because in seeking the root of these four-dimensional space-time configurations, we are not seeking whatever can generate a complex pattern. To be sure, this is a necessary condition; but it is not a sufficient condition. Complexity is only a small part of the story. It is not so much that the patterns are complex, but rather that they are complex in a coherent way.
Useful Patterns
Using our minds, we can create countless near-random, complex patterns. But virtually all of the patterns thus created will display no functional coherence. If we are going to explain the origin of the world we must be able to logically explain how this functional coherence came into existence.
From the perspective of complexity, many patterns may qualify. Yet of the near infinite number of almost random patterns that can be envisioned, as a practical matter, one produces the self-consistent functional coherences
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that harmoniously sustain the 11 million species alive on earth today.1
It's easy to suppose that other patterns may exist that are capable of sustaining this many species. But the definition and demonstration of just one other is an impossible task. The point is that we know planet earth exists in the way described, but we know of no other! Some have engaged in wishful thinking and romantic speculation on this point, but that won't do. What we need is knowledge based on facts, not intuition rooted in supposition. If we are to rationally explain the origin of the stable life-support system called planet earth, then we must explain the production of functional coherences intrinsic to the distribution and nature of the parts comprising it.2
We perceive this coherence in this planet's mountains, oceans, and land distributions. We see it in the relative kinds of gases and the pressure of the atmosphere. We find it in earth's tilt angle and spin rate, and in the eccentricity and size of its orbit. These and other planetary and solar parameters display cooperative relationships that stagger the mind — not only in terms of the tolerances with which they are assembled and the intricate ways they interact, but in the provisions and protections they provide.3
Ours is the only planet with significant water, and with all ninety-two useful elements available at its surface. What other planet offers trees for fuel and caves for shelter? Earth shines as a Garden of Eden in an otherwise hostile and barren abyss.4
Earth's Astounding Temperature
The sun is 92,900,000 miles from the earth, and yet its 12,000 degree surface temperature radiates precisely the correct amount of energy for the proper intensity to reach this planet.5 Moreover, it arrives with the right "color" distribution for the gases through which it must pass. This is remarkable because radiant energy decreases with the square of the distance, and arrives with different strengths for different colors.6 Yet the situation is much more involved. The earth's diameter is 7,900 miles (North to South Pole) so that it intercepts one two-billionth of the total solar energy that reaches us. Yet if its diameter were slightly smaller or larger, we would either freeze or roast to death.7 But this, too, is only part of the story.
The comparative sea-to-land mass; the one-to-five silica/water specific heat capacity; the lunar mass, distance, and orbit in relation to the ocean tides and surface area and other influences collectively interact to cover this globe with a shifting cloud cover. In conjunction with still other factors, these control the thermodynamic emissivity and reflectivity of the upper atmosphere so as to stabilize earth's temperature by radiating and / or reflecting more or less heat back into space.8 The importance of this lies in the fact that the more or less stable temperature we enjoy essentially all over the earth is determined by the difference between the amount of heat the earth catches from outer space and the amount it loses due to radiation and reflection from the cover of its outer atmosphere.9
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Or, consider something as simple as the question, How deep is the sea? The oceans have an average depth of just over two miles. Yet were they much deeper, the 0.03 percent carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be absorbed into the oceans and decrease to the detriment of earth's plant life.10 Were they shallower, however, their ability to store heat would decrease, resulting in violent temperature excursions and gradual polar ice accumulation.11 These and other global parameters constitute complex patterns of physical matter that are functionally intertwined with physical properties to produce the organizational coherences responsible for the stable temperature we enjoy. And lest we take the thermal environment for granted, we might recall that the moon is only 239,000 miles away. Yet its surface temperature varies each lunar day (15 earth days) from a high of 214 degrees above zero, to a low of 243 degrees below zero!
The Miracle of Survival
The patterns we find on earth not only harmonize to guarantee the temperature; they also act to ensure our very survival. Consider one example: Near the equator, the troposphere (the air we breath) is about two miles high (five miles at the poles). Since volcanos are stabilized by a balance between pressures above and below the earth's crust, if the atmosphere's height were appreciably lower, the decreased air pressure would act to promote increased volcanic activity attended by increased earthquakes.12 Moreover, atmospheric protection against five hundred large meteorites that are estimated to strike earth's surface each year would be lost, and our population would be exposed to their devastating consequences. Some of these meteorites weigh thousands of tons and impact the earth at speeds of 150,000 miles per hour.
