Sciencelosophy

# Synthesis of Design, Emergence, and Free Will This essay examines Darwinian accounts and the modern Intelligent Design (ID) movement’s approach to questions of intelligent causation and offers an interpretation of a Bahá’í-oriented framework on the subject. It is intended as a starting point for inquiry, not a final or authoritative treatment. Accordingly, the discussion is provisional: it sketches the conceptual terrain, highlights promising lines of argument, and points to where later work can refine, revise, or extend the approach. This essay neither endorses the Intelligent Design Movement’s scientific, religious, or political interpretations nor adopts its cultural or policy agendas The analysis outline here reflects the author’s own interpretation and should not be taken as an official Bahá’í position or as part of the authoritative Bahá’í writings. ## The Eternal Struggle to Discern Meaning in Randomness Human beings excel at finding patterns, inferring agency, and linking regularities to purposes. We readily “see” faces in the Moon, animals in clouds, or profiles in wood grain, and hear meaning in noise - radio static forming words or ambiguous voicemails sounding human after repeated listening. We interpret chance as significant: hot hands in sports, lucky streaks at roulette, or runs of correct guesses feel like evidence of special causation rather than ordinary variance. Coincidences seem to be everywhere; matching shirts, recurring numbers, unlikely meetings feel like it was fate. Yet inferring design from patterns is often warranted and helpful: grammatical sentences, QR codes, road signs, keys matching locks, or circuit board traces point to agency because we know which processes reliably generate such structures. This pattern-seeking logic drives efforts to detect extraterrestrial intelligence, searching for engineered regularities rather than background noise, and cybersecurity intrusion detection, which recognizes structured and repeated behaviors. Carl Sagan’s Contact captures the tension: combing vast data streams for credible hallmarks of intelligence while resisting the impulse to treat every anomaly as evidence of mind. These cases show why teleological thinking resurfaces in debates about life’s functional order: moving from patterned structure to purposive cause can be rational when constrained by background knowledge, competing hypotheses, and tests separating genuine signature patterns from regularities nature produces independently. ## Darwin’s Breakthrough: Rethinking Evolutionary Change and Adaptation By the time Darwin penned his theory of evolution, European debates about order and design had been reshaped by Enlightenment ideals of reason, public evidence, and intellectual autonomy. Natural theology did not disappear, but it increasingly had to defend its claims in broadly accessible terms rather than by appeal to ecclesial authority alone. This encouraged discussions grounded in shared experience, empirical regularities, and the apparent intelligibility of the world. At the same time, critiques of “occult” explanations and the growing prestige of mechanistic, law-based accounts narrowed the space for explanations that relied directly on final causes or special acts. Theology often responded by emphasizing a creator as legislator, grounding the stability of natural laws, while treating design as readable in the general order of nature rather than in ad hoc intervention. Against that background, Darwin’s theory of natural selection altered the argumentative landscape. Rather than denying that organisms look designed, Darwin offered a mechanism that can generate adaptive fit without foresight. Variation, heritability, and differential reproductive success produce cumulative change, and over long spans this can yield elaborate systems whose parts appear coordinated for survival and reproduction. This shift matters epistemically because it provides what design arguments often lacked: a detailed pathway from simpler antecedents to complex outcomes, constrained by observable processes. Once such a pathway exists, the inference from apparent design to an intelligent cause loses credibility. It becomes a comparative question about explanatory performance, measured by evidential fit, breadth, and integration with adjacent fields such as genetics, ecology, and developmental biology. Richard Dawkins later crystallized this tension with his provocative phrase “the blind watchmaker” stressing that natural selection can mimic the outputs of purposeful design without being guided