Theistic Evolution and the Reasonable Christian.
Collins’s main argument in The Language of God makes three related claims:

1. “Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps” (p. 93). We cannot use causal action by a transcendent intelligence to explain puzzling natural phenomena. In short, no God‐of-the‐ gaps allowed.
2. “Darwin’s framework of variation and natural selection,” but especially Darwin’s picture of a Tree of Life—the common ancestry of all organisms on Earth—“is unquestionably correct” (141). Universal common descent by natural processes is scientifically non‐negotiable. The theory of neo‐Darwinian evolution cannot rationally be doubted by any educated person.
3. The best way to reconcile the propositional content of a transcendentally grounded morality with modern evolutionary theory is what Collins calls “BioLogos,” his renaming of “theistic evolution.” BioLogos is “not intended as a scientific theory” (204), but it is “by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying” (210) of the alternatives in the science/religion debate (the others being atheism or agnosticism, young‐earth creation, and intelligent design). BioLogos “will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous [and] provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions” (210).
   Given this, a reasonable Christian will find herself embracing theistic evolution—BioLogos—if she wishes to be heard in our current culture.

The former Calvin College physicist Howard Van Till prominently advocated a similar position, until his recent exodus from Christianity, in such books as The Fourth Day and Science Held Hostage. Brown University cell biologist Kenneth Miller argues in his book Finding Darwin’s God and in his extensive public lectures that Christian faith and neo‐Darwinian evolution are compatible, a view also held by a majority of the members of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), an organization of Christians in the sciences. As Collins notes, his position is the mainstream view for many believing scientists and scientifically informed theologians:

Theistic evolution is the dominant position of serious biologists who are also serious believers. That includes Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief advocate in the United States, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, the twentieth‐century architect of evolutionary theory. It is the view espoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, including Pope John Paul II. (199)

For Collins, a necessary condition of being seen as a “serious biologist” is acceptance of Darwin’s theory of common descent via random variation and natural selection, and the only rational stance for a Christian is acceptance of BioLogos or theistic evolution.

Collins’s Failure to Realize the Depth of the Conflict.
Collins fails to understand fully the real conflict in the origins debate—philosophical naturalism —or the extent of its grip on modern evolutionary theory. This leads him into the central flaw that winds its way into every corner of his argument.

He locates evidence for the God of Christian theism in the fine‐tuning of the universe itself and in the “Moral Law” that governs human behavior. Cosmological fine‐tuning falls outside the purview of neo‐Darwinian theory, whereas explanation of human behavior is one of its goals, so I will only consider the latter here. On what grounds does the existence of universal standards of “right” and “wrong” behavior —of consistent moral categories across human cultures—count as evidence for the existence of God?

For Collins, humans behave altruistically because they are governed by a divinely authored moral law. The evidential significance of altruism and the moral law arises from the inability of standard evolutionary theory to explain it. Collins argues:

Agape, or selfless altruism…cannot be accounted for by the drive of individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves. Quite the contrary: it may lead humans to make sacrifices that lead to great personal suffering, injury, or death, without any evidence of benefit. (27)

This mode of reasoning resembles exactly what Collins elsewhere derides as God‐of‐the‐gaps thinking.

Would a Darwinian biologist agree with Collins? Let me explain why I think not, by recounting two revealing personal experiences I had with David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at SUNY-Binghamton, and Elliott Sober, a philosopher of biology at the University of Wisconsin. Wilson and Sober are coauthors of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1998), in which they attempt to explain human moral behavior generally and altruistic behavior in particular. The fact that humans are known to perform actions that appear not to benefit the actor, but someone else, is an explanatory puzzle for Darwinian evolutionary theory because such altruism appears not to be favored by natural selection.

I once spoke with Wilson about his views at a conference in Arizona. Human moral and religious behavior, he told me, is what makes us most distinctive as biological objects—and these are the characteristics of Homo sapiens most in need of evolutionary explanation. Does God Himself exist? I asked. Is there any being properly addressed as “Lord” truly out there in reality, as the object of the prayers of those people in church? No, he said to me. Once the task of evolutionary explanation is complete, under the philosophical guidance of naturalism, there is no unexplained remainder.

In the spring of 2006, in a seminar at the University of Wisconsin, I argued that naturalism cannot be reconciled with Christianity; one cannot pray to a God who does not exist. Sober, who served as a co-panelist, e‐mailed me some time later to say that I had misunderstood evolutionary theory. Explaining the causal origin of a biological characteristic such as moral or religious behavior, he wrote, does not prove that God does not exist. Evolutionary explanation, however, does destroy the evidential status of that behavior as pointing uniquely to a divine source.

In my experience, evolutionary biologists who are not already Christians—and that’s most of them—see Collins’s arguments about the divine origin of the Moral Law as wholly unpersuasive. If some humans pray or act sacrificially (say, in adopting handicapped children), then those actions, the biologists say, are facts about human biology that are in need of evolutionary explanation.

A Pervasive Contradiction.
We may summarize the central flaw of Collins’s position as follows:

1. As a Christian, Collins cannot endorse philosophical naturalism. He indeed does not. He accepts, for instance, the historical reality of the Resurrection.
2. If philosophical naturalism fails, however, then methodological naturalism—its putatively or supposedly neutral cousin for the practice of science—must, for any Christian, fail, too. For Collins, that point of failure corresponds with the moral uniqueness of human beings. Evolutionary theory does not explain altruism or human moral categories such as “right” and “wrong.”
3. If methodological naturalism is unsound as a global rule for scientific practice, however, then defying naturalism for such puzzles as the origin of life or the Cambrian Explosion—as intelligent design theorists do—is not by itself a defect in one’s scientific reasoning. If there can be a “gap” in biological history at one location, as Collins argues is the case for the origin of human moral behavior, then there can be “gaps” elsewhere, and these could be discovered by science. Suspend methodological naturalism anywhere, and one has the right to suspend it elsewhere.

Science in the twenty‐first century could use many more such brave Christians as Collins who speak plainly, in high profile settings, about their faith. Collins needs to think much more deeply, however, about what his understanding of reality entails. Pressing methodological naturalism on others, as Collins does, when he rejects it himself, is bad practice for a proponent of science. It is my hope that as the science of intelligent design matures, Collins will revisit his current certainty about its inevitable failure. I expect he is in for a major (and pleasant) surprise.

