Christian apologist (and former atheist) “Jim” Warner Wallace knows quite a lot about design, having earned a bachelor’s degree in design from California State University and a master’s degree in architecture from UCLA. Wallace also worked as a homicide detective for many years, in a job where he had to be able to distinguish deaths that were intentional from deaths that were not. Wallace writes well, and his Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels (David C. Cook, 2013) is an apologetic masterpiece. So naturally, when I came across a post over at Evolution News and Views, featuring his views on Intelligent Design, I was very interested to hear what he had to say.
In his interview with Center for Science & Culture research coordinator Brian Miller, “Jim” Warner Wallace listed what he referred to as eight attributes of design. Wallace emphasized that a strong case could be made for saying that an object was designed, even on the basis of its possessing only a few of these attributes, but that when taken together, they constitute a case for design which is certain beyond all reasonable doubt. The cumulative nature of the case is what makes it so strong.
Without further ado, here are Wallace’s eight attributes of design:
1. Could random processes (i.e. chance alone) produce this object?
2. Does it resemble something that you know is designed?
3. Does it have a level of sophistication & intricacy best explained by design?
4. Is it informationally dependent – that is, does it require information to get it done?
5. Is there evidence of goal-direction?
6. Can natural law get it done?
7. Is there any evidence of irreducible complexity?
8. Is there evidence of decision, or choices, that were made along the way, that can’t be explained by chemistry and physics?
I’d like to offer my own brief comments on Wallace’s eight attributes:
1. Could random processes (i.e. chance alone) produce this object?
By itself, this attribute doesn’t yield the inference that an object was designed. It needs to be combined with attribute 6, which rules out natural law as an explanation for the object. But even if 1 and 6 are both true, it still doesn’t follow that law and chance working together could not produce an intricate object which neither of them could generate alone.
2. Does it resemble something that you know is designed?
Resemblance to a designed object does not justify the inference to design. Wallace’s attribute trades on an unfortunate ambiguity here, confusing (a) a resemblance in structure between an object known to be designed and one which looks designed, with (b) a resemblance in causal history between the former object and the latter. The point of Darwin’s argument in his Origin of Species was that resemblances of type (a) do not warrant justified design inferences, in and of themselves, and that two objects with wildly different causal histories may end up looking alike. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was intended to provide a causal history that was capable of generating objects that look designed, but which have no designer.
3. Does it have a level of sophistication & intricacy best explained by design?
I have to confess that emotionally, my sympathies are very much with Wallace here. Back in the 1980s, the breathtaking level of sophistication that can be found in even the simplest living cell made a vivid impression on biochemist Michael Denton, who wrote:
Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler & Adler, 1986, p. 250.)
However, critics will object that the complexity of a city or a factory is not irreducible: cities, like factories, can be constructed one step at a time. That being the case, they say, there is no reason in principle why blind (or non-foresighted) processes are incapable of producing these complex structures.
Even so, I cannot help wondering whether the cell is in a special category of its own:
4. Is it informationally dependent – that is, does it require information to get it done?
The three tricky questions which leap to mind here are: (a) what kind of information; (b) how much information; and (c) how should the quantity of information be properly calculated, anyway?
5. Is there evidence of goal-direction?
Goal-direction, or teleology, is of two kinds: intrinsic (directed at the good of the entity itself) and extrinsic (designed purely for the benefit of some other entity). Teleology of the latter kind obviously implies design. However, in order to show that even intrinsic teleology indicates design, one needs to appeal to a philosophical argument rather than a scientific one. As philosopher Edward Feser has pointed out, Aristotle’s own view was that goal-directedness does not require a mind which consciously intends the goal. By contrast, the Scholastic philosophers argued, in the Middle Ages, that the very fact that unconscious things exist whose natures direct them towards certain goals can only be made sense of if there is a Divine Intelligence which orders the world. (Feser outlines the Scholastic argument in an essay titled, Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide, in Philosophia Christi, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2010. See also his blog article, Atheistic teleology?, July 5, 2012.)
