Dawkins: Intelligent Design Is a Scientific Hypothesis

By David Klinghoffer

As I was writing this, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright took a poll on X. He posed the following question: “Is Intelligent Design a scientific hypothesis?” Wright is a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an advisor for Atheists for Liberty. He has received criticism for defending the scientific objectivity of gender. I thought it could be worth telling him that no less a figure than atheist biologist Richard Dawkins finds the idea of a cosmic designer to be a “scientific hypothesis” albeit, Dawkins thinks, a mistaken one.

In 2024 in New York, Dawkins participated in a moving public dialogue with former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is also a former Muslim. She had not long before announced her conversion to Christianity from atheism for what she describes as “very subjective” reasons. It was in response to a “personal crisis”: “I lived for about a decade with intense depression and anxiety and self-loathing. I hit rock bottom. I went to a place where I actually didn’t want to live anymore but wasn’t brave enough to take my own life.” Faith rather than suicide was her way out of the crisis.

Dawkins answered kindly that belief in a designer is more than a mere subjective response: “You appear to be a theist,” he told her. “You appear to believe in some kind of higher power. Now, I think that the hypothesis of theism is the most exciting scientific hypothesis you could possibly hold.” Hold that thought in your mind.

Unsurprisingly, Dawkins wasn’t giving up his own atheism. But he did further emphasize the point above: “The idea that the universe was actually created by a supernatural intelligence is a dramatic, important idea. If it were true, it would completely change everything we know. We’d be living in a totally different universe. That’s a big thing. It’s bigger than personal comfort and nice stories and these things. The idea that the universe has lurking beneath it an intelligence or supernatural intelligence that invented the laws of physics, that invented mathematics, is a stupendous idea, if it’s true.”

What Dawkins is describing here is the design argument from the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and from “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in science, championed by everyone from intelligent design proponent Stephen Meyer to Nobel-Prize winning scientists such as Arno Penzias and Charles Townes. And although Dawkins rejects the arguments as untrue, he frankly concedes that the arguments are scientific. This is a remarkable admission, granting what design theorists have long insisted, namely that the theory of intelligent design is every bit as scientific as a materialistic theory such as neo-Darwinism.

The design hypothesis could be wrong, or it could be right. But we should weigh it on its own terms as the scientific hypothesis it is. Thank you to Richard Dawkins for pointing that out.

As philosophers of science have shown, there are multiple, differing, sometimes overlapping criteria for what constitutes a scientific theory, the criteria differing based on the particular scientific discipline in question and on who’s doing the scorekeeping. This is why there is no quicker way to drive a philosopher of science to distraction, particularly one with a good grasp of the evolving and differing methodologies of multiple scientific disciplines, than to ask, what is the checklist for a properly scientific theory.

Stephen Meyer has written extensively on what in the philosophy of science is known as the demarcation issue—that is, the issue of defining the boundary or boundaries between science and non-science. As he shows, whatever conventional criteria one invokes, intelligent design fares just as well as Darwinism, the only exception being the question-begging rule—rightly rejected in various mainstream scientific disciplines—that intelligent causes must not be invoked in a scientific theory. Both theories involve inferences to what occurred in the distant past. Both appeal to a suite of physical evidence. And as Meyer shows, reasoning in the field of intelligent design draws on Darwin’s own method of historical scientific reasoning.

Many scientists, rightly or wrongly, carry a bias in favor of scientific investigation and scientific theories focused on natural phenomena that can be observed happening repeatedly in the present. Not for them are the mysteries of ancient natural history; give these scientists the activities of nature in the here and now. The prejudice is understandable. While the historical sciences have made extraordinary breakthroughs in unraveling many mysteries of the past, it is undeniable that they face a daunting challenge not faced by scientists focused on present phenomena: namely, the historical scientist is investigating something that happened in the past and cannot study it at the time it was occurring (for example, the Cambrian explosion).