— reviewed by Paul Nelson

SYNOPSIS

Some people argue that morality is the result of blind evolutionary forces rather than an omnipotent Creator. This view is flawed because (1) it assumes a morality that transcends evolutionary “morality,” (2) it cannot explain motive and intent, (3) it denies rather than explains morality, and (4) it cannot account for the “oughtness” of morality. Given the existence of morality as well as the nature of moral claims, the existence of God seems to be the best explanation for morality.

Bongo is a chimp. He’s being punished by other members of the chimpanzee band for not sharing his bananas. Bongo is selfish. Bad Bongo. Moral rule: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.

One of the strongest evidences for the existence of God is man’s unique moral nature. C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity that there is a persistent moral law that represents the ethical foundation of all human cultures. This, he says, is evidence for the God who is the author of the moral law.

Not everyone agrees. Scenarios like that of Bongo the chimp have been offered as evidence for rudimentary forms of morality among animals, especially the “higher” primates like chimpanzees. This suggests that morality in humans is not unique and can be explained by the natural process of evolution without appeal to a divine Lawgiver.

This view of morality is one of the conclusions of the new science of evolutionary psychology. Its adherents advance a simple premise: The mind, just like every part of the physical body, is a product of evolution. Everything about human personality — marital relationships, parental love, friendships, dynamics among siblings, social climbing, even office politics — can be explained by the forces of neo-Darwinian evolution.

Even the moral threads that make up the fabric of society are said to be the product of natural selection. Morality can be reduced to chemical relationships in the genes chosen by different evolutionary needs in the physical environment. Love and hate; feelings of guilt and remorse; gratitude and envy; even the virtues of kindness, faithfulness, and self-control can all be explained mechanistically through the cause and effect of chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

One notable example of this challenge to the transcendent nature of morality comes from the book The Moral Animal — Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology , by Robert Wright.

HOW MORALS EVOLVE

In his popular defense of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins acknowledges that the biological world looks designed, but he asserts that this appearance is deceiving. The appearance of intelligent order is really the result of the workings of natural selection.

Robert Wright holds the same view regarding man’s psychological features, including morality. The strongest evidence for this analysis seems to be the explanatory power of the evolutionary paradigm when dealing with moral conduct. The argument rests on the nature of natural selection itself: “If within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.”¹

Wright argues from effect back to cause, asking what is the simplest, most elegant solution adequate to explain the effects we see. To Wright, the evolutionary explanation is “obvious.” In order to survive, animals must adapt to changing conditions. Through the process of natural selection, naturalistic forces “choose” certain behavior patterns that allow the species to continue to exist. We call those patterns “morality.”

 Wired for Morality

An evolutionary explanation for all moral conduct requires that such conduct be genetically determined. Morality rides on the genes, as it were, and one generation passes on favorable morality to the next. Wright sees a genetic connection with a whole range of emotional capabilities. He talks about “genes inclining a male to love his offspring”² and romantic love that was not only invented by evolution, but corrupted by it.³ Consider these comments:

If a woman’s “fidelity gene” (or her “infidelity gene”) shapes her behavior in a way that helps get copies of itself into future generations in large numbers, then that gene will by definition flourish.⁴ (emphasis in original)

Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes — cold, hard equations composed of simple variables.⁵

Some mothers have a genetic predisposition to love their children, so the story goes, and this genetic predisposition to be loving is favored by natural selection. Consequently, there are more women who are “good” mothers.

What is the evidence, though, that moral virtues are genetic — a random combination of molecules? Is the fundamental difference between a Mother Theresa and an Adolph Hitler their chromosomal makeup? If so, then how could we ever praise Mother Theresa? How could a man like Hitler be truly guilty?

Wright offers no empirical evidence for his thesis. He seems to assume that moral qualities are in the genes because he must; his paradigm will not work otherwise.

 WRIGHT’S DOUBLE STANDARD

In a public relations piece promoting his book, Robert Wright says, “My hope is that people will use the knowledge [in this book] not only to improve their lives — as a source of ‘self-help’ — but as cause to treat other people more decently” (emphasis added).

This statement captures a major flaw in Wright’s analysis. His entire thesis is that chance evolution exhausts what it means to be moral. He sees morality as descriptive, a mere function of the environment selecting patterns of behavior that assist and benefit the growth and survival of the species. Yet he frequently lapses, unconsciously making reference to a morality that seems to transcend nature.

Take this comment as an example: “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse“⁶ (emphases mine). Wright reflects on the moral equipment randomly given to us by nature, and then bemoans our immoral use of it with words like “tragic,” “pathetic,” and “misuse.”

He writes, “Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal.”⁷

It’s almost as if there are two categories of morality, nature’s morality and a transcendent standard used to judge nature’s morality. But where did this transcendent standard come from? It’s precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining. If transcendent morality judges the “morality” that evolution is responsible for, then it can’t itself be accounted for by evolution.

 Social Darwinism

Like many evolutionists, Wright recoils from social Darwinism. “To say that something is ‘natural’ is not to say that it is good. There is no reason to adopt natural selection’s ‘values’ as our own.”⁸ Just because nature exploits the weak, he argues, it doesn’t mean we are morally obliged to do so. “Natural selection’s indifference to the suffering of the weak is not something we need to emulate. Nor should we care whether murder, robbery, and rape are in some sense ‘natural.’ It is for us to decide how abhorrent we find such things and how hard we want to fight them.”⁹

Wright argues that the reductio ad absurdum argument from social Darwinism is flawed. Though life in an unregulated state of nature is, as 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”¹⁰ we’re not required to take the “survival of the fittest” as a moral guideline.

Evolutionists may be right when they argue that we’re not compelled to adopt the morality of evolution. The threat of social Darwinism, though, is not that society is required to adopt the law of the jungle, but that it is allowed to do so. The exploitation of the weak by the strong is morally benign according to this view.