At any rate, the point I wish to make here is that goal-direction, taken by itself, cannot be said to constitute scientific or forensic evidence for design, unless the goal is an external one.
6. Can natural law get it done?
See my remarks on attribute 1 above.
7. Is there any evidence of irreducible complexity?
It is worth noting that Professor Michael Behe has never said that irreducibly complex systems cannot evolve naturally; rather, his point is that their evolution by a roundabout route (exaptation), while theoretically possible, is practically impossible for any system containing a large number of parts.
In his interview, “Jim” Warner Wallace made much of Behe’s example of the bacterial flagellum. However, the following passage from an article in New Scientist magazine by Michael Le Page (16 April 2008) reveals the weakness of Wallace’s case:
The best studied flagellum, of the E. coli bacterium, contains around 40 different kinds of proteins. Only 23 of these proteins, however, are common to all the other bacterial flagella studied so far. Either a “designer” created thousands of variants on the flagellum or, contrary to creationist claims, it is possible to make considerable changes to the machinery without mucking it up.
What’s more, of these 23 proteins, it turns out that just two are unique to flagella. The others all closely resemble proteins that carry out other functions in the cell. This means that the vast majority of the components needed to make a flagellum might already have been present in bacteria before this structure appeared.
It has also been shown that some of the components that make up a typical flagellum – the motor, the machinery for extruding the “propeller” and a primitive directional control system – can perform other useful functions in the cell, such as exporting proteins.…
…[W]hat has been discovered so far – that flagella vary greatly and that at least some of the components and proteins of which they are made can carry out other useful functions in the cells – show that they are not “irreducibly complex”. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
Nick Matzke’s 2006 article, Flagellum evolution in Nature Reviews Microbiology, over at Panda’s Thumb, is also well worth reading. Intelligent Design advocates have often claimed that the bacterial flagellum contains a large number of unique components. As Matzke convincingly shows, they’re wrong, period.
Of course, this is not the end of the story, and Professor Behe discusses what he views as further evidence for the design of the bacterial flagellum in his book, The Edge of Evolution (The Free Press, New York, 2007, pp. 87-101) – namely, the intricacies of intra-flagellar transport and the precisely co-ordinated timing required for the construction of a single bacterial flagellum. However, the point I want to make here is that the assertion that irreducible complexity, in and of itself, constitutes evidence for design is factually mistaken, as Dr. Douglas Theobald’s elegantly written article on the subject at Talk Origins illustrates so aptly.
8. Is there evidence of decision, or choices, that were made along the way, that can’t be explained by chemistry and physics?
If there were any positive evidence for choices being made in the four-billion-year history of life, then I would certainly regard it as evidence for design. However, in order to infer the existence of a choice, it is not enough to rule out physics and chemistry as explanations; one must also rule out chance. Why, for instance, is life left-handed instead of right-handed? Is this a choice made by life’s Creator, or an accident? Who knows?
Conclusion
I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully of “Jim” Warner Wallace, as I have enjoyed reading his writings. His recent book, A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe, which I have not read yet, appears to have been favorably reviewed and looks intriguing. However, I have to say that Wallace’s eight attributes of design need a lot more work, in order to refine them.
What do readers think? And how would readers modify Wallace’s criteria for design? Over to you.
Then we are back to the car in the desert. Just because it LOOKS like a designed car in the desert, it is not safe to infer it is, without any other historical information about the object to go with. So if you drove past one, you can’t really tell someone you saw an abandoned car, because its not safe to assume that.
You mean, item in the desert that looks like a car? First make sure it’s not a mirage. If it isn’t examine it closely. If it’s actually a car, and not just something that looks a bit like a car, it’s pretty safe to infer that it was designed in your, my (and I’m guessing Vince’s and dazz’s) opinion.
