The Gift of Intelligence & Design

At this precise moment, you are doing something that no other matter in the known universe does: you are evaluating abstract propositions against each other using logical relations, assigning probability estimates, considering counterfactuals, and asking what is true. Not what is useful for your survival. What is true. The rocks outside your window do not do this. The stars do not do this. The chimpanzee, with 98.8% of your DNA, does not do this. You do this. And the capacity you are exercising right now is either a designed feature of reality or an accidental by-product of random mutation that happened to survive because it was useful for collecting food and avoiding predators. Choose one. The implications of your choice are significant.

I. The Brain Numbers

The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, connected by an estimated 100 trillion synaptic connections. Each neuron is not a simple on-off switch. It is an analog integrator that processes inputs from thousands of other neurons simultaneously, with variable weights at each connection, dynamic modulation of the connection strengths through long-term potentiation and depression, and modulation of the entire system by at least 100 identified neurotransmitters. The human brain's information processing capacity has been estimated at approximately 10¹⁵ operations per second (roughly a petaflop), though the relevant metric for abstract reasoning is not operations per second but the capacity for recursive, symbolic, context-sensitive thought that no computational model yet reproduces.

This system arose, according to the unguided evolution narrative, from selection pressure for survival in the African savanna. The problem is that survival does not require calculus. Survival does not require the capacity to evaluate Cantor's theorem, to be moved to tears by a Bach fugue, to feel moral obligation toward a stranger in another country, or to ask whether the universe had a beginning. These capacities are massively in excess of anything natural selection should have produced. They are, to use the technical term, evolutionarily unexplained.

II. C.S. Lewis's Argument from Reason

C.S. Lewis, in Miracles (1947), made the argument from reason with unusual precision. If our cognitive faculties are the products of unguided evolutionary processes, then they were selected for survival value, not truth-tracking. A belief that increases reproductive fitness is preserved; a belief that accurately represents the structure of reality may or may not be preserved, depending entirely on whether accuracy happens to be adaptive in a given environment. There is no reason to think that "what is true" and "what increases survival" are correlated across all domains, including the domain of metaphysical propositions about the origin of the universe.

If naturalism is correct, then the very faculties you are using to evaluate naturalism were not designed for that purpose and cannot be trusted to reach accurate conclusions about it. Alvin Plantinga formalized this as the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN): if naturalism and evolution are both true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable truth-trackers is low or inscrutable, which defeats any belief formed by those faculties, including the belief in naturalism. Naturalism is self-defeating.

III. The Specific Capacities That Should Not Exist

Beyond the general argument, there are specific intellectual capacities that natural selection has no business producing, and that are, on the design hypothesis, exactly what you would expect:

Mathematical intuition. Humans can discover mathematical truths about abstract structures that have no physical instantiation. Cantor's theorem, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the Riemann hypothesis: these are truths about abstract mathematical objects that selection pressure for savanna survival has absolutely no reason to build access to. Eugene Wigner called this "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." Abstract math developed with no physical application consistently turns out to describe physical reality perfectly. This is inexplicable on a survival-fitness account.

Moral realism. Humans have an overwhelming sense that moral obligations are real, not just preferences, but obligations that hold even when they are costly to the obligated. The evolutionary account of morality (kin selection, reciprocal altruism, game-theoretic cooperation) explains the feeling of moral obligation, but it explains it away. It reduces it to a survival-beneficial illusion. If moral realism is true, if some things genuinely are wrong regardless of whether they are adaptive, then there is a moral standard outside the natural order that the natural order is measured against. That requires a moral lawgiver.

Consciousness itself. The "hard problem" of consciousness (David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1996) is the question of why physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to be you? Why is there an inside to your experience: the redness of red, the pain of pain, the felt sense of thinking this thought? No physical account of the brain explains this. Consciousness is the fact that sits outside every reductive account. It is either a miracle of emergence (which requires an explanation of how) or it is the fingerprint of a mind behind the physical universe.

IV. Intelligence as the Best Datum We Have

The argument I am making is simple: Intelligence is a real feature of the universe. The universe contains minds that can understand it. Minds are the only known sources of coded, functional information. Minds are the only known sources of abstract mathematical reasoning. Minds are the only known sources of genuine moral agency. If the universe contains minds, and minds are the only things that produce the kind of specified complexity we see in the universe, the most parsimonious explanation is that the universe was produced by, or is an expression of, a mind that is at least as capable as the minds it produced.

This is not a God-of-the-gaps. It is an argument from the best-known cause of the best-known effects. We know what produces DNA-level information. We know what produces abstract reasoning capacity. We know what produces moral consciousness. In every case, the answer is: mind. The inference to a designing mind behind the universe is the same inference you would make in any other domain where you found these effects without a known material cause.

The following sources constitute the primary intellectual foundations for reviewing and preparing for this kind of argument.

• Lewis, C.S. (1947). Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Geoffrey Bles. Lewis's argument from reason — the first systematic presentation of why naturalism is self-defeating. Chapter 3 is one of the most important pages in twentieth-century philosophy of mind. View on WorldCat ↗
• Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford University Press. The full development of the EAAN — Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self-undermining. The most rigorous version of the argument from reason in contemporary philosophy. View on WorldCat ↗
• Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press. The definitive formulation of the hard problem of consciousness — why physical processes produce subjective experience. Chalmers is not a theist, but his analysis reveals the depth of the problem for materialism. View on WorldCat ↗
• Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press. A committed atheist philosopher's admission that consciousness, cognition, and moral value are not explicable within the materialist framework. The book caused intellectual controversy precisely because Nagel is not a theist. View on WorldCat ↗
• Wigner, E.P. (1960). "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13(1):1–14. The paper that named the problem no one has solved: pure mathematics, developed with no physical application, describes physical reality with uncanny precision. Cited here against the survival-fitness account of mathematical intuition. Search this source ↗
• Hardy, G.H. (1940). A Mathematician's Apology. Cambridge University Press. "There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." Hardy's meditation on mathematical beauty as a real, non-functional perception — evidence of a capacity that natural selection has no account for. View on WorldCat ↗
• ENCODE Project Consortium. (2012). "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome." Nature 489:57–74. The project that overturned forty years of "junk DNA" consensus. Biochemical function found in ≥80% of the human genome. The chimp comparison figure of 98.8% was generated before this data existed — it compares protein-coding exons only (1.5% of each genome). Full genomic comparison yields ~84–88% similarity. Read at Nature ↗
• Britten, R.J. (2002). "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5% counting indels." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99(21):13633–13635. Demonstrates that when insertions and deletions (indels) are counted alongside single-nucleotide differences, human-chimp genomic divergence is approximately 5% — not 1.2%. The widely-cited 98.8% figure applies only to aligned, protein-coding regions. Read at PNAS ↗