What Darwinists cannot do is give us a reason why we ought not simply copy nature and destroy those who are weak, unpleasant, costly, or just plain boring. If all moral options are legitimate, then it is legitimate for the strong to rule the weak. No moral restraints protect the weak, because moral restraints simply do not exist.

 MONKEY MORALITY

Recent studies have attempted to show that animals exhibit rudimentary moral behavior. In one case, a group of chimpanzees “punished” one “selfish” member of their band by withholding food from it. Apparently, the moral rule was this: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.

 Conduct, Motive, and Intent

There are several problems with this assessment. First of all, drawing conclusions about animal morality simply from external behavior reduces morality to conduct. Why should we accept that morality is exhaustively described by behavior? True morality entails nonbehavioral elements, too, like intent and motive.

One can’t infer actual moral obligations from the mere fact of a chimp’s conduct. One might talk descriptively about a chimp’s behavior, but no conclusion about morality follows from this. One can observe that chimps in community share food, and when they do they survive better. But one can’t conclude from this that Bongo, the chimp, ought to share his bananas, and if he doesn’t, then he’s immoral because he hasn’t contributed to the survival of his community.

Further, in fixing blame, we distinguish between an act done by accident and the very same act done on purpose. The behavior is the same, but the intent is different. We don’t usually blame people for accidents, such as in the case of the boy who didn’t intend to trip the old lady.

We also give attention to the issue of motive. We withhold blame even if the youngster tripped the old lady on purpose if the motive is acceptable: he tripped her to keep her out of a sniper’s line of fire.

Motive and intent can therefore not be determined simply by looking at behavior. In fact, some “good” behavior — giving to the poor, for example — might turn out to be tainted if the motive and intent are wrong, as when a man gives to be thought well of but has no real concern for the recipient. Indeed, it seems one can be immoral without any behavior at all, as when a woman plots an evil deed but never has the opportunity to carry it out.

Morality informs behavior, judging it either good or bad, but it’s not identical to behavior. Morality is something deeper than habitual patterns of physical interaction. Therefore, one can’t draw conclusions about animal morality simply based on what one observes in their conduct.

 Morality: Explained or Denied?

This leads us to the second problem, which runs much deeper. When morality is reduced to patterns of behavior chosen by natural selection for its survival value, then morality is not explained; it’s denied. Wright admits as much: “The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truth. Truly a shameless ploy”¹¹ (emphasis added).

Evolutionists such as Wright are ultimately forced to admit that what we think is a “higher truth” turns out to be a “shameless ploy,” a description of animal behavior conditioned by the environment for survival. We’ve given that conduct a label, they argue. We call it morality. But there is no real right and wrong .

Does Bongo, the chimp, actually exhibit genuine moral behavior? Does he understand the difference between right and wrong? Can he make principled choices to do what’s right? Is he worthy of blame and punishment for doing wrong? Of course not, Wright says. Bongo merely does in a primitive way what humans do in a more sophisticated way. We respond according to our genetic conditioning, a program “designed” by millions of years of evolution.

The evolutionary approach is not an explanation of morality; it’s a denial of morality. It explains why we think moral truths exist when, in fact, they don’t.

 Why Be a Good Boy Tomorrow?

This observation uncovers the most serious objection to the idea that evolution is adequate to explain morality. There is one question that can never be answered by any evolutionary assessment of ethics. The question is this: Why ought I be moral tomorrow?

One of the distinctives of morality is its “oughtness,” its moral incumbency. Assessments of mere behavior, however, are descriptive only. Since morality is essentially prescriptive (telling what should be the case, as opposed to what is the case) and since all evolutionary assessments of moral behavior are descriptive, then evolution cannot account for the most important thing that needs to be explained: morality’s “oughtness.”

The question that needs to be answered is: “Why shouldn’t the chimp (or a human being, for that matter) be selfish?” The evolutionary answer might be that when we’re selfish, we hurt the group. That answer, though, presumes another moral value: We ought to be concerned about the welfare of the group. Why should that concern us? Answer: If the group doesn’t survive, then the species doesn’t survive. But why should I care about the survival of the species?

Here’s the problem. All of these responses meant to explain morality ultimately depend on some prior moral notion to hold them together. It’s going to be impossible to explain, on an evolutionary view of things, why I should not be selfish, or steal, or rape, or even kill tomorrow without smuggling morality into the answer.

The evolutionary explanation disembowels morality, reducing it to mere descriptions of conduct. The best the Darwinist explanation can do — if it succeeds at all — is explain past behavior. It cannot inform future behavior. The essence of morality, though, is not description, but prescription.

Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can’t be their source.

Evolution does not explain morality. Bongo is not a bad chimp, he’s just a chimp. No moral rules apply to him. Eat the banana, Bongo.

 WHERE DO MORALS COME FROM?

Darwinists opt for an evolutionary explanation for morality without sufficient justification. In order to make their naturalistic explanation work, “morality” must reside in the genes. “Good” — that is, beneficial — tendencies can then be chosen by natural selection. Nature, through the mechanics of genetic chemistry, cultivates behaviors we call morality.

This creates two problems. First, evolution doesn’t explain what it’s meant to explain. It can only account for preprogrammed behavior, which doesn’t qualify as morality. Moral choices, by their nature, are made by free agents — not dictated by internal mechanics.

Second, the Darwinist explanation reduces morality to mere descriptions of behavior. But the morality that evolution needs to account for entails much more than conduct. Minimally, it involves motive and intent as well. Both are nonphysical elements that can’t, even in principle, evolve in a Darwinian sense.

Where do morals come from? Why do they seem to apply only to human beings? Are they the product of chance? What world view makes sense out of morality?

We can answer these questions simply by reflecting on the nature of moral rules. By making observations about the effect — morality — we can then ask what are its characteristics and what might cause it.

 Four Observations about Morality

The first thing we observe about moral rules is that, although they exist, they are not physical and don’t have physical properties. We won’t bump into them in the dark. They don’t extend into space. They have no weight. They have no chemical characteristics. Instead, they are immaterial entities we discover not through the aid of our five senses, but by the process of thought, introspection, and reflection.