by intention; the phrase is contentious, but it marks a substantive claim that evolutionary theory offers a non-intentional process with enough creative capacity, under plausible conditions, to account for many appearances that earlier supported design inference. The Darwinian Pathway to Complex Organization Darwinian explanation begins from a simple premise: populations vary, some variation is heritable, and organisms differ in reproductive success. From these elements, natural selection follows as a cumulative filter, steadily increasing the frequency of traits that confer advantages in particular environments. The process involves no foresight, yet it can yield remarkably coordinated outcomes because each step is retained only insofar as it works locally. Selection is therefore both constrained and opportunistic: constrained by available variation and by developmental, physiological, and ecological limits, yet opportunistic in its ability to assemble novelty from what already exists. Complexity, in this view, is not a single property that arrives all at once; it is a historical product of incremental modification, functional shifts, and the recombination of parts. Minor improvements can accumulate into tightly integrated systems, while co-option can recruit traits that originally served different roles. Gene duplication and divergence expand the search space by freeing one copy to explore new functions. Over time, selection can deepen integration among parts, transforming initially loose associations into interdependent networks. A Darwinian account also benefits from distinguishing kinds of complexity that are often blurred together. Structural complexity can mean mere intricacy, many parts and interactions, without implying purposeful organization. Functional complexity refers to reliable performance, in which components are organized to carry out a task consistently despite ordinary randomness and perturbations. Evolutionary theory expects both, but it treats functional organization as especially likely where selection repeatedly rewards performance and stabilizes improvements, which helps explain why living systems often display regulation, redundancy, error correction, and adaptive responsiveness. Such features can sound “engineered” in ordinary speech, yet they are also the sort of properties that selection tends to preserve when reliability is advantageous. ## Modern Intelligent Design Movement and Its Core Claims Emerging in the late twentieth century, the modern Intelligent Design (ID) movement represents a strategic effort to reframe design reasoning as an evidentiary inference rather than a theological deduction. Unlike earlier teleological arguments or natural theology, which often operated as metaphysical commentaries on nature, modern ID aims to establish ‘design’ as an empirically detectable feature of the physical world. The movement’s core premise is that recognizing intelligence is already a standard scientific practice in fields such as forensics, cryptography, and SETI. Proponents argue that biology should be subject to the same explanatory filter used in these domains, which distinguishes between effects caused by natural laws, random chance, and directed agency. By applying this filter to biological systems, ID proponents contend that the third category, intelligent causation, best explains certain features. Crucially, by treating the designer as an abstract agent and setting aside questions of religious identity, the movement seeks to shift the controversy from the identity of the cause to the detectability of the effect. The movement’s ideology centers on the concept of information as a distinct ontological category that cannot be reduced to matter or energy. The basic framework asserts that functional complex systems possess a quality that natural selection cannot mimic. This is codified in two primary arguments: Irreducible Complexity: This biological argument states that certain molecular formations consist of multiple, interacting parts, all of which are necessary for the function to exist. A system is said to be irreducibly complex if it consists of numerous well-matched interacting parts that jointly perform a basic function, such that removing any key part causes loss of that function. The intended inference is historical: because the system requires all its parts to perform its current function, a gradual evolutionary pathway is unlikely, since intermediate stages would be non- functional and therefore would not confer a selectable advantage for natural selection to preserve.

