This year’s Dallas Conference on Science and Faith took place earlier this month, and this post recaps one of the seminars on intelligent design. Dr. Paul Nelson’s presentation examined the amazing design of butterflies and how their design is evidence for a creator.

Intelligent design is a field of science which posits there are telltale signs of a designer incorporated in all living things. Just as we can infer that a watch, car or computer was designed by an intelligent being, so we can infer design in living organisms.  A watch, for example, has many complex components working together to serve a particular purpose… to tell time. None of this could come about by natural processes and incremental changes over millions of years. This is a logical deduction. Further, it would be illogical to believe the contrary because we have no evidence that nature can design or assemble complex machines for a purpose.

Butterflies serve as a prime example. To begin with, there are many complex biological processes involved- starting from the egg and ending with an adult capable of reproduction. But the problem is, evolutionary theory cannot explain how a supposed ancestor of butterflies- something that was not a butterfly- became a butterfly. Evolution requires long periods of time along with small, incremental changes. However, there’s no evidence that a butterfly could become a butterfly in such a manner. Such evolution would cause its extinction. All the necessary changes would have to be drastic and occur quickly, the first time. And that’s why intelligent design is the best explanation for a butterfly’s existence. A creator- God- using his mind with foresight and a goal in mind produced a living organism for a reason and on purpose.

Consider, once the caterpillar exits the egg, it eats the egg, which is full of proteins and nutrients. From the time it hatches, the caterpillar becomes an “eating machine,” multiplying its weight 3,000 times by the pupa stage. This means the female butterfly can’t lay all her eggs in the same place, otherwise the emerging caterpillars would eat their sibling’s eggs, killing them in the process. So how did the female butterfly learn to lay her eggs and hide them on separate plants as butterflies do? Somehow this behavior existed for the first butterflies- created by God- to thrive.

Caterpillars go through five molts, but after the fourth molt they find a place to secure a small silk pad, then attach itself to the pad with an appendage called a cremaster, which contains a series of hooks, acting like a natural Velcro. Once attached, the caterpillar folds into a j-shape and spins around to make sure nothing is touching it during development.

All this must take place before the caterpillar can become a butterfly. But, if one believes in evolution, how did all these steps take place? Evolutionists believe all this happened in small, incremental steps over long periods of time by mutations in the DNA. So, at what point did the caterpillar create the substance for the silk pad? And how many millions of years went by before the cremaster evolved? If both aren’t present at this stage of development, the caterpillar never becomes a butterfly. Yet we don’t find separate stages in the fossil record. The earliest fossil evidence… supposedly 200 million years old, shows that butterflies have always been butterflies. The oldest butterfly scales have the classic characteristics of butterflies. So there has been no butterfly evolution for more than 200 million years!

There is no evidence of something else becoming a butterfly, and no sudden appearance of the silk pad or cremaster in the fossil record. Further, there’s no reason for the silk pad to exist if there’s no cremaster, and there’s no point for having a cremaster if there’s no silk pad. According to Dr. Nelson, both components are needed at the same time to function. So evolution can’t explain the existence of butterflies in any meaningful way.

The silk pad and cremaster are examples of irreducible complexity. An irreducibly complex system is one that requires several interdependent parts to function. If any part is removed, the system ceases to work effectively. This concept challenges the gradual, step-by-step process of evolution, as such systems could not function until all parts are present and working together.

So it’s not surprising that evolutionists can’t agree how this happened. Admittedly, they don’t have an answer. According to Dr. Nelson, “Too many things have to go right at the right time and place. Coordinating everything together is a problem for evolution.”

Dr. Nelson provided this analogy: He asked how engineers successfully build a bridge across a wide river. The answer is, “You know where you’re going before you begin construction.” This answer is both simple and elegant. Bridges have a purpose, and every stage must occur in the right order to have a functional bridge.

This analogy poses a problem for evolution because heredity is on the far side of the bridge. Evolution can’t build a butterfly from a caterpillar if the stages of development aren’t known from the beginning, and evolutionists understand this. In order to get a butterfly from a non-butterfly, major genetic changes are needed, yet those kinds of changes are not tolerated by developing systems. They would crash the system. Further, there’s no evidence that the pathways needed for evolution are heritable.

All this is why it’s reasonable to conclude that an intelligent mind designed butterflies to develop the way they do, right from the beginning. This is supported by the fossil record. Butterflies have always been butterflies, and God was the designer and engineer.