This is a profound realization. We have, with a high degree of certainty, stumbled on something real. Yet it’s something that can’t be proven empirically or described in terms of scientific laws. From this we learn that there’s more to the world than just the physical universe. If nonphysical things — like moral rules — truly exist, then materialism as a world view is false.

Many other realities seem to populate this invisible world, such as propositions, numbers, and the laws of logic. Values such as happiness, friendship, and faithfulness exist, too, along with meanings and language. There may even be persons — souls, angels, and other immaterial beings.

It becomes clear that some things really exist that science has no access to, even in principle. Some realities are not governed by scientific laws. Science, therefore, is not the only discipline that gives us true information about the world. It follows, then, that naturalism as a world view is also false.

Our discovery of moral rules forces us to expand our understanding of the nature of reality. It opens our minds to the existence of a host of new entities that populate the world in the invisible realm.

The second thing we observe is that moral rules ar e a kind of communication. They are propositions — intelligent statements conveyed from one mind to another. The propositions take the form of imperatives, or commands. A command only makes sense when there are two minds involved, one giving the command an d one receiving it.

We notice a third fact when we reflect on moral rules. They have a force we can actually feel prior to any behavior. This is called the incumbency of moral rules, the oughtness of morality we considered earlier. It appeals to our will, compelling us to act in a certain way, though we may disregard its force and choose not to obey.

Fourth and finally, we feel a deep discomfort when we violate clear and weighty moral rules; an ethical pain makes us aware that we have done something wrong and deserve punishment. This sense of guilt carries with it not just this uncomfortable awareness, but also the dread of having to answer for our deed. Distraction and denial may temporarily numb the pain, but it never disappears entirely.

 Narrowing Our Options

These four observations provide us with a foundation from which to answer the question, “Where do morals come from?” We need only determine the possible options and then ask which option best accounts for our observations.

Faced with a limited number of options, we must choose something. When the full range of choices is clear, rejection of one means acceptance of another. At this point our discussion becomes personal, because the ultimate answer to our question has serious ramifications for the way we live our lives. We may be tempted to abandon careful thinking when we are forced to confront conclusions that make us uncomfortable.

Our options are limited to three. One: Morality is simply an illusion. Two: Moral rules exist but are mere accidents, the product of chance. Three: Moral rules are not accidents but are the product of divine intelligence. Which option makes most sense given our four observations about morality?

Some argue that morals simply don’t exist. They are nothing but illusions, useful fictions that help us live in harmony. This is the evolutionist’s answer we’ve already found seriously wanting.

Some take the second route. They admit that although objective moral laws must exist, they are just accidents. We discover them as part of the furniture of the universe, so to speak, but they have no explanation, nor do we need one.

This won’t do for a good reason: Moral rules without grounds or justification need not be obeyed. An example may help to illustrate. One evening in the middle of a Scrabble game, one notices the phrase “do not go” formed in the random spray of letter tiles on the table. Is this a command that ought to be obeyed? Of course not. It’s just a random collection of letters.

Commands are communications between two minds. Chance might conceivably create the appearance of a moral rule, but there can be no command if no one is speaking. Since this phrase is accidental, it can be safely ignored.

Even if a person is behind the communication, one could easily ignore the command if it isn’t backed by an appropriate authority. If I stood at an intersection and put my hand up, cars might stop voluntarily, but they’d have no duty to respond. They could ignore me without fear of punishment because I have no authority to direct traffic. But if a police officer replaced me, traffic would come to a halt.

What is the difference between the officer and me? My authority is not grounded. It doesn’t rest on anything solid. Police, in contrast, represent the government, so their authority is justified. They are legitimate representatives of the state, appointed to carry out its will.

It’s clear then that a law has moral force when an appropriate authority, operating within its legitimate jurisdiction, issues it. If people violate such a law, they could be punished. The same is true of moral laws. These laws have force if a proper authority stands behind them. Moral rules that appear by chance, in contrast, have no such grounding.

Our second option fails because it doesn’t explain the three important features we observed about morality. Chance morality fails to be a communication between two minds and therefore cannot be imperative. It doesn’t account for the incumbency of moral rules, nor does it make sense of the guilt and expectation of punishment one feels when those rules are violated.

 One Remaining Answer

Only one answer remains as a possible source of morality. If morality is neither an illusion nor the product of chance, then morals must be the result of an intelligent lawgiver. Universal moral laws that have genuine incumbency require an author whose proper domain is the universe, who has the moral authority to enforce His laws, and ultimately the power to mete out perfect justice.

What best explains the existence of morality? A personal God whose character provides an absolute standard of goodness. An impersonal force won’t do because a moral rule encompasses a proposition and a command; both are features of minds. Ethicist Richard Taylor explains: “A duty is something that is owed. . . . but something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as a duty in isolation. . . . The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone.”¹²

Only one option makes sense of each observation about morality: a personal God who created both the material and the immaterial realms. Moral laws suggest a moral lawgiver, one who communicates His desires through His laws. He expects His imperatives to be obeyed.

The existence of God also explains the incumbency of morality. Ethics are adequately grounded because God is a proper authority for moral rules. The universe is His possession because He created it. He has the right to rule over it; His great power undergirds that right

Ethical pain — true moral guilt — also makes sense with this explanation. Morals are not disembodied principles but personal commands, and so a violation is not just a broken rule but an offense against the person who made the rule. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard pointed out that a person could not have anything on his conscience if God did not exist.

Some attempt to argue that they don’t need God to have morality. They can live a moral life even though they don’t believe in a divine being. But no one denies that an atheist can behave in a way one might call moral. The real question is, “Why ought he?” Trappist monk Thomas Merton put it this way: “In the name of whom or what do you ask me to behave? Why should I go to the inconvenience of denying myself the satisfactions I desire in the name of some standard that exists only in your imagination? Why should I worship the fictions that you have imposed on me in the name of nothing?”¹³

A moral atheist is like someone sitting down to dinner who doesn’t believe in farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cooks. She believes the food just appears, with no explanation and no sufficient cause. This is silly. Either her meal is an illusion, or someone provided it. In the same way, if morals really exist, as we have argued, then some cause adequate to explain the effect must account for them. God is the most reasonable solution.