Whether or not the prejudice against the historical sciences is justified, it does not apply to mathematical biologist Richard Sternberg’s formulation of the idea that nature displays evidence of intelligent design. . . . Sternberg argues that the information in DNA, a physical medium, cannot alone account for what we find in organismal life. Neither can other material elements in the cell. The logic and the math are not even close. Instead, a source of direction or agency—an immaterial genome—must exist elsewhere, outside of space and time, in a transcendent reality like that sketched by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. With modern science, Plato thus obtains his “revenge.” The eerie and unusual nature of Sternberg’s conclusions might lead one to overlook the fact that his subject matter faces no challenge of the kind faced by historical science. If he is right, Sternberg strengthens the case for design by inferring that intelligent agency operates in life at this very moment. His theory explains phenomena that occur repeatedly in the present—in every cell, in every developing embryo.

Yes, Sternberg’s hypothesis invokes something immaterial. We can’t actually see this non-physical input. But as with various iconic theories in physics, it invokes for evidence observable effects that repeatedly occur in the present. One cannot observe the law of gravity as an entity in itself. But one can observe its effects repeatedly in the present. In the same way, one can observe the effects of an immaterial genome that veritably shouts teleology, busy as an entire hive of bees working in marvelous concert, and doing marvelous, life-giving things right under our noses that defy the material-genome paradigm.

In contrast, modern evolutionary theory’s explanation for the Cambrian explosion posits, through no fault of its own, a causal story for the Cambrian explosion (gradual evolution via random mutations and natural selection) that, until a time machine is invented, we have no means of directly observing. In this regard the design hypothesis for the Cambrian explosion is in the same boat, a boat crowded with theories in the historical sciences, from design to evolutionary biology to historical geology and all manner of historical sciences in between.

One might object that the immaterial genome, and the agency it suggests, are not only immaterial but teleological, thereby dooming the immaterial genome hypothesis to the status of being unscientific. But such an objection boils down to question-begging—the materialist ruling out immaterial teleological causation by fiat, replacing the scientific virtue of following the physical evidence where it leads with a game of victory-by-defining-the-rules.

If we set aside such games, we see that arguments for intelligent design can be advanced in terms that any scientist, if being strictly reasonable, would have to recognize as scientific. One virtue of a scientific theory is that it makes testable predictions. Obviously it is better if the prediction proves correct. . . [T]he Darwinian paradigm led the great bulk of the evolutionary biology community to see non-coding DNA as junk, whereas the theory of intelligent design motivated a prediction of function for this so-called “junk DNA.” The intelligent design paradigm was proved correct.

— David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is the author of six books including, with Senator Joseph Lieberman, The Gift of Rest. A former senior editor at National Review, he has contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, CA, he lives on Mercer Island, WA.

Excerpted from Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome by David Klinghoffer (Discovery Institute Press, 2025). Used by permission.

First there was the genetic revolution—the discovery that physical structures in the cell, including DNA and RNA, shape every organism. Now, says evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, we are overdue for another and more profound revolution. Recent findings reveal that genetic and even epigenetic sources alone cannot account for the rich dynamism of life—not even close. Some other informational source is required.

The idea was anticipated 2,400 years ago in Plato’s Timaeus, and periodically revisited in the ensuing centuries. Sidelined by scientific materialism, it is now reasserting itself on the strength of cutting-edge molecular biology, higher mathematics, and commonsense reasoning. In Plato’s Revenge, science writer David Klinghoffer takes Sternberg’s profound explorations and weaves them into a lively and accessible account of a most remarkable realization: At every moment, we owe our lives to a genome that is more than matter, and to an informational source that is immaterial, transcomputational, and beyond space and time.

“Darwinian materialism fails to explain the biological information in DNA sequences. But that truth merely scratches the surface when it comes to explaining biological form. To understand organisms in all their complexity, argues Richard Sternberg, we must break completely with nineteenth-century materialism and reconsider the thought of ancient greats such as Plato and Aristotle. Sternberg’s argument might seem daunting to the non-specialist, but David Klinghoffer does a masterful job of explaining Sternberg’s revolutionary thought in a delightfully accessible way.”

— Jay​​​​ Richards, PhD, co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery and editor of God and Evolution

“There are more things than are dreamt of in our materialist philosophy—not just in heaven, but right here on earth. At a time when this is becoming newly, exhilaratingly apparent, David Klinghoffer’s wonderfully readable book explores some breathtaking implications of the latest natural science in an area—genetics—that touches deeply on our origins, our characters, and perhaps our souls.”

— Spencer Klavan, author, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith

Find Plato’s Revenge at Amazon, Barnes & Noble (print / ebook), and Bookshop.org.

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