But consider what would happen if the atmosphere were significantly higher than it is. The unshielded radiation and reduced collisions along the outer troposphere would energize leakage into space of the lighter nitrogen molecules. Were this to continue, breathing difficulties could result for us near the earth's surface due to an enriched oxygen mixture. Breathing problems would also occur as we tried to exhale against the higher atmospheric pressure. The reason is that we empty our lungs primarily by the elasticity of lung tissue, and not by moving the diaphragm muscle (used to inhale).13
The enriched oxygen mixture would also begin to oxidize important elements available on the earth's surface, elements needed by vegetation. Were this to occur, plant life would rapidly die off,14 and animal life would soon follow.15 These and numerous other planetary factors are inextricably interrelated in ways that conspire to keep us alive. Moreover, they testify not to "order," but rather to a functionally coherent complexity whose central thrust is to sustain not only human life, but things as tiny as a single-celled amoeba.16
Though one of the simplest of life forms, this creature contains a vastly complex structure with patterns that are anything but simple. If we used a microscope to look inside, we'd realize very quickly that it performs all the
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essential functions that an elephant performs. For example, it gets food, processes oxygen, eliminates waste, reproduces itself, moves around, and interacts with its environment. This single-celled creature is just one of a myriad of life forms we find in the world.
This world is saturated with patterns that interact harmoniously, function coherently, and sustain themselves indefinitely. For example, there are growing seasons and dormant seasons for plant life. These are activated yearly by a small shift in the strength of sunlight at different colors, and this shift occurs due to the 3 percent eccentricity of earth's orbit.
Or consider our planet's water system. Water circulates from the oceans and goes over land to deliver rain so that food can grow; then it returns back to the oceans. There is also a complex exchange pattern between plant and animal life. Plants need carbon dioxide and produce oxygen as a by-product; animal life needs oxygen and produces carbon dioxide as a by-product.
This is a world of complex patterns harmoniously interacting so as to sustain themselves. Such patterns are never produced on our scale of observation by chance processes. We see them only produced by intelligence. What experiment has ever shown that functionally coherent complex patterns are produced by the chaotic motion of dust? There are none! Just the opposite is true. Experience abounds where such motion produces patterns with virtually no complexity or information at all.17 Where then is the empirical warrant for the faith that presupposes that lifeless particles first made a home for themselves (the earth), endowed themselves with a living awareness of their own existence (us), and then proceeded to build art museums, music halls, and bowling alleys?
Patterns in Our Life
Have you ever compared the patterns produced by chance processes with those we generate in the machines we build? Would we believe that, given enough time, random motions could produce the engineered systems we design and build? For example, when we examine an automobile engine we notice that the piston goes up and down and at regular intervals.
Why doesn't it go sideways? Or move at arbitrary times? The reason is that the up-and-down motion of the piston exists in harmony with valves located at the top, and a crankshaft positioned below. Furthermore, the intervals of its motion are synchronized with the opening and closing of valves so that gasoline enters and exhaust gas leaves at the correct moments of the engine cycle. In fact, so critical are the shapes of these parts and is the timing that small variations can produce severe power loss. Thus, the timing is carefully orchestrated to satisfy design requirements, as are the shapes and location of each part in the engine.
Or consider a television receiver and the complex patterns that make up
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its picture. Do we believe that natural chance processes could ever generate this? We know that when we look for TV stations late at night, we see "snow" on some of the channels because the stations have gone off the air. We can also duplicate the snow during the day by disconnecting the antenna. This underscores what we all know: A television picture exists due to signals received by the antenna, and the program we watch makes sense because the signals are related to one another in a coherent fashion.
In other words, it is the coherence among the signals that allows us to assign meaning to the picture on the screen. The coherence comes from a studio scene composed of complex patterns that functionally interrelate in a meaningful way. The coherence is preserved in signals sent to your antenna where they are processed to replicate the studio scene on your television screen. The tolerances in this system are extraordinary, and the slightest imperfection in its picture-making parts is picked up as a blemish on the screen.