 The Final Verdict

Atheistic evolution cannot make sense of morality. Neither can monistic (“all is One”) Eastern religions. If duality is an illusion, as they hold, then the distinction between good and evil is ultimately rendered meaningless. Something like the Judeo-Christian idea of God must be true to account for moral laws adequately.

Morality grounded in God explains our hunger for justice. We desire for a day of final reckoning when all wrongs are made right, when innocent suffering is finally redeemed, and when the guilty are punished and the righteous rewarded.

This also explains our own personal sense of dread. We feel guilty because we are guilty. We know deep down that we have offended a morally perfect Being who has the legitimate authority to punish us. We also know we will have to answer for our own crimes against God.

In the end, we must accept one of two alternatives. Either we live in a universe in which morality is a meaningless concept and thus we are forever condemned to silence regarding any moral issue, or moral rules exist and we’re beholden to a moral God who holds us accountable to his law. There are no other choices. As Francis Schaeffer put it, “These are not probability answers; [these] are the only answers. It is this or nothing.”¹⁴ If one is certainly false, the other is certainly true.¹⁵

Gregory Koukl is president of Stand to Reason, an apologetics organization (www. str.org), and the coauthor with Francis J. Beckwith of Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Baker, 1998).

NOTES

1         Robert Wright, The Moral Animal — Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 23.

2         Ibid., 58.

3         Ibid., 59.

4         Ibid., 56.

5         Ibid., 88.

6         Ibid., 13.

7         Ibid., 377.

8         Ibid., 31.

9         Ibid., 102.

10      Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 , edited with introduction and notes by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 76.

11      Wright, 212.

12      Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83-84.

13      Quoted in Phillip Yancy, “The Other Great Commission,” Christianity Today, 7 October 1996, 136.

14      Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, from The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, vol. 1(Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 303.

15      This article is adapted from the forthcoming book, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1998). It can be ordered online at www.str.org.

The contents of this article are available for PDF download HERE!

First, the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolutionists. No verifiable transitions from one kind to another have as yet been found. Charles Darwin had an excuse; in his day fossil finds were relatively scarce. Today, however, we have an abundance of fossils. Still, we have yet to find even one legitimate transition from one kind to another.

Furthermore, in Darwin’s day such enormously complex structures as a human egg were thought to be quite simple-for all practical purposes, little more than a microscopic blob of gelatin. Today, we know that a fertilized human egg is among the most organized, complex structures in the universe. In an age of scientific enlightenment, it is incredible to think people are willing to maintain that something so vastly complex arose by chance. Like an egg or the human eye, the universe is a masterpiece of precision and design that could not have come into existence by chance.

Finally, while chance is a blow to the theory of evolution, the laws of science are a bullet to its head. The basic laws of science, including the laws of effects and their causes-energy conservation and entropy-undergird the creation model for origins and undermine the evolutionary hypothesis. While I would fight for a person’s right to have faith in science fiction, we must resist evolutionists who attempt to brainwash people into thinking that evolution is science.

Adapted from Fatal Flaws

For further study, see Hank Hanegraaff, Fatal Flaws: What Evolutionists Don’t Want You to Know (Nashville: W Publishing, 2003); Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, second edition (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993).

Get the Book

Dawkins acknowledges that on the surface Darwinism seems to be inadequate to explain goodness and morality. After all, what is the survival value of such sentiments? He nonetheless attempts to explain morality through his “selfish gene” theory by which genes ensure their own survival by encouraging altruistic behavior, such as through reciprocal altruism or aiding one’s genetic kin.²

Dawkins also argues that if our morality is grounded in our “Darwinian past” then we can expect to find universal morals that transcend cultural and religious boundaries. He cites studies that allegedly demonstrate that religious people do not differ from atheists in their morals.³ He concludes that “we do not need God in order to be good—or evil.”⁴

Considering his atheistic assumptions, it makes sense that Dawkins would attempt to base morality on evolution. However, his argument does not do justice to the true nature of morality: (1) he does not adequately explain how natural selection can produce moral obligation; (2) he confuses the relationship between morality and either God or religion; and (3) he does not adequately explain why being moral is important.

PROBLEM ONE: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD BE

Dawkins’s theory addresses whether actions either promote or hinder the survival of genes. This is merely a pragmatic criterion, but morality deals with concepts of right and wrong, not useful and not useful. No one consistently lives as if morals are merely based on survival value. People do regard some actions as genuinely right or wrong. Dawkins does not explain how the survival value of an action translates into the moral status of that action. As Dawkins admits elsewhere, “science has no methods for deciding what is ethical. That is a matter for individuals and for society.”⁵

Dawkins theorizes in terms of pragmatic survival value, but he misses this problem when he criticizes religion in terms of actual right and wrong:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.6

These considerations fill me with despair. They seem to show the immense power of religion, and especially the religious upbringing of children, to divide people and foster historic enmities and hereditary vendettas.7

Joshua’s action was a deed of barbaric genocide.8

A More Pessimistic Perspective

Dawkins demonstrates a very different attitude in River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (published eleven years before The God Delusion). He explains how a female digger wasp lays eggs inside a caterpillar so that her larvae can eat it. She paralyzes the caterpillar but does not kill it so that the body remains fresh. Dawkins speculates that if the wasp’s venom included an anesthetic, then the caterpillar would not suffer while being eaten, but “nature is not cruel, only piteously indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”⁹

In The God Delusion, Dawkins advocates seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people,¹⁰ but in River out of Eden he explains that natural selection does not promote such behavior. He draws from the economic concept of utility functions (in other words, whatever a given system maximizes) and explains that natural selection maximizes the survival of DNA. He then proposes the concept of “God’s Utility Function.” He says that we can imagine that creatures were created by a Divine Engineer and then we can reverse engineer what he was trying to maximize.¹¹ He applies this to what he considers to be the instability of cooperative effort:

Humans have a rather endearing tendency to assume that welfare means group welfare, that “good” means the good of society, the future well-being of the species or even of the ecosystem. God’s Utility Function, as derived from a contemplation of the nuts and bolts of natural selection, turns out to be sadly at odds with such a utopian vision. To be sure, there are occasions when genes may maximize their selfish welfare at their level, by programming unselfish cooperation, or even self-sacrifice, by the organism at its level. But group welfare is always a fortuitous consequence, not a primary drive. This is the meaning of the “selfish gene.”¹²

Dawkins returns to his example of the wasp and caterpillar and says that “Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA.”¹³ He describes the crash of a school bus and quotes a writer who argues that the horror of such tragedies confirms that we live in a world of values, because if the world were just electrons, then there would be no problem of evil. Dawkins responds:

On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither know nor care.

DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.¹⁴

How can natural selection be the basis of morality (The God Delusion) if it is completely unconcerned with kindness and suffering (River out of Eden)? Dawkins shows some intellectual honesty (considering his atheistic assumptions) regarding morality in River out of Eden, but he appears to abandon it in The God Delusion. The reason for this change is unclear.

Morals Need a Solid Foundation

Paul Copan argues that evolutionary naturalism can describe how people behave, but it cannot prescribe how people should behave.¹⁵ In order to say that an action is good or evil, one needs an objective and universal moral standard that transcends individual people and individual societies. It must also be personal in nature. Moral standards deal with right and wrong, what should and should not be done. That implies a choice that requires personality and consciousness. A transcendent moral standard would therefore need to be grounded in a conscious, personal, and transcendent reality. Christians find this in God—the only place where such a standard can be found.¹⁶

If God does not exist, then as Francis Schaeffer explains, ethics merely explain what is rather than what should be. There is then no objective difference between kindness and cruelty because there is no standard.¹⁷ The very terms “kind” and “cruel” would be meaningless. As Norman Geisler and Frank Turek argue, atheists rule out a transcendent Lawgiver in advance:18 This creates a problem: “While they may believe in an objective right and wrong, they have no way to justify such a belief (unless they admit a Moral Law Giver, at which point they cease to be atheists)” (emphasis in original).¹⁹

PROBLEM TWO: CONFUSING GOD AND RELIGION

In some places in The God Delusion Dawkins argues that God does not need to exist in order for people to be moral, and in other places he argues that people do not need religion or belief in God in order to be moral. He appears to use these two conditions interchangeably:

As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.²⁰

The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgments. This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good—or evil.²¹

You have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good.²²

Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.²³

The distinction between these two conditions is significant. As explained above, objective morality requires a transcendent foundation in God. This is true regardless of a person’s specific religious beliefs, or lack thereof, and despite differing cultural standards. In the Christian worldview (to which Dawkins responds more than to any other religious worldview), God created mankind, and He has revealed Himself not only through the written revelation in the Bible and the incarnation of Jesus, but also through nature and mankind’s moral conscience. For example, the apostle Paul explains in Romans 2:13–16 that the Gentiles who do not have the written law are nonetheless inwardly aware of God’s moral law.

If God exists and has given mankind a moral conscience, then people will be aware of His moral law, despite differing cultural and religious standards. Human morality has a divine foundation, not only for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but also for atheists. As Paul Copan explains, atheists can discern an objective difference between right and wrong without reference to special revelation (such as written scripture), but they lack “a proper metaphysical context” for such an affirmation, a context that is provided in the biblical affirmation that God exists and has created mankind in His image.²⁴ Someone may be aware of morals without religion but not without God.²⁵

PROBLEM THREE: WHY EVEN BOTHER BEING MORAL?

Most atheists are not guilty of the immoral deeds perpetrated by atheistic regimes, but beyond evolutionary pragmatism and public pressure, what prevents a person from being immoral if atheism is true? Dawkins admits that evolution does not produce such virtues as generosity and universal love,²⁶ but he argues that we have evolved to the point where we can rebel against our DNA and teach such values.²⁷ However, he does not indicate why we should rebel and move beyond our evolutionary heritage.

If nature does not care about suffering, then why not be cruel if it is beneficial for the individual person or society? History provides numerous examples of cruelty and oppression by perpetrators who saw personal or societal benefit in their actions (such as Hitler’s “Final Solution”). Alister McGrath notes that “one of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that many of the most deplorable acts of murder, intolerance, and repression of that century were carried out by those who thought that religion was murderous, intolerant, and repressive—and thus sought to remove it from the face of the planet as a humanitarian act.”28 Dawkins argues that humans have progressed morally since the times of Genghis Khan and Hitler and will continue to progress,²⁹ but he needs a standard by which to judge between moral systems. C. S. Lewis explains:

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.³⁰

Dawkins does not provide a clear standard. He supports a utilitarian ethic by which one should seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but he does not explain how to judge which consequences are good and which are bad.³¹ Lewis argues that a moral standard exists beyond human convention: “It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.”³²

Dawkins also does not have a rational basis for moral values if people are the products of impersonal, random, evolutionary processes. He attempts to argue that natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process.³³ Granted, if natural selection determines which genes survive based on their survival value, then it does not operate according to pure chance, but there are two problems. First, chance mutations will determine whether or not a gene arises as a candidate at all, even if natural selection itself is not a chance process. Second, Dawkins appeals to chance to explain how the first hereditary molecule arose and why one universe is favorable to life while another is not. He argues that chance (he also calls it “luck”) in the origin of life is not a significant problem because it only needs to happen once, while natural selection is a continuing process.³⁴ This may reduce the role of chance, but it does not escape the reality of chance and the problem that it creates for objective morality. Life is still the product of chance.

In Dawkins’s model, morals are byproducts of evolution, which means that they are mere conventions. Nothing is genuinely right or wrong. An action is merely pragmatic or not pragmatic, desirable or not desirable (but pragmatic or desirable for whom? Who decides?). People are merely accidents of evolution, and there is nothing wrong with a stronger (more “fit”) accident oppressing a weaker (less “fit”) accident in order to move ahead. In fact, that would be natural selection at work.³⁵

THE REALITY OF MORALS

Every person is aware that there is a genuine difference between right and wrong. As Paul Copan explains, “an ethic rooted in nature appears to leave us with arbitrary morality. Theism, on the other hand, begins with value; so bridging the is-ought gulf is a nonissue” (emphasis in original).³⁶ God did not arbitrarily declare a standard of right and wrong, and He did not discover that standard. Instead, the standard that He has revealed is an expression of His eternally holy, just, and loving nature. Greg Bahnsen states that “as Christians we have an absolute, unchanging, holy God who has revealed an absolute, unchanging, holy law to provide an absolute, unchanging, holy foundation for our ethical outlook and our moral conduct.”³⁷

Christians have an absolute, unshakable, and unchanging standard of morality. The atheist does not have such a basis. Gary Habermas argues:

One may have a strong, personal disgust for eating eggplant, but such an act is far from being immoral. Similarly, what we commonly view as evil in the world on an atheistic ethical system amounts to personal distaste, not to an objective problem for theism. Atheists have lost their favorite argument against theism.

