Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

Some critics of intelligent design portray the case for intelligent design as a fallacious argument from ignorance. They claim proponents of the argument affirm intelligent design only because of the implausibility of various naturalistic processes (NP) as causal explanations for the origin of the specified information, the key effect (E) that needs to be explained in living systems. Nevertheless, the specified information of DNA implicates a prior intelligent cause, not only because various naturalistic or materialistic origin-of-life scenarios fail to explain it, but also because we know that intelligent agents can and do produce information of this kind. Thus, in addition to a premise about how natural processes lack causal adequacy, the argument for intelligent design (ID) presented here also cites evidence of the power of intelligent agents to produce functional or specified information. The argument as stated, thus, does not fail to provide a premise affirming positive evidence for the adequacy of a preferred cause. The argument specifically includes such a premise. Therefore, it does not commit a fallacious argument from ignorance. The fallacious form of the ID argument as portrayed by ID critics is depicted in the top half of this figure. The valid form of the argument presented in this book as an inference to the best explanation is depicted in the bottom half of the figure.