Few of us would believe that, given enough time, interstellar particles would eventually collide to create an automobile engine or a television receiver. Yet many have no problem accepting the idea that such particles created human beings. I understand that the Saturn missile is thirty-six stories high, and yet has a fuel tank whose wall is only eighty-thousandths of an inch thick. I have learned that it took the collective resources of over ten thousand companies to build the missile, and that it was constructed over a five-year period using thousands of trained, skilled, thinking people. It consists of incredibly complex and intricate chemical, mechanical, and electrical subsystems that must all function together at precisely the right moments and in the right ways. But if I were to drag that missile into the thoroughfare of a major city and tell people that some chance sequence of fortunate collisions among atomic particles caused it to assemble itself, I'd be laughed out of the city — and rightly so. Yet we are asked to believe something that's infinitely more ludicrous: that the human body came into existence that way.
The Mystery of Information
What's really at issue in the question of earth's origin is the source of the informational specification that organizes the atomic parts into a life-support system. For example, suppose you were to get into your car and I were to instruct you how to reach a particular location in the middle of our country. I might write out seventeen pages of instructions containing much information. Someone else might say to you: "I can get you there a much easier way. All you have to do is turn right — whenever you're in doubt, just turn right." Impressed by these simple instructions, you put them to the test. But very quickly you realize that you're driving around in a circle.
Angry over the time you've wasted, you turn to the seventeen-page specification.
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To be sure, these instructions are very complicated and they contain much information, whereas the other specification, "Turn right," had hardly any information at all. But the complex set of instructions successfully functions to direct you where you need to go. This simple example crudely illustrates the kind of problem we must address in our search for insight into origins. Natural processes are limited and the only specification they can ever produce is, figuratively speaking, "Turn right." But to explain the origin of the world and the complexity of patterns within it, we have to explain the origin of a set of extended instructions — specifications, figuratively speaking, that can take us to "the center of the country."
One pattern we find on earth is life itself. In the past two decades, science has uncovered bits and pieces of life's blueprint that we have begun to analyze with new and powerful mathematical tools. What they tell us is that in looking to nature for the source of life, we've been driving around in circles. Careful studies of the vast magnitude of complexity uncovered by electron microscopes probing living cells indicate that natural forces acting in the time and space of the universe are inadequate to explain the information revealed, and that a Supreme Intelligence is the only known logical explanation for what we see. Simply put, materialism is an inadequate world view to explain what modern tools have disclosed. A similar viewpoint has been expressed by a biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA in 1953. His answer is that we may have been planted here by a supercivilization out among the stars.18 Aside from there not being one shred of physical evidence to support such a view, the question of where they came from is unanswered.
The Bible teaches that the world was created by a Super Intellect, whom it identifies as God. This is consistent with the simplified earlier example with salt and pepper, and the need for an intellect to create functionally coherent patterns by performing acts of separation. If salt and pepper are thoroughly mixed, there is no pattern. A pattern is created by a person or an observer — an intellect — observing specks of black pepper and separating them from pieces of white salt. Intelligence can create complex patterns this way.
An application of this principle might be one of the very valuable original Rembrandt paintings. Rembrandt took colors and, after separating them, located them in different strengths at different places on a canvas. In other words, Rembrandt created complex patterns (paintings) for which he became famous. He was a person, an intellect. Only thus could he create timeless and world-acclaimed art patterns. In recent times some have tried to produce "art" by randomly throwing paint blobs against a canvas. It's fair to say that these efforts have proven much less successful.
Or consider a seamstress who makes a dress; she uses the same basic
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principles. First, she takes cloth and separates it into different shapes. She then proceeds to sew the pieces together, thereby creating a "grand pattern" (possibly copied from another pattern) out of all of the separate shapes. The dress she creates in this way "functions" to fit a person of a particular size and shape and the reason is that intelligence designed it that way. But had the separate shapes been assembled at random, the dress would have turned into a cloth of dubious value.