To summarize briefly, we cannot have it both ways: we can accept absolute morality and face the strong possibility of the theistic universe, or we can deny it and acknowledge that we cannot lay evil at God’s feet, for there would be no such thing as objectively recognized wickedness. Either way, atheism receives a serious blow.³⁸

It is true that some people have committed atrocities in the name of Christ, but they acted contrary to the teachings of Christ. This illustrates the depravity inherent in the heart of every person and the need for Christians to continually strive to serve Christ more fully. Atheism does not account for mankind’s fallen nature,³⁹ and it does not provide an adequate basis for morality or for the concepts of good and evil. As Joel McDurmon notes, “The atheist has no Golden Rule because he has no Golden Ruler.”⁴⁰ When morality is divorced from its foundation in God, mankind ultimately has no stable foundation on which to judge the good and the bad. The Christian does have such a standard.

Henry W. Middleton, Ph.D., is a researcher and advisor for TrueLife.org. He also writes a Christian apologetics blog at http://thoughtsonapologetics.blogspot.com.

notes

1 See C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan Books, 1952), 17–39.

2 See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 214–20. Dawkins says in a radio interview that altruism towards individuals who cannot reciprocate is a “mistaken byproduct” but a mistake of which he approves. Terry Gross, Fresh Air (March 28, 2007), 50 min, MPEG-4, http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/ viewAudiobook?id=251744842&s=143441.

3 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 222, 225.

4 Ibid., 226.

5 Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 34. See also Gregory Koukl, “Monkey Morality: Can Evolution Explain Ethics?” Christian Research Journal, April–June 1998, http://www.equip.org/articles/evolution-and-ethics.

6 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 31. For a response to such charges, see Paul Copan, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics,” Philosophia Christi 10, 1 (2008): 7–37; also available from the Evangelical Philosophical Society, http://www.epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=45.

7 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 257.

8 Ibid. Dawkins is referring to the attack on Jericho in Joshua 6.

9 Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, The Science Masters Series (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 95–96.

10 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 232–33.

11 See Dawkins, River out of Eden, 103–5.

12 Ibid., 121–22. Also Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2–4.

13 Dawkins, River out of Eden, 131.

14 Ibid., 132–33.

15 See Paul Copan, “A Summary Critique: Why Science Can’t Explain Morality,” Christian Research Journal 29, 6 (2006): 44.

16 Paul Copan makes a similar argument in “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality,” in The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 147–48. Also available at PaulCopan.com, http://paulcopan.com/articles/pdf/God-naturalism-morality.pdf. See also J. M. Njoroge, “The New Atheism and Morality,” Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, at http://www.rzim.org/USA/USFV/tabid/436/ArticleID/10020/CBModuleId/881/Default.aspx.

17 See Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, in The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy: Three Essential Books in One Volume (Wheaton, IL.: Crossway Books, 1990), 291–301.

18 See Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL.: Crossway Books, 2004), 191.

19 Ibid., 193.

20 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 223.

21 Ibid., 226.

22 Ibid., 227.

23 Ibid., 272.

24 See Copan, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?” 35–36. Also Copan, “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality,” 145–57.

25 Dawkins’s appeal to studies regarding behavior among religious and nonreligious people does not prove that God is unnecessary in order for a person to be moral. At most such studies demonstrate that a moral distinction between right and wrong is universal among mankind, which is part of Paul’s argument in Romans 2:13–16.

26 See Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ix, 2–3.

27 See ibid., xiv, 3, 139, 200–201, 267–68.

28 Alister McGrath, “Has Science Eliminated God? Richard Dawkins and the Meaning of Life,” Science and Christian Belief 17, 2 (October 2005): 132. For examples of actions committed under atheistic communism, consult Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Luc Panné, et. al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

29 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 265–72.

30 Lewis, Mere Christianity, 25.

31 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 232–33. See also Dawkins, River out of Eden, 104.

32 Lewis, Mere Christianity, 30.

33 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 113–14.

34 See ibid., 137–40, 158.

35 Dawkins describes slavery among ants (The Selfish Gene, 177–79), but he opposes slavery among humans (The God Delusion, 169, 265, 271).

36 Copan, “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality,” 152.

37 Greg L. Bahnsen, Pushing the Antithesis: The Apologetic Methodology of Greg L. Bahnsen, ed. Gary Demar (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007), 182.

38 Gary Habermas, “The Plight of the New Atheism: A Critique,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 51, no. 4 (Dec. 2008): 823.

39 See Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live without God? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994), 189.

40 Joel McDurmon, The Return of the Village Atheist (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007), 28.

Synopsis

The controversy surrounding intelligent design (ID) and Darwinism continues to be at the forefront of cultural dialogue. Despite the growing success of ID, the same objections repeatedly appear in both scholarly and popular literature. Christians must be equipped with effective responses to such challenges.

For example, in The God Delusion Richard Dawkins asserts that design is unsuccessful unless it can explain who designed the designer. Besides his theological naivete, Dawkins here fails to grasp the nature of science. Simply put, explanations can be effective even if we can’t explain the explanations. For instance, an archaeologist can identify an object as designed even if she is unaware of the origin or identity of the designer. The same is true with the natural world.

With a little research, common challenges such as this are easily answered. It’s high time for Christians to educate themselves and put these objections to rest.

“Evolution Wars!” proclaimed the cover story of Time magazine, August 15, 2005. The following year Time ran another cover story titled, “God vs. Science,” featuring a debate between human-genome researcher Francis Collins and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The controversy surrounding intelligent design (ID) continues to appear in major newspapers, magazines, popular television shows, and various forums on the Internet. In the major motion picture documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,¹ actor Ben Stein examines how dogmatic Darwinists suppress the academic freedom of anyone who dissents from their theory, especially proponents of ID. The debate surrounding ID therefore continues to heat up and shows no signs of dying down.