Intelligent Design proponents illustrate irreducible complexity with a mousetrap, which requires five components - base plate, spring, hammer, holding bar, and catch - arranged such that removing any single part renders it non-functional. Applied to biology, the argument claims that evolutionary precursors to such systems would be non-functional and therefore could not have been favored by natural selection. However, critics often point out that a system lacking one component, while unable to perform its current function, may still perform a different, simpler function that could have been advantageous to ancestors, making it a viable evolutionary precursor. Specified Complexity: Specified Complexity Information (CSI) is a mathematical framework that aims to detect design by combining low probability with an independently defined pattern. Since many outcomes are unlikely without implying agency, CSI argues that design is supported only when an outcome is both highly improbable under a relevant chance hypothesis and “specified,” meaning it matches a pattern set independently of the result. This specification requirement is intended to prevent picking the target after seeing the data, which can make almost any outcome look significant. In the explanatory filter, the inference proceeds in steps: determine whether the event is contingent rather than necessary, whether it exceeds a complexity threshold, and whether it is independently specified; only then does the filter yield design rather than necessity or chance. A concrete illustration of complex specified information comes from cybersecurity incident response. Suppose monitoring captures two equal-length network payload strings: one is high- entropy noise consistent with compressed traffic; the other contains structured patterns matching a known command-and-control beacon format from prior threat reports. Both strings are highly improbable, so rarity alone doesn’t distinguish benign from malicious. CSI reasoning depends on specification: the suspicious string matches an independently defined pattern class, described before capture, and compactly expressible. Given realistic generative models, malware produces such beacons while random traffic is unlikely to. Evidential force lies in this conjunction, not rarity alone. Challenging Methodological Naturalism: A central feature of science is methodological naturalism, explaining natural phenomena through publicly testable causes. Intelligent Design challenges this principle, arguing that restricting explanations to material causes arbitrarily excludes intelligent causation. ID theorists contend that methodological naturalism functions as dogma rather than justified methodology, and they seek to expand scientific explanation to include non-material agency. Thus, ID represents not merely a dispute about biological mechanisms, but a fundamental disagreement about the epistemic rules governing explanations of complex origins. Where Intelligent Design Falls Short Most philosophers of science and biologists reject Intelligent Design not for logical incoherence, but for lacking the epistemic virtues of productive scientific explanations. Successful hypotheses constrain outcomes, specify testable mechanisms, and generate falsifiable predictions. Intelligent Design suffers from under-constraint: claiming “an intelligent cause produced this” accommodates virtually any biological pattern without identifying the designer’s capacities, constraints, or empirical signatures. Such broad compatibility prevents meaningful discrimination from competing explanations. A second weakness is a narrow mechanistic view of evolution. Evolutionary theory offers extensive testable mechanisms: natural selection, drift, duplication, co-option, and developmental constraint; integrating coherently across biological levels. ID arguments typically stop at attributing design without elaborating investigable causal pathways. While stimulating debate, Intelligent Design has produced few distinctive research trajectories that have yielded empirical discoveries attributable to design rather than evolutionary processes. Intelligent Design’s signature concepts face inferential difficulties. Irreducible complexity arguments infer historical impossibility from present functional features. Yet, critics note that evolutionary pathways operate through functional shifts, redundancy, scaffolding, and co-option, allowing selectable intermediates that don’t perform the final function. Complex specified information arguments depend on independent specification and realistic alternative models, but often fail on both counts. Intuitions about probability usually err when evolution is misconceived as purely random sampling, leading to complex outcomes being deemed astronomically unlikely. This misses the Darwinian point: natural selection is a non-random filter that retains beneficial traits and eliminates deleterious ones. The epistemic question shifts from computing the one-step assembly probability to assessing whether credible stepwise routes exist in which intermediates function adequately. A related shortcoming is treating rarity as evidence of special causation. Any particular sequence is exceedingly improbable beforehand, so rarity alone carries little weight. When “chance hypotheses” misconstrue evolution as random sampling or specifications are determined post hoc, probability calculations mislead rather than compare realistic causal models. Defensible design inference requires independently specified patterns, not mere improbability. Evolutionary inquiry, therefore, reconstructs mechanisms and pathways, seeking signatures of incremental adaptation: trade-offs, constraints, vestigial features, and imperfect solutions that mark selection’s cumulative work. Intelligent Design’s argumentative structure operates largely negatively, critiquing evolutionary gaps. But identifying one framework’s incompleteness doesn’t establish an alternative. Competing hypotheses require independent evidential support and predictive leverage. Without this, “design” becomes a retreating placeholder, explaining why critics deem the Intelligent Design methodologically unproductive.

## ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Reframing of Design, Complexity, and Free Will Across his talks, tablets, and correspondence, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá repeatedly engages questions central to contemporary intelligent design debates, addressing purposiveness in nature, the emergence of organized complexity, and human volition. Remarkably, several ideas that later became foundational to the Intelligent Design Movement appear in his discourse many decades before. This essay does not claim a one-to-one correspondence between ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and contemporary ID frameworks; its aim is strictly analytic, identifying possible points of conceptual convergence and examining their implications. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Design Decision Criteria At the heart of Intelligent Design’s complexity-specification criteria lies a procedure addressing three fundamental questions: should we attribute an event or the formation of an entity to necessity , chance, or design? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his tablet to August Forel, has indicated a similar decision criterion. “Now, formation is of three kinds and of three kinds only: accidental, necessary and voluntary. The coming together of the various constituent elements of beings cannot be accidental, for unto every effect there must be a cause. It cannot be compulsory, for then the formation must be an inherent property of the constituent parts and the inherent property of a thing can in no wise be dissociated from it..Thus under such circumstances the decomposition of any formation is impossible, for the inherent properties of a thing cannot be separated from it. The third formation remaineth and that is the voluntary one, that is, an unseen force described as the Ancient Power, causeth these elements to come together, every formation giving rise to a distinct being.” [1] The core claim of irreducible complexity in ID is that some systems consist of multiple, tightly coordinated, interacting parts that jointly enable a basic function, such that removing any one part causes the system to lose that function. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has reiterated this concept decades before. “For instance, as we have observed, co-operation among the constituent parts of the human body is clearly established, and these parts and members render services unto all the component parts of the body.. Likewise every arrangement and formation that is not perfect in its order we designate as accidental, and that which is orderly, regular, perfect in its relations and every part of which is in its proper place and is the essential requisite of the other constituent parts, this we call a composition formed through will and knowledge.” [2] The apparent overlap between ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s statements and key themes in the Intelligent Design framework raises a critical question: Does the Bahá’í approach offer a genuinely distinctive account of design, or does it inherit the same conceptual and philosophical weaknesses often attributed to the Intelligent Design movement? Bahá’í Paradigm Shift: Behavior Trumps Structure The distinction of the Bahá’í approach lies in a crucial additional component that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá consistently emphasizes. Integrating this element fundamentally transforms ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s treatment of design, complexity, and free will into a distinctive philosophical framework that addresses many of the criticisms of the Intelligent Design movement. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet to Auguste Forel offers a clear window into his reasoning about intelligent causation. Before engaging themes that resemble irreducible complexity or other design-oriented ideas, he begins from a radically different starting point: humanity’s distinctive manner of interacting with nature. He offers concrete examples to show that the human intellect does not merely submit to natural forces but can discover their regularities and deliberately redirect them toward chosen ends. “Consider: according to the law of nature man liveth, moveth and hath his being on earth, yet his soul and mind interfere with the laws thereof, and even as the bird he flieth in the air, saileth speedily upon the seas and as the fish soundeth the deep and discovereth the things therein. Verily this is a grievous defeat inflicted upon the laws of nature.” [3] This starting line of argument reframes what “design” is taken to mean. Instead of drawing a verdict solely from the arrangement of parts in a finished structure, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá adds a second dimension centered on what an entity can do relative to nature’s constraints. Alongside a configuration-based analysis of organized forms, he introduces a behavior-based component that emphasizes capacities, agency, and modes of lawful interaction. The implications are substantial: the focus shifts from static features to dynamic powers and patterns of action, and the evidential standard becomes more observer-independent. Because the laws of nature are taken to be invariant across the universe, modes of interaction with those laws supply a universal reference point that, in principle, any competent observer, anywhere, could recognize and assess. Astronomy offers a helpful analogy. To distinguish an alien craft from a comet, composition alone may be unclear; what matters is behavior under natural law. Astronomers examine trajectories and accelerations to see whether motion matches gravity and typical outgassing. Because these regularities supply a shared reference for any observer, anomaly detection often prioritizes law-governed behavior over structural description.

