Quantum Non-Linearity: November 2026

Thursday, November 12, 2026

The Discovery Institute and God of the Gaps Part III

(This post is still undergoing correction and enhancement)

In this post I will complete my look at a post by Jonathan McLatchie, a member of the North American Intelligent Design Community (NAID). Jonathan's post can be found here:

Atheist: Why ID Is Not “God of the Gaps” | Science and Culture Today

The previous two parts to this three part series can be found here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Discovery Institute and God-of-the-gaps. Part I

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Discovery Institute and God-of-the-gaps. Part II

My contention is that in spite of how they perceive themselves, the NAID community are nevertheless proposing a God-of-the-Gaps solution to the question of life's origins. In my view Jonathan's post is further evidence of this in spite of its title.

In his post Jonathan quotes the "logical form" of Stephen Meyer's argument for intelligent design which can be found in Meyer's book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.....Viz:

Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.

Firstly, what is "specified information"?

The cosmos presents us with a large variety of patterns, a notable feature of which is the high organization of many of those patterns; in particular, many, if not all of its dynamical patterns allow us to describe them using the very general laws of physics. Whatever "specified information" means it can only ultimately be a category of pattern. So, I think premise one is trying to tell us that this type of pattern, whatever it might be, isn't covered by the laws of physics (="material causes"?). Premise two is telling us that intelligent agents like humans and animals also create patterns, a subset of which are those enigmatic patterns NAID calls "specified information". According to NAID, patterns containing "specified Information" appear not to be generated by the laws of physics.

But here's a question: Are patterns containing "specified information" defined as such because they are only generated by intelligent agents or are they defined by the intrinsic configurational properties of their form? There is no need to answer that question here: All we need know at this juncture is that premises one and two make it clear that when we encounter large amounts of "specified information" (How ever NAID defines it) it is a predictor of intelligent work; in contrast it is not a predictor of the work of physics and chemistry. In short when it comes to configurations containing "specified information" (whatever that is) the NAID community will claim that physical laws are not likely to be an explanation; that is, so-called "specified information" (However defined) shows up as a gap in our physical explanations. Nothing wrong with that if we are talking about patterns generated by cosmically in-house intelligences like humans, animals, AI and aliens: When we are looking at archeological remains, animal nests or monoliths on the moon we are hard put to it to explain their development in terms of the direct action of known physical processes.

As I proposed in parts 1 and 2 of this series, if we are talking about cosmically in-house intelligent agency, intelligence-of-the-gaps is an established category; cf. archeology and SETI. But evolutionists are likely to believe that humans, animals and aliens are themselves a long term (very long term) application of the physical regime (*1). Therefore in that sense evolutionists believe there is really only one type of pattern, namely patterns generated by the physical regime. For evolutionists what is identified as patterns which are the work of cosmically in-house intelligence actually trace back to the physical regime running the universe.

All this changes, however, if we take patterns containing so-called "specified information" as evidence of the transcendent intelligence of God at work. According to the NAID paradigm "specified information" cannot be traced back to the physical regime either by the direct action of that regime or via the evolution of cosmically in-house intelligence. For NAID "specified information" is always dumped directly into the cosmos by God or at most traces back to "specified information" dumped into the creation by God in the form of secondary intelligences like human beings.

This means that for NAID patterns containing "specified information" are axiomatic contingencies and stand in contrast to patterns generated by physics and chemistry. Therefore NAID postulates two kinds of pattern:

1. Patterns generated by physics and chemistry.

2. Patterns containing that mysterious "specified information" which according to NAID is only generated by intelligent action; whether it be the direct action of God or from those depositories of "specified information" such as we have in the configurational patterns we see in the form of humans and animals.

The upshot is that for the NAID community patterns with "specified information" are of an entirely different genus to patterns generated by the cosmic physical regime; NAID's claim is that such patterns are generated by intelligence only, notably by the transcendent Omnigod. A consequence of this NAID paradigm is that any acceptance of standard evolutionary theory becomes taboo: For if intelligences such as humans, animals and aliens have evolved this implies that "specified information" can be created by the physical regime, thus challenging NAID's strict category dichotomy.

