Someone asked me recently "what is the best evidence for Intelligent Design"? I know that may sound like an oxymoron to many of you, who think that ID is a philosophy or a religion and therefore cannot use evidence, its a matter of belief. [Recent FAQ on ID answers many of these Q.]

But if you are a long-time reader of this blog, you will know that I reject the Kantian divide between religion and science. To quote Albert Einstein, "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." That doesn't sound like strict separation to me, though if anything, I would say lame is too weak a word, "terminal" or "metastasized" might be more appropriate. And likewise blind is also too weak, "heretical" or "apostate" might be better.

Why such strong language? Because St Paul ties the whole point of Christianity to the scientific proof of a historical fact. And Science, whether it wants to admit it or not, only arose in the Christianized West, was founded by Christians, whose practitioners continue to use Christian metaphysics, and who only make progress when they functionally operate as if there is a Christian God. Sure, Einstein may say to the Princeton students that he barely believes in a Spinoza (pantheistic) God, but when he is in the heat of argument with Gnostic Niels Bohr, he insists "God doesn't play dice", which is a peculiar thing for a Spinozan to say (especially to a Gnostic!)

So yes, I do believe that ID can be both a philosophy/religion and use evidence, just as much as I believe that Darwinism can be a scientific theory and depend on philosophy/religion. The truth of the matter is that they are both, perhaps not in equal measures, but certainly in essential importance. For example, there are many books that say the best evidence for Christianity is the Resurrection. And perhaps equally many books that say the best evidence for Darwinism is evolution--the observation of change in species over time (as distinguished from capital "E" Evolution--the theory.)

Then what is the best evidence for Intelligent Design?

I think one defines by saying what it is not. So when ID is defined, it is "not chance". You can look at Dembski's "The Design Inference" and that's basically how it works.

Darwinism has two basic tenets: chance (natural selection), and common descent. I am inclined to say that the best argument for ID comes not from denying chance, but by denying common descent. That is, ID accepts as given that there has been evolution/change/development over time. Some have said "front loading" is the best way to describe this change, sort of like watching a seed sprout and flower from the "front-loading" of the DNA program in the germ of the seed. So common descent is not controverted, but the chance part is, so that species and speciation become like the development of a plant, with all life descending from the divine seed.

My argument is that speciation doesn't follow the analogy of a seed. Rather, it is more like the construction of a building. Carpenters are called in to do the framing, and then they leave and stonemasons do the the facing, and roofers do the roof, and electricians come in and do the wiring. Nothing about the half-finished building tells anyone what it will be, only the architect's blueprints in the hands of the main contractor. The blueprints do not build themselves, nor do they operate autonomously or by chance, but everything is semi-hierarchically arranged toward the goal. Everybody doesn't get the same subset of blueprints, or even know what the details of subsequent contractors jobs. The roofers probably have little concern for the electricians. But if a problem arises, say, an roofers truck is blocking the access to an electrical box, the solution doesn't involve referencing the original blueprints. [Aerospace engineering has a entire speciality devoted to this "systems engineering" problem.]

If one were to use a metric like "volume of enclosed space" or "density of enclosed space" or even "complexity of enclosed space" and then chart this metric for the evolution of the building, it would be very far from linear, in contrast to a growing seed.

So speciation and change are part of a grand plan, though individual parts may have no real idea what will come after them. The front-loading, if you will, is non-obvious to many participants. So how do we know or could we know that the Earth and its ecosystem and evolutionary history is a building and not a sprout?

a) Finding the partial blueprints and reconstructing the master ==> which to a certain extant, we have started to make progress on: typeing the genomes of many organisms, doing the historical development of organisms, etc.

b) Fractal distribution of information in the genome or in ecology or in time, indicate that the system has long-range space/time interactions. Long-range interactions are indicative of information, since random space/time events are diffusive and highly local.

c) Another indication is particularity of species and niches and adaptations. For diffusive information (see Dembski's "No Free Lunch" book) the potential species in "parameter space" must be dense, but when they are sparse, there is no diffusive, random solution. Sparse particularity is the characteristic of very low entropy systems, which are high information systems.

d) I'm not sure how significant this one is, but super-linear growth in information density, or even exponential growth would seem to be indicative of long-range temporal organization. That is, not just information, but information flow is significant for planning. During WWII this was the field of "Operations Research", which addressed the problem of getting the men and material to the front. Likewise, in evolution, how does one get the information to the lifeforms that need it?

All of this means that the "organic" paradigm of life multiplying itself into more and more varied niches as a continuum of evolution from a common ancestor can't explain the actual distribution in space and time.

I've used the analogy of a PC booting up Windows XP as an example of a recursively programmed, non-linear evolution of complexity. Life on Earth and its history are so far from being smooth, that the very thing Darwin set out to explain, cannot be explained by his method: change over time. The best evidence for ID then, is not the inability of the chance hypothesis to explain current information (design inference), but the distribution of information over space and time (e.g. "evolution") which cannot be attributed to a diffusive or even "organic" growth from a common ancestor.

Evolution is the best evidence for ID.