The Intelligent Design movement, by contrast, tends to concentrate on the arrangement and coordination of molecular components and organismal structures, for example, pointing to intricate biochemical machinery or the tightly coupled organization found across diverse life forms. By contrast, Darwinian theory largely explains how natural selection and other natural laws shape organisms over time. Still, it offers a thinner account of how the organism, once formed, can actively engage, harness, or redirect those same laws in its own behavior. Measuring Complexity by Interaction, Not Intricacy Intelligent Design discussions often treat “complexity” and “function” as if their meaning were self-evident, yet the criteria are frequently underspecified. A structure is labeled complex because it looks intricate, and it is labeled functional because it appears to serve a purpose. This approach is vulnerable to after-the-fact selection: once an outcome exists, observers can highlight whichever features make it seem special, then infer significance from the highlighted pattern. The problem is not that biological systems lack organization, but that the boundary between “meaningful organization” and “mere arrangement” can shift with the observer’s background assumptions. This observer-dependence becomes clearer under a simple thought experiment. A biological configuration that humans interpret as exquisitely coordinated might not register as “functionally organized” to an extraterrestrial whose embodiment, sensory access, and biological architecture differ radically from ours. If the alien’s categories of function are keyed to entirely different substrates and constraints, many of our “salient” biological patterns could appear arbitrary or even unintelligible. In that case, the inference is not tracking a foundational property of the system alone, but a match between the system and the observer’s prior conceptual scheme. Darwinian theory offers a more disciplined route for classifying function because it ties it to a universal, testable criterion: differential contribution to survival and reproduction under specific conditions. A trait’s function is not whatever an observer finds impressive; it is what the trait does that selection can preserve, refine, or repurpose across generations. Complexity, in this framework, is often described as the cumulative integration of multiple parts and processes shaped by selection through gradual modification, co-option, and increasing interdependence. Yet “complexity” remains vague and less tightly fixed than “function”: it can refer to the number of parts, degree of interdependence, informational structure, or the length of an evolutionary pathway, and these measures do not always align consistently. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá introduces an additional way to classify complexity that shifts attention from static configuration to interaction with nature’s laws. In this narrative, the most important feature is not only how parts are arranged, but how an entity can recognize, engage, and redirect regularities in nature toward chosen ends. This behavior-centered criterion has a distinctive advantage: it leans on the assumed universality of natural law. If the laws of nature are invariant for any competent observer, then the capacity to understand and harness those laws offers a more observer- independent reference point than judging what “looks designed” on structural grounds alone. In that sense, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s framework proposes a generalizable, universally agreed upon measure of complexity grounded in lawful constraint and responsive engagement with nature’s laws.

Hierarchical Complexity A recurring limitation in both the Intelligent Design (ID) literature and standard Darwinian presentations is that neither offers a fundamental, widely accepted way to sort “complexity” into discrete hierarchical levels. ID typically treats complexity as a marker that triggers design inference, but its criteria do not naturally yield a principled taxonomy of kinds or grades of complexity. Darwinian accounts explain how complexity can accumulate historically, yet they often treat “complexity” as a family of measures rather than a well-defined set of categories. By contrast, the Bahá’í framework interpreted here offers a consistent basis for hierarchical classification by grounding complexity in law-interaction capacities. Aristotle’s biological writings offer a precedent for functional classification: minerals, plants, animals, and humans are distinguished by characteristic powers rather than by mere physical arrangement. Plants exhibit nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Animals add sensation, appetite, and self-initiated motion. Humans add rational thought, deliberation, and purposive choice, so each level is marked by what it can do. