I highly recommend Steven Meyers's book Signature in the Cell. Nevertheless, in this post I'm going to focus on a aspect of his argument that seems to be a failure.
Setting aside the question of how life evolved, Meyers focuses on the origin of life. He shows how even the simplest known living things have an extremely complex teleology: they appear to be designed. Darwinian natural selection cannot explain this apparent design because for natural selection to get off the ground, there must already be a living (self-reproducing) system in existence. Meyers points to the interdependence of, on the one hand, the proteins that act as machines to perform the functions maintaining an organism's life, and, on the other hand, the DNA and RNA molecules that contain the information without which those proteins cannot be constructed. He demonstrates the implausibility of the RNA-world hypothesis, and of metabolism-first alternatives. He claims that the hypothesis of a designer provides the best explanation for the apparent design in biology. And he says that this is a properly scientific inference, which takes the same form as inferences in geology and other sciences that study the past, for it appeals to the vera causa criterion championed by Darwin himself: the best explanation for ancient events should appeal to causes now known to be in operation. Minds are the only things now known to be capable of originating complex teleology (i.e., apparent design). And since other possible explanations are either unavailable before the origin of life (natural selection) or poor explanations (chance, necessity, or combinations thereof), the theory of intelligent design (henceforth ID) should be accepted on scientific grounds as the best explanation for apparent design in biology.
Meyers has consistently distinguished ID from any religious or philosophical implications
that might be drawn from it. It is analogous, in his view, to the
big-bang theory: the old steady-state universe was a more intellectually
comfortable home for an atheist; the big-bang theory seems to point in
the direction of a first cause that transcends the physical world. But
when one makes this inference to a first cause (whether justified or not) one has stepped outside of science. But the fact (if
it is a fact) that big-bang cosmology entails, or suggests, something
like the existence of God, does not make the big-bang theory itself
non-scientific. Similarly, the design hypothesis is a scientific
inference from the empirical evidence. It does not seek to identify the
nature of the designer. It only postulates that some mind is, or some
minds are, responsible for the very complex teleology that is present in
all known living things. As far as the ID theory goes, those minds could be physically
embodied, like our own minds. If that seems implausible, then the ID
theory might seem to point to a transcendent designer, as the big-bang
theory might seem to point to an ex-nihilo creator; but the fact that that inference from the ID theory is beyond science does not make the inference to ID non-scientific.
Now, my own view is that science and philosophy overlap that philosophical assumptions are equally present in evaluating the evidence for both Darwinism and ID, and that teleological and cosmological arguments for God's existence, and their rebuttals, can be legitimately called scientific arguments. But for this blog post, I am going to assume, arguendo, that a truly scientific inference can be distinguished from one that goes beyond science. And I aim to demonstrate that ID cannot be a good inference if it is of a purely scientific nature.
