1. Many scientists (including some Christian ones) argue that introducing God or a “designer” as a valid scientific explanation will be a “science stopper” – that it will stifle research or produce only trivial “god of the gaps” type of answers. 

The problem with this objection is that it assumes that all gaps in the scientific record must await a naturalistic explanation regardless of how ad hoc. It also assumes that naturalistic science has the unlimited resources to fill every gap in nature given enough time without suggesting how much time is enough. Finally, the objection assumes that suggesting the intervention of design ipso facto precludes any further scientific investigation when nothing could be further from the truth. The design inference is itself the end product of a scientific exploration. Even so, it leaves open the question of modality, that is, how the entity came to be.

Indeed, it is illegitimate to jump to a proscriptive generalization before all of our scientific resources have been exhausted. Therefore, filling the gaps with just-so, empirically unverifiable, ad hoc naturalistic explanations is just as questionable as jumping prematurely to a design explanation. Yet, we must eventually come to proscriptive generalizations, and we do so regularly. Scientific journals do not publish articles by geo-centrists or flat-earth theorists; we do not find stories in Scientific American about expeditions in search of Cyclops or centaurs; and we do not practice medicine based on the four humors. We cannot wait indefinitely for an explanation, and an attitude that precludes any explanation that involves a designer, even if it may be the best explanation, is one that exhibits an a priori commitment to naturalism, itself a scientifically unverifiable ideology.

2. Stephen Jay Gould has argued that the world consists of some very bad design. He insists that an omnipotent Creator would have done a better job. Therefore, the universe was not created, but is just the result of chance plus time.  

Even an allegedly “bad” design is still a design. But by what criteria are we to declare a design to be bad? And by what criteria are we to recognize an ideal design. Those who propound the “bad-design” argument seldom if ever propose just what an optimal design might look like. Does the possibility that the Creator may prefer a menagerie of diverse contraptions make him any less a designer? A souped-up rattle-trap may not be a Mercedes, but it is still the invention of intelligence. Also, the Creator’s concerns may be more those of an artist. Perhaps he values the aesthetic and the unusual over the optimally mechanistic.

Finally, if we are to think of the Creator as an engineer, then we must include engineering principles in our definition of optimality. Real designers strive for constrained optimization, seeking to strike a balance among many conflicting objectives. As finite human beings, we cannot possibly comprehend all such deliberations of a transcendent and infinite Designer. Therefore, Gould begs the question, and assumes human omnipotence in deciding how the Designer should go about his business.

3. If God made the universe, then who made God?

This question commits a category fallacy. It is like asking “how much does my memory of my mother weigh?” God by definition is a necessary, self-existent being and therefore not a “makeable” entity. This is what both theists and atheists mean when they refer to God. He is not a thing within the spatio-temporal world of cause and effect. He transcends the natural world and requires no causal antecedent to explain him.

4. We should not be surprised by the data we find in the physical universe, since this data is itself necessary for the existence of human observers in the first place. This world just happens to be one that supports intelligent life, so it is not at all amazing that we apprehend this.

The fallacy in this argument is that it assumes that intelligent design advocates believe that any sequence of events could have led to intelligent life. However, this is not true. ID advocates hold that there is one and only one such sequence possible, and we should be amazed that we are here to observe its effects. The confluence of these forces in just the right combination to produce life was highly unlikely given the delicate balance required among these forces.

5. Richard Dawkins (and others) criticize the notion of "irreducible complexity" as an "argument from personal incredulity." Dawkins asserts that "even if the foremost authority in the world can't explain some remarkable biological phenomenon, this doesn't mean that it is inexplicable" (Blind Watchmaker, 39). Dawkins then goes on to argue that modern complex systems have arisen gradually because they had enough time to do so. Is irreducible complexity simply a "God of the gaps" argument in biochemical disguise? Why is it a serious challenge to "naturalism of the gaps"? 

Irreducible complexity seems to have at least equally if not more explanatory power and scope than evolution, particularly at the biochemical level. If science is largely in agreement that the molecular level is the end of the line, then these are at last the ultimate life processes for which Darwinism must account. But the mechanism of natural selection can only work on finished products. It cannot seem to demonstrate how these finished products came to be as they are at the molecular level. The imaginative evolutionary just-so stories that have had such a hypnotic affect over the past century break down under our high-powered microscopes.

The complexity of life at this level requires that each component within a molecular machine be minimally functional for the machine to accomplish its vital purpose. If a mousetrap is of no good use unless all of its components are immediately fully functional, how much more a molecular machine such as the bacterial flagellum. These microscopic machines confront us with the question of how organisms could have emerged at all let alone evolved if these fundamental processes were not minimally functioning from the beginning, all components in place. See the video below for a wonderful depiction of this awesome phenomenon.

Blessings,

Arnie Gentile