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá extends this template by asking how these biological powers position beings in relation to nature’s law itself. Minerals display regularity under physical forces without using those regularities toward ends. Plants channel natural regularities into growth and reproduction without reflective awareness of the laws they express. Animals engage causal regularities through perception, instinct, and flexible behavior, yet typically without an abstract grasp of governing principles. Humans, on the other hand, formulate and test regularities, then redirect their operation toward chosen purposes. This can be framed as hierarchical complexity: higher forms add control layers that integrate and govern lower-level processes. Plants exhibit a one-dimensional nested vertical growth, seemingly defying gravity. Animals add a multi-level dynamic coordination and movement in all directions, through sensation, nervous control, and locomotion. Humans add symbolic representation and externalize it into artifacts that exploit natural law independently and externally to the body, extending organized control into tools, machines, and engineered systems. Together, these considerations suggest a methodological shift: rather than treating “complexity” as whatever a particular audience happens to find unnatural, we should ask whether the criterion for complexity and its division into different hierarchical categories holds across multiple observers and is anchored in observer-independent standards. ## Free Will: Real or an Illusion? A natural next step is to move from the complexity of structure and law-governed interaction to a deeper question about agency: How do we know we have free will, and how could we prove it? The challenge is methodological. Introspection feels decisive, yet private conviction rarely counts as public evidence. At the same time, outward behavior is observable, but many different causes can generate behavior. If the aim is an account that any competent observer can assess, the question becomes: What observable markers would distinguish genuine agency from the appearance of choice produced by other mechanisms? One temptation is to treat unpredictability as proof of freedom of choice. If an entity’s behavior cannot be predicted, one might infer that it has free will. But unpredictability is not enough. A process can be unpredictable because it is driven by stochastic factors, hidden variables, and chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions. Randomness can defeat prediction without adding agency. An outcome that no one could foresee may still be the output of blind chance, or of lawful dynamics too complex to track. So a test that rests only on failed prediction will misclassify both random systems and opaque deterministic systems as “free.” A second temptation moves the other way: some experiments report neural activity that precedes a person’s conscious report of deciding, prompting skeptics to conclude that free will is illusory. On this view, we experience deliberation, but the causal machinery is already completed before awareness registers the choice. This interpretation risks rendering free will effectively unfalsifiable, since any decision can be dismissed as post hoc awareness of a prior process. This brings the discussion back to the earlier theme of observer-independent criteria. If structural complexity can be observer-relative, and non-agentive causes can explain unpredictability, then the core task is to find a universally acceptable definition of free will: a criterion that does not depend on a particular culture’s intuitions, or on a specific species’ psychology, but can be applied across observers who share access to the same laws of nature. The guiding question then becomes: What would count, for any observer, as evidence that a system is not merely pushed around by law or noise, but can govern its own action within the natural law? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has given us a definition of free will: “Likewise every arrangement and formation that is not perfect in its order we designate as accidental, and that which is orderly, regular, perfect in its relations and every part of which is in its proper place and is the essential requisite of the other constituent parts, this we call a composition formed through will and knowledge.” [ 4 ] Combining this definition with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s framing of complexity as the manner of its dynamic interaction with laws of nature, we can create a plausible definition and a universal criterion for free will: Free will is the capacity of an agent to organize multiple interdependent components into a holistic system that can harness and leverage natural laws to operate against nature’s local tendencies. The search for free will thus parallels the earlier shift from configuration-based to behavior- based analysis. This framework establishes universal criteria for detecting free will : observing a module escape a distant planet’s gravitational force through a telescope warrants a conclusion that its creator possesses free will. These criteria remain compatible with natural law while pointing to a higher-order mode of control that unpredictability alone cannot capture. ## Identifying Intelligent Causation A persistent weakness in Intelligent Design argumentation is its reliance on contested notions of “complexity” and “function.” What counts as complex often reflects intuitive impressions rather than consistently applicable criteria across various contexts and observers. “Function” can be assigned retrospectively once a structure is known, risking hindsight bias. The result is a framework that appears compelling to those sharing its intuitions while remaining methodologically