CeleryKills

So, another cloudy PNW Sunday morning, and I posted a new question. I asked what I thought was a fairly simple question. Not an easy question, but a clear one.

At what point does improbability become evidence for design rather than ignorance?

The question sits in an uncomfortable place because it forces a distinction many people would rather avoid. Improbable things happen constantly. Every shuffled deck of cards produces an arrangement so astronomically unlikely that it will almost certainly never occur again. Yet nobody rushes to conclude that a designer arranged the deck merely because the outcome was improbable. Something more is required.

What fascinated me was how few responses actually attempted to identify that “something more.”

Instead, many replies drifted toward sociology.

As Shawn Pretzel put it:

“In the mind of a hard core atheist, never. The probability could literally be 0% an atheists would push back on it.”

One commenter argued that atheists would never accept design under any circumstances. Another insisted that evolution functions as a religion and therefore its adherents are constitutionally incapable of evaluating evidence. The discussion moved from epistemology to tribalism almost instantly.

I kept returning to the same puzzle. Whether atheists are stubborn, theists are stubborn, or everyone involved is stubborn has no bearing on the original question. If improbability becomes evidence for design at some threshold, where is that threshold? How would we recognize it? What principle determines the transition?

The question remained sitting there like an unanswered note on a piano.

Other responses took a different route.

Several commenters bypassed improbability altogether and argued directly for Intelligent Design through the concept of “coded information.” DNA, they claimed, contains coded information. Coded information comes only from minds. Therefore DNA must originate from a mind.

Niels Kreuzer framed the issue this way:

“We DO know that coded information ONLY ever comes from a mind. Therefore, the information encoded in the DNA must have also come from a mind.”

At first glance, this appears to answer the question. On closer inspection, it changes the subject.

The argument depends almost entirely on how one defines the word code.

I found myself returning repeatedly to a linguistic dilemma. When biologists speak about a genetic code, are they describing a literal symbolic language analogous to software and English? Or are they using a scientific metaphor to describe biochemical relationships?

That distinction matters because metaphors are useful tools and terrible evidence.

Meteorologists speak about storms “feeding” on warm water. Nobody concludes that hurricanes possess digestive systems. Physicists describe electrons as having “spin.” Nobody imagines tiny spheres twirling through space. Scientific language frequently borrows familiar concepts to describe unfamiliar phenomena.

The phrase genetic code is no exception.

The letters A, T, C, and G are human symbols imposed upon molecules. DNA itself contains no alphabet. The molecules are not sitting inside cells waiting to be read like tiny novels. They interact chemically according to physical constraints and biological processes (Alberts, Molecular Biology of the Cell, 2022).

Yet this is where the discussion became especially interesting.

One commenter objected that the genetic code cannot merely be a metaphor because codons correspond to amino acids through a system that is not strictly dictated by chemistry. The existence of variant genetic codes in mitochondria and certain organisms, he argued, demonstrates an arbitrary mapping analogous to human symbolic systems.

I actually think this is the strongest version of the Intelligent Design argument because it engages molecular biology rather than merely pointing at complexity and declaring victory.

Still, a gap remains.

Even if biological systems contain coding relationships, it does not automatically follow that minds created them. The conclusion is inserted precisely where the explanation should be. The assertion that “all codes come from minds” derives entirely from human experience with human-made codes. It is an inductive observation about a tiny subset of reality, not a demonstrated law of nature.

A map is not evidence that all territories were drawn.

What struck me throughout the conversation was how often proponents of design treated analogies as conclusions.

DNA resembles a language.

Therefore it was written.

Cells resemble machines.

Therefore they were engineered.

Information resembles software.

Therefore it was programmed.

Each step feels intuitive. But intuition is doing almost all the work.

The same pattern appeared elsewhere in the thread.

One commenter argued that any complex working system constitutes evidence for intelligence. Another claimed that blades of grass and butterfly chrysalises are obviously designed. The word obviously appeared frequently.

I have become suspicious of that word.

Anything genuinely obvious rarely requires extensive philosophical defense. Once “obvious” enters the discussion, it often signals that intuition is being promoted into evidence without submitting to evidential standards.

Snowflakes display extraordinary organization. Crystal lattices exhibit repeating mathematical structures. Rivers generate branching networks. Galaxies form luminous spirals. Complexity appears throughout nature without requiring independent proof of intelligent agency (Sober, Evidence and Evolution, 2008).

A few years ago, I knew someone with a pet hedgehog who had developed a nightly ritual. Every evening, Toge, the hedgehog, would emerge from its enclosure, make a precise lap around the living room, stop at the same corner of the rug, and then waddle back home. Watching it for a week, you could almost feel your brain constructing explanations. Maybe it was patrolling territory. Maybe it preferred that route. Maybe it had some tiny hedgehog purpose known only to itself. The behavior looked intentional because humans are specialists at finding intentions. Then one day the rug was moved a few feet, and the entire “ritual” disappeared. What looked like a meaningful pattern turned out to be an interaction between the animal’s habits and the environment. The interesting lesson was not that Toge’s behavior lacked a cause. It was that the first explanation that felt satisfying was also the one least supported by evidence.

The question is not whether design is possible.

The question is what observation uniquely distinguishes design from non-design.

That distinction kept disappearing.

Perhaps the most revealing moment came when evidence itself became the topic. One commenter defined evidence as anything consistent with a hypothesis. The problem is that countless incompatible explanations can be consistent with the same observation.

Jeanne d’Arc offered a remarkably broad definition:

“Anything that supports a hypothesis is evidence.”

Suppose I find a locked door.

The door is consistent with security.

It is also consistent with privacy.

It is consistent with secrecy.

It is consistent with habit.

Consistency alone does not discriminate among explanations.

Evidence gains power when it narrows possibilities rather than multiplying them (Sober, Evidence and Evolution, 2008; Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959).

That is why the original question remains stubbornly difficult.

Improbability by itself proves remarkably little. Every actual outcome was improbable before it occurred. Design requires more than astonishment at complexity. It requires a method for distinguishing intentional arrangement from natural processes without quietly assuming the conclusion in advance.

The deeper I followed the conversation, the more I noticed a recurring dilemma.

Whenever design advocates attempted to move beyond improbability, they appealed to code, information, symbolism, machinery, or purpose. Yet each of those concepts carried human associations imported into biology. The argument never quite escaped the gravity of analogy.

And there sits the unresolved question.

If improbability alone is insufficient, and analogy alone is insufficient, what exactly converts an unlikely event into evidence for a designer rather than evidence that our understanding remains incomplete?

That, I think, is the question worth asking.

It is also the question that most of the conversation worked very hard not to answer.

References

• Alberts, B., et al. Molecular Biology of the Cell (2022).
• Maynard Smith, J. The Concept of Information in Biology (2000).
• Mayr, E. What Evolution Is (2001).
• Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
• Shannon, C. E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948).
• Sober, E. Evidence and Evolution (2008).
• National Academy of Sciences. Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008).