Or consider yet another example. Before you write a letter with a ballpoint pen, all the ink is located within the pen. But after you write the letter, some of the previously-pooled ink has been separated from the pen and is now located onto paper. Thus, letter-writing does two things: It separates ink and forms a complex pattern over the sheet of paper, and it creates information in terms of the relationship of the symbols to one another. The information contained in the complex pattern on the sheet came from your intellect creating letters by separating and then distributing ink across the paper. Moreover, by organizing the letters into words and the words into sentences, the "complexity" of the ink pattern increased.
The message or information in your letter is the pattern of ink that exists across the sheet. But were your letter exposed to the elements by accidentally dropping it onto the sidewalk, or inadvertently leaving it on a park bench, nature would undo your letter-writing. Natural forces will act over time to "mix" the ink on the paper and destroy the pattern, and the information created when you wrote the letter. The point is this: Nature is a destroyer of patterns and, therefore, of information.
Were we to examine the pattern displayed by a complex rock formation and then return to the same place many years later, we would discover that natural forces had eroded the formation and dissipated the pattern. This simple example, like so many others, is in agreement with the facts of science, and shows that random, chance processes erode rather than create complex patterns. Natural processes are, therefore, a poor explanation for the complex patterns of this world. These patterns are better explained as the product of Intellect.
It is more logical to believe that planet earth functions to sustain life because it was designed to do so. This is the best explanation because it aligns with all of the facts as we know them. If we inquire into the origin of the Intelligence who designed earth, that's a different question — but we have answered the question as to earth's origin. If we speculate that this intelligence resides among the stars in the form of say, some supercivilization, then we ask: "What is its origin?" Conversely, if we say that God designed the earth, then to inquire into his origin is an entirely different matter. The reason is that "God" belongs to a different category, i.e., supercivilizations have life, whereas God is life.
Were we foolish enough to inquire into the origin of "God," we would first need to presume that our inquiry was meaningful — that "God" had
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an origin. If we somehow pass this hurdle, we must next assume that our minds are capable of comprehending the answer. In this case killifish have a better chance of learning the origin of manmade satellites falling into the ocean.
It seems all that can be said with sobriety is that intelligences (you and I) exist on earth. Therefore, it's not unreasonable to suppose that we originated from a higher Intelligence. This is much more logical than to suppose we came from dead dust.
Chapter Nine || Table of Contents
1. Fraser R. The Habitable Earth (1964) Basic Books, NY.
2. Press F. & Siever R. Earth (1982) Freeman, San Francisco.
3. Hutchinson E. et.al. The Biosphere (Energy Cycles) Sci. Am. (1970) 223(3):45.
4. Davies M. & Murray B. The View From Space (1971) Columbia Univ. Press, NY.
5. Imbrie J. & Imbrie J. Science (1980) 207:943 Feb 29.
6. Friedman H. Sun and Earth (1986) ch.4:98 Freeman, NY.
7. Hammond A. Science (1975) 187:245 Jan. 24.
8. Namias J. & Cayan D. Science (1981) 214:869 Nov. 20.
9. Barron E. et.al. Science (1981) 212:501 May 1.
10. Friday A. & Ingram D. Life Sciences (1985) Cambridge Univ. Press Ch. 6:153.
11. Hughes T. Science (1970) 170:630 Nov. 6. Gaskell T. Sci. Jour. (1970) :31 Dec. Llibourty L. Sci. Jour. (1969) :51 Mar.
12. Decker R. and Decker B. Volcanos (1981) Freeman, San Francisco.
13. Thews G. & Hutten H. Biophysics of Respiratory Gas Transport ch. 12 Sec 6:503 Biophysics Hoppe W. et.al. ed. (1983) Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
14. Cotterill R. Cambridge Guide To The Material World (1985) Ch.17:299 Cambridge Univ. Press.
15. Friday A. and Ingram D. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (1985) Ch. 5 Sec.3:136 Cambridge Univ. Press.
16. Stanley S. Earth and Life Through Time (1985) ch.10:288 Freeman, NY.
17. Karlin S. & Taylor H. A First Course In Stochastic Processes (1975) Ch.9 (6:489) Academic Press, NY. Loeve M. On Almost Sure Convergence in Second Berkeley Symposium On Mathematical Statistics and Probability (1951) II:279 Univ. Calif. Press.
18. F. Crick, Life Itself, published by Simon and Schuster, 1982.