"Specified information" is NAID's forever gap in our account of the physical world. These are patterns which they believe cannot be generated by physics and chemistry. Thus, "specified information" is a weasel word for God-of-the-Gaps. Necessarily then the NAID community is an anti-evolution outfit because acceptance of standard evolutionary theory cuts across their notion of a gap in the physical account of the world that NAID identifies as an irresolvable dichotomy between intelligent agency and so called natural forces.

But why does NAID feel the need for God-of-the-Gaps when it is so clear that even the standard evolutionary paradigm presents us with such an improbable scenario in organistion that it also strikes a chord with those deep theological intuitions which some of us possess; namely, that this cosmos with its breath taking organization has its origins and above all its purpose in the aseity of an Omnigod. Those so called "natural forces" look themselves to be a manifestation of so-called "specified information". If so why does NAID continue to appeal to the natural forces vs intelligent design dichotomy? My answer, as I suggested in part II, is that NAID gets it's appeal and support from the popularist "God-did-it vs evolution-did-it" dichotomy. That also explains why NAID is so politically motivated.

Standard evolution itself, if it is true, is a remarkable process: As Christian evolutionist Sir John Polkinghorne said of himself; he is an intelligent design creationist: What Polkinghorne referred to as the amazing fruitfulness of evolution may have been the evidence he was thinking of. Adding to the irony it seems that NAID William Dembski appears to understand that evolution simply passes on the ultimate question of the origins of cosmic organization. See here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Dembski: “I’m not denying evolutionary gradualism, challenging common descent or Natural Selection” (!!!!)

The ironies continue to pile up: Many an atheist thinks like the NAID community: that is, they believe there is a God-did-it vs evolution-did-it dichotomy, making many atheists as pro-evolution as NAID is anti-evolution. But let's face it: Atheism on the subject of meaning and purpose has next to nothing to offer; Brian Cox's universe is very bleak; its only fall back is that human life with all its foibles, contradictions, predicaments, and its unbounded capacity for selfishness and conflict is all the meaning the cosmos has to offer.

****

So my analysis of Jonathan's post is that it only serves to further reinforce that NAID promotes a God-of-the-Gaps paradigm; what an irony! However, in the latter half of his post Jonathan makes a couple of points I would agree with. He quotes atheists Jeffery Lowder and Gregory Dawes as follows:

JEFFERY LOWDER: In order to explain biological information, it’s not enough to posit the existence of an intelligent designer as a potential cause of biological information. In addition, it seems to me that a design explanation must also include a description of the mechanism used by the designer to design and build the thing. In other words, in order for design to explain something, we have to know how the designer designed it. If we don’t know or even have a clue about how the designer did it, then we don’t have a design explanation.

GREGORY DAWES: It is only when you have specified the divine intention in question that we can test your explanation, by asking what else would follow if God did indeed have this intention. And as we have seen, it will not do merely to substitute the explanandum for the posited goal… As we have already seen, this would be a spurious kind of explanation, seriously lacking in empirical content.

I agree with Jonathan that these objections to detecting and positing intelligent agency are not true to life. When it comes to detecting cosmically in-house intelligent design (for example those stone circles which litter the landscape of the UK, or the pyramids) we may initially understand neither the building process nor the purpose behind the circles, but nevertheless have an entirely rational intuitive hunch that intelligent agency was involved. From there we may then strike out in an attempt to discover the building methods and above all the purpose of construction. If I may use the fictional 2001 scenario: The monolith discovered on the Moon was assumed from the start to be the work of a very alien intelligence, but its method of construction was far from clear as was the purpose of the artifact.

For the Christian such as myself, uncovering the methods of creation and above all its purpose is an ongoing and exciting quest.

FOOTNOTES

* 1 The formula I <= S + Log(T) explains why evolution is a slow process.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified. tvreeves@yahoo.co.uk

Quantum Non-Linearity

Thursday, November 12, 2026

The Discovery Institute and God of the Gaps Part III

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION