Intelligent Design: Solution to the Mystery?

              While watching the movie-documentary “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” in class, I was a bit skeptic as to whether in the end the filmmakers would give us the idea that evolution is once again the highlight of the show for the class. They were saying something about natural selection and Darwin’s infamous On the Origin of Species so I thought that the movie was another fact-filled medium for us students to easily grasp the concepts and principles of evolution, one of our chosen elective subjects for this semester.

              And so, there I was, listening to that film and occasionally glancing my notes on Philosophy (we were going to have an exam after the class), never really giving much attention on the words the scientists on the film say. But when my ears caught something about “Intelligent Design” and “Supreme Intelligence”, my face turned towards the television set and my eyes fixed on the words being typed on the screen. And I said to myself, “This is interesting.”

              I never really imagined that Biology and Philosophy can be joined as one. Seeing one of those philosophers in Biology on T.V. sure made my mind wonder as to how they can incorporate Philosophy in Biology, or is it the other way around? Whatever way it is, one thing is certain: that man is continually in search for knowledge and, whatever field that knowledge may be, he goes on searching for it in order for him to find answers to that never-ending array of questions his wonderful mind contains.

              Philosophers of long ago, including St. Thomas Aquinas, have proposed on ways on explaining the mystery of life. But, since life is in itself a mystery, there is no concrete explanation for it. Aquinas, however, explained life and all its mysteries (e.g. complexity) through another mystery he called the Absolute Perfect Being or God. So the notion of an Intelligent Design is no longer new to us. Of course, most believers would consider the idea of an Absolute Perfect Being rational enough to be accepted by the majority of human beings. But scientists, atheists, skeptics and most nonbelievers would not accept the idea without further proving it by means of science. To prove something as factual and real, humans have adapted not only the philosophical way of proving things, but also the way of scientific reasoning and experimentation. The existence of such being has been proven philosophically by Aquinas. But, the issue being raised here is whether to consider this idea as scientific and not merely religious. That is why scientists of today strive to find ways to solve the mystery scientifically, and at the same time, philosophically.

              How then did they (the proponents of Intelligent Design) come up to the idea that there is indeed no way of solving the mystery of life except through an Intelligent Design? This takes us back to Darwin’s principle of natural selection. It has been explained that natural selection accounts for the complexity of life at the organism level, down to the organ level, up to the cellular level. But how can we decide whether Darwinian natural selection is the reason behind the amazing complexity of life at the molecular level?  Darwin himself set the standard when he acknowledged, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” And this “complex organ” he had mentioned about is today represented by a tiny machine we call bacterial flagellum. Michael Behe, one of Intelligent Design’s proponents, discovered that some systems, such as the bacterial flagellum, seem very difficult to form by such successive modifications, and he calls them irreducibly complex systems.

From the emergence of this discovery, the world of evolution is utterly shaken. More and more irreducibly complex systems, such as the central dogma of Biology, are being realized. Indeed, there is no way that such unique arrangement of molecules can come up just by chance alone. There is a way, that is, a sort of Supreme Intelligence that can arrange molecules into a pattern that will lead to the existence of life. Whatever this Intelligent Being may be (God for Christians and other believers), we ultimately must be very thankful that such being exists, for without it, we would surely not be here.

              Many ideas may come up. More and more questions may arise. Even the acceptance of this Intelligent Being cannot stop us from wondering, asking and finding answers. That is what we are, humans. And as a human having a vast imagination and an ocean of thoughts, I consider myself as an irreducibly complex system. I think everything is. ^C