fragile to others. Darwinian theory avoids some pitfalls by tying function to differential contribution to survival and reproduction. Yet as a general account of complexity, evolutionary discourse can remain imprecise. Complexity may refer to the number of parts, interdependence, information content, hierarchical organization, or pathway length, meanings that don’t always converge. This ambiguity weakens attempts to use “complexity” as a term for broader philosophical conclusions. The Bahá’í framework proposes a more observer-independent approach by shifting attention from static arrangements to law-governed interactions. Design is best detected not merely by intricate configuration, but by organized systems that exploit nature’s regularities to achieve ends running counter to local natural law tendencies. Within this Bahá’í framework, design can be defined operationally as follows: An artifact is designed by an intelligent agent if it comprised of multiple interdependent components arranged into a holistic system that harnesses natural laws to operate against nature’s local tendencies. Two features matter. First, the criterion anchors in natural law, supplying a universal reference point for any observer, anywhere. Second, it focuses on capacity rather than historical pathways. Design detection infers an organized agency expressed through dynamic interaction with nature’s laws, not a substitute for mechanistic explanations. This framework doesn’t treat design language as a replacement for biology, geology, genetics, or other empirical disciplines. Natural inquiry into evolutionary history, causal mechanisms, and ecological constraint remains valid. The aim is narrower: articulating criteria under which “design” constitutes disciplined inference about organized agency while leaving intact the scientific work of reconstructing how organisms and environments change over time. The Bahá’í approach (as interpreted by the author) also aligns with scientific realism, which infers unobservables - electrons, quarks, fields - from measurable effects. Methodological naturalism and scientific realism need not be rivals: the former governs the investigation of lawful processes; the latter justifies inference beyond direct observation. Detecting design attempts to unite these commitments: accepting nature’s and life’s evolutionary story while refining when and how claims of an intelligent agent are warranted. ## Conclusion This article moved from debates about biological order and probability to a more disciplined approach to design, complexity, and agency. It argued that design reasoning falters when evolution is treated as a uniform random search, and improves when it focuses on cumulative pathways, independent specification, and the limits of after-the-fact inference. Building on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s insights, it then added a dimension often neglected in both ID and Darwinian discussions: shifting emphasis from static configuration to dynamic behavior, or how beings and artifacts engage natural laws. Using an Aristotelian functional hierarchy extended by this law- engagement lens, this article proposed an interpretation that gravitates towards a more observer- independent criterion of complexity. The resulting method treats design detection as identifying organized systems that harness universal laws to counter local tendencies, while fully preserving the scientific project of explaining evolutionary history. Within this framework, “intelligent design” allows at least three readings. One holds that the Divine created a lawful cosmos that unfolds through natural processes, yielding life through evolution. Many naturalists can accept the explanatory sufficiency of those processes while treating belief in the Divine as faith rather than science. A second reading agrees with the scientific account of life’s development while arguing that philosophical reasoning can still justify an inference to agency behind those processes, so design is “detected” without displacing biology. A third reading aligns with the Intelligent Design movement: natural processes are deemed inadequate, life is treated as directly designed, and mainstream conclusions are rejected, often without a comparably detailed, testable alternative.

Caution is warranted before drawing hard conclusions. Several key questions remain empirically open, and future evidence may sharpen what we can claim. If scientists eventually generate living systems from basic ingredients, from scratch, that would make “natural sufficiency” concrete rather than speculative. Likewise, more powerful computer simulations of early-Earth chemistry can stress-test origin pathways, probing how lifelike organization might arise under plausible constraints and whether natural processes can yield systems that harness universal laws to counter local tendencies. Disagreement about “design” often turns less on the term than on which reading of it is assumed. The Bahá’í-oriented approach developed here aims to preserve scientific explanation while clarifying when a design inference could be warranted as a philosophical conclusion grounded in observer-independent criteria tied to natural law. [1] Tablet to August Forel Page 16 [2] Tablet to August Forel Page 23 [3] Tablet to August Forel Page 11 [4] Tablet to August Forel Page 23