As I said a long time ago on this thread (and on others too, IIRC) there are resemblances and resemblances. The “old man” that recently fell off that mountain in New Hampshire, really did resemble an old man.
BTW, what is the point you are trying to make with this car biz?
walto,
Sorry, got it. Why do you think it is unsafe to make this assumption?
It’s something like, “So you admit there are designed things? I win!” Has happened to me more than once…
OMG
So, is each snowflake a result of pure chance, or pure intentional design?
This is a whole spool of fallacies all tangled together. We rational people freely admit that humans design things. We know, for example, that cars are designed, not because of some CSI or FSCOI score or some such silliness, but rather because humans design cars. There’s no evaluation of, “well, it resembles a car…” Good grief!
But here’s the real kicker: that humans design things indicates absolutely nothing about whether there are any other intelligent agents out there with the capability to design things. And if there are such other agents out there, human design capability indicates squat about how any other agents might go about designing their things. So really, the whole ID argument is just plain silly. The idea that some non man-made thing kinda, sorta, maybe resembles human design is just begging the question with a bad analogy tagged on for bad measure.
To note how silly the argument is, forensics doesn’t bother with ID theory or anything like this “resembles” argument – it doesn’t have to. It has a perfectly good approach in the known, accepted scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology. Forensics doesn’t even identify perps; it provides the scientific evidence that detectives use to do that work. So ID is worthless in this field. No need for any, “well…the blood splatter kinda looks like a unicorn, so it must have been a designed injury as opposed to a natural injury.”
So a car or a watch or…whatever item found in a desert would be analyzed not for any similarity to what the item resembles, but rather whether said item actually is an item made by humans. Pretty easy really.
I would guess that the committed design theorist would have to say that crystals can be explained entirely in terms of laws of physics, whereas cells cannot be. So we need Something Else to explain cells, but not crystals.
And — according to their hypothesis — it has to be intelligent design, because it can’t be chance (whatever that is) or necessity (whatever that is).
Bill resembles a spam bot. Spam bots are designed.
Therefore eggs, bacon, sausage and Spam
I like how more recently Wallace dropped the “efficiency/irreducible complexity” bit that fit his acronym in the past, and replaced it with just “irreducible complexity.” The efficiency aspect is compromised by life’s dependency upon heredity (like rigid bird wings being fused from bones that would have become articulated in their ancestors), and of course it’s what an actual designer would strive for, but, unfortunately, he was thinking too much about design (and the acronym)’ previously, not like a good IDist who doesn’t ever deal with the constraints and limits of evolution rife throughout life.
Efficiency was nice for the acronym, not so good when you’re claiming that a superintelligence made life complete with a lot of ancient holdovers that no good designer would retain. Who needs real design criteria, when you’re trying to claim that a host of historical accidents (albeit coupled to natural selection) constitute design?
Glen Davidson
Yep. They usually won’t claim crystals are designed, because we know too much about the natural processes that form them. They have to categorize everything as either pure chance or design, because admitting anything else opens the door that they don’t want to walk through (evolution).
🙂 🙂
I guess that hasn’t got too much spam.
I used to wonder why we humans don’t design planes with flapping wings or why we don’t design ground vehicles with legs and feet. I used to think it was because those structures are just too complex for us to mimic, but apparently that isn’t the case at all.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the real reason is that birds are not actually designed to fly: some of them simply learn how to user the wing structure they have to do so. Even some fish, animals clearly more suited to swimming, learn they can fly too, but who’s going to argue they were designed to do so?
This is the real difference between biological objects and man-made designs; biological organisms develop and adapt their features to operate in their environments. Man-made designed objects do not adapt at all.
Yes right, brilliant analysis Erik, that’s just what I said. And spiders walking across paint to make pictures of deer is part of the context of deciding if a painting was intended or not.
Gee, you and Dazz are smart as a whip.
Well, Wallace has given you 8 criteria to consider when deciding if something is likely designed or not, you could try reading them. How many of them do a snowflake posses? They look nice?
Um, no, I think what you meant to say, as an evolutionist, has to be, they just so happened to randomly get some accidental features at just the right time, and they turned out to be pretty useful. Let’s tell it like it is shall we?
Animals don’t adapt, they get lucky mistakes.
I asked for your opinion, my friend. Are you afraid to open that door?
Say we endorse those criteria and agree that anything that meets five or more of them is quite likely to be designed. Now what?
Whilst driving by at 50 miles an hour?
An Asian friend of mine once showed me a quartz crystal she bought as a feng-shui item for her home. Apparently natural crystals are believed to have powers useful in feng-shui. At first glance it appeared natural. Why? Because I had seen many quartz crystals before, in natural rock matrix, and this example had a similar shape. It matched a pattern in my mind of what natural quartz crystals look like.
But I also happened to have more detailed experience than my friend. It so happens that I cut gemstones as a hobby. I have taken natural crystals and cut/polished them to make gemstones. On close examination, I could tell the facets of my friend’s crystal had been aggressively polished. The crystal may have been completely natural at one time, but it had undergone some “redesign” which removed natural imperfections in the surface. This presumably was done to make it look more “flawless” and worthy of a higher price when sold to inexperienced buyers. It was only because I knew about the process of polishing and it’s visual result, and I knew that natural crystals are rarely that smooth, that I recognized that the crystal had been polished. The lesson is that it is easy to be fooled as to whether something is natural or not, if you don’t know the process by which it can acquire certain outward characteristics. In other words, you need 1) to look CLOSELY, (deep versus shallow resemblance) and 2) acquire a detailed understanding of how things can arrive at a particular state. It often helps to ask someone with experience.
Did I tell my friend about the fraud? No. She would have just gone out and spent more money on more crystals, which would not achieve anything. I told her it was a nice crystal, and that was that.
I think it would be a stretch to claim that a snowflake passes even one of Wallace’s test.
Door firmly closed.
How can almost every snowflake (there are exceptions) have six-sides if it is a purely random process?
If dice came up sixes every time, I would suspect some monkey business.
Fair Witness,
That’s an amazing story. There was a rock, that someone polished (with intent), and there was a person who didn’t realize that someone had polished it.
Whoa! Maybe Erik was right, we can’t look at something and compare it to other known things, then make inferences about its origins…, instead we have to..Wait, what is the other thing we have to do? How did Erik put it, we have to “observe AND analyse”? In other words, not just look, also think?
Or look at the price tag?
Did Wallace say one attribute of intelligently created design is that it will have six sides?
I missed where he wrote that . Shame on VJ.
Now Wallace is correct.
Now we just have to figure out why VJ wrote that nonsense?
Pretty simple really.
I honestly have no idea what you’re getting at. I think wallace’s list is slapdash and overlapping, but it’s not completely stupid–and vince never says it is. My question to you is, suppose it’s not worthless. So what? What’s new or interesting there? How does it your theistic position, in your view?
8 attributes of a skeptic.
🙂
If follows that the alleged “science” of evolution isn’t any such thing. Neither Darwin nor Dawkins had a scientific method to detect “non-design” or even “apparent non-design.” They lack any replacement for design. They have no designer substitute. The very idea is ludicrous.
Which is why TSZ is such a hoot.
It’s dazztastic!
Even if this is true of phoodoo (a big if), it’s not true of me. We know the sorts of things that can be produced given an intelligent cause, we have no idea when it comes to so-call “unintelligent” causes. By what means do we determine that a given cause is an unintelligent cause? Scientifically.
No such scientific metric exists. Which is why TSZ is such a fun place to post.
Progress!
No one knows what chance is. Nor what necessity is. nor how the two can collaborate in any meaningful/purposeful way to accomplish anything.
Law requires a lawgiver. It is imposed. Science doesn’t explain laws. It doesn’t know where they come from. It just happened, that’s all. Just another form of chance.
From the OP:
It might make a the case an object is designed, but it doesn’t make the case that an object is NOT designed. I think everyone can agree we can make a reasonable case that something is designed. We do it all the time.
So where is the skeptic’s case for how to tell something is NOT designed? They have none.
Mung,
Huh?
Hi walto.
There seemed to be some confusion up thread about what Wallace was proposing to demonstrate.
For example:
I don’t think that Wallace gives us criteria for deciding whether something is NOT designed. That would be like trying to prove a negative.
How does the Lawgiver impose those laws on energy and matter? It just happens?
The pleasure is mutual,I’m sure.
Yes, I will agree with that.
Furthermore, if we went with Eriks claim, that using rationale to decide design is not science, because we can’t use empirical numbers for the data, then science shrivels down to a very minuscule art; basically just chemistry and a little physics.
WE could make bug spray and food additives but do little else.
Do you have a problem with proving negatives (such as that bachelors are really NOT married)?
What’s the use of proving design or even arguing about it when it cannot be distinguished from non-design?
The problem is deeper: Design is undefined. There cannot be any science about something undefined. A basic feature of any definition is to distinguish the thing from that which is not that thing, so that we know what we’re talking about. Until then we are just wasting time.
Yes, he is.
Mung,
And that’s just the way you like it, you submissive slave, you.
Eugh, have you guys not gotten over that silly kind of sematics yet? Creation requires a creator. Paintings require a painter. Codes require a coder. Laws require a lawgiver etc. etc.
But whether it really is a “creation”, or a “code” or a “law” is then what is in question. You assume it is, but we’re not joining you in that assumption.
By even calling it a law, you are begging the question that it is a law. But that’s what is being questioned. Is it a law?
Here’s another fact we know about laws: You’re free to disobey them. Yet that isn’t true of the “laws” of physics, which implies they’re probably not really laws in the sense that laws given by human lawgivers are. In fact, no law given by humans holds prescriptive power over the behavior of matter and energy.
The physical laws are observations about the behavior of physical reality. They’re descriptions. A regularity we take to hold until such a time as it is observed not to hold. Technically we don’t really know whether they always hold. It’s a working assumption. One that has been useful in practice.
But why are they regular and how did they come to be that way? Well we don’t know, and we don’t really solve that by just sticking the “law” label on them and declaring that therefore they were made by lawgivers.
Here’s what we know about lawgivers:
1. They’re made of flesh and blood and belong to the species Homo Sapiens.
2. They’ve never made any laws that dictate the behavior of physical reality.
In every way we understand the terms law and lawgiver, the “laws” of physics defy the term.
I do. Or at least, I know what I mean by those terms when I use them.
That much we agree on. I don’t think the accomplishments of chance and necessity (of which there are many, for example you, and the planet we live on) have any intrinsic purpose or meaning.
Hi, guys. We don’t need criteria for both being designed and not being designed. If there are criteria that you like for something having been designed, then whatever fails to have enough of them is not designed.
Then your problem is even more deep, as both “evolution” and “not-designed” are not defined; so clearly evolutionary theory is not science.
The laws of physics defy the laws of physics!
Rumraket could be in for a Nobel Prize!
Umm…no. That’s really not what I would say at all. Because it’s inaccurate.
I’ll be happy to tell it like it is if you’ll agree to read it like it is.
That’s not what the evidence indicates.
What, are you just running around with goalposts now, Phoodoo? Try planting your claim in the sand and sticking with it.
But regardless, even at 50 MPH, judging something is man-made is not that tough.
I agree.
Again we agree!
You are very magnanimous today!
I don’t think that follows at all. Just because we lack enough evidence to adjudicate that x is y it does not follow that x is not y.
A verdict of not guilty in a murder trial does not establish that the defendant is not a murderer.