Despite incessant proclamations by the media and the academic establishment regarding the demise of ID, interest in ID is exploding,² and philosopher J. P. Moreland contends that the ID movement cannot be stopped.³ Despite ID’s growing success, however, objections against it regularly appear in both scholarly and popular literature. In this article, we respond to ten of the most common criticisms raised against ID. Given the widespread misinformation in our culture about ID, it has become increasingly important for Christians to respond effectively to challenges posed against it.

OBJECTION #1:

IMPERFECTION IN LIVING THINGS COUNTS AGAINST ID

In his book Why Darwin Matters, skeptic Michael Shermer claims that the imperfect anatomy of the human eye disconfirms design. He asks, “For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye upside down and backwards?”⁴ According to Shermer, such imperfections are evidence for evolution and evidence against design.

Shermer has overlooked a basic point, however: design does not have to be perfect—it just has to be good enough. Imperfection speaks to the quality of design, not its reality. Consider successive versions of the iPod. The various versions have minor imperfections, but each clearly was designed; none evolved without guidance from programmers. Our ability to envision a better design hardly means the object in question lacks design.

What is true for the iPod is also true in biology. Living systems bear unmistakable marks of design, even if such design is, or appears to be, imperfect. In the real world, perfect design does not exist. Real designers aim for the best overall compromise among constraints needed to accomplish a function. Design is a give-and-take process. For instance, a larger computer screen may be preferable to a smaller one, but designers must also consider cost, weight, size, and transportability. Given competing factors, designers choose the best overall compromise—and this is precisely what we see in nature.

For instance, all life forms are part of a larger ecology that recycles its life forms. Most life forms survive by consuming other life forms, either living or dead. In due time, all life forms must die.

Suppose we object to design because foxes catch rabbits and eat them. If rabbits had perfect defenses, however, foxes would starve. Then rabbits, by reproducing without limit and eating all the vegetation, also would starve. The uncatchable rabbit, ironically, then, would upset its ecosystem and create far more difficulties for design than it would resolve. Given this larger perspective, it seems that the “imperfections” of individual organisms in nature are actually part of a larger design plan for life.

What about the human eye? Is the eye built upside-down and backwards, as many critics of design argue? Despite common claims that the eye is poorly designed, there actually are good reasons for its construction,⁵ and no one has demonstrated how the eye’s function might be improved without diminishing its visual speed, sensitivity, and resolution.

OBJECTION #2:

ID MUST EXPLAIN WHO DESIGNED THE DESIGNER

Richard Dawkins has raised this criticism against design arguments for years now, most recently in his book The God Delusion. According to Dawkins, ID fails because it doesn’t explain the origin of the designer. If the universe bears the marks of design, as ID proponents claim, does the designer bear such marks of design in turn? We are led to ask, “Who designed the designer?” If we can’t answer this question, says Dawkins, then ID is fruitless.

Is this, however, how science works? Can scientists only accept explanations that themselves have been explained? The problem with this objection is that it is always possible to ask for further explanation. There comes a point, however, when scientists must deny the request for further explanation and accept the progress they have made. As apologist Greg Koukl has observed, “An explanation can be a good one even if you do not have an explanation for the explanation.”⁶

For example, if an archaeologist discovers an ancient object that looks like an arrowhead or digging tool, she would be fully justified in drawing a design inference. In fact, after a few clear instances she would be irrational not to infer design. She may have no clue as to the origin or identity of the designer, but certain patterns that the artifacts exhibit would point beyond natural forces to the work of an intelligent designer.

If every explanation needed a further explanation, then nothing could ever be explained! For example, if designer B was responsible for having designed designer A, then the question inevitably would arise, “Who designed B?” The answer, of course, is designer C. And so on without end. Given such an infinite regress of explanations, nothing could ever be explained, since every explanation would require still further explanation. Science itself would come to a standstill!

OBJECTION #3:

ID IS NOT TESTABLE

This criticism is meant to disqualify ID as a science. For ID to be considered untestable, however (and hence, unscientific), there has to be a clear definition of what it means for something to be testable and a clear failure of ID to meet that definition. As it stands, no such definition exists.

If by “testable” we mean that a theory should be open to confirming or disconfirming evidence, then ID most certainly passes the test. Darwin presented what he regarded as strong evidence against design. Claiming that ID has been tested by such evidence and shown to be false, however, creates a catch-22 for the critic: If evidence can count against a theory, evidence must also be able to count in favor of a theory. The knife cuts both ways.

One cannot say, “Design is not testable,” and then turn around and say, “Design has been tested and shown to be false!” For evidence to show that something is false implies that evidence also might show it to be true, even if one thinks the particular evidence in question fails to establish a claim.

Researchers have confirmed the evidence for ID across a wide range of disciplines including molecular biology, physics, and chemistry.⁷ Even if critics reject the evidence for ID, in the very act of rejecting the evidence, they put design to the test (which is exactly what they do when no one is looking!).

A simple way to see that ID is testable is to consider the following “thought experiment.” Imagine what would happen if microscopic investigation revealed the words, “Made by Yahweh” inscribed in the nucleus of every cell. Of course, cells are not inscribed with the actual words, “Made by Yahweh,” but that’s not the point. The point is that we wouldn’t know this unless we actually “tested” cells for this sign of intelligence, which we couldn’t do if ID were not testable. If ID fails, it won’t be for lack of testability.

OBJECTION #4:

ID VIOLATES THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS

In 2003, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg testified before the Texas State Board of Education about the methods of science. He explained, “By the same standards that are used in the courts, I think it is your responsibility to judge that it is the theory of evolution through natural selection that has won general scientific acceptance. And therefore, it should be presented to students as the consensus view of science, without any alternatives being presented.”⁸ Judge John Jones made a similar declaration in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005).⁹

Darwinian evolution undeniably is accepted by the majority of practicing biologists. Appealing to the majority view as a way to exclude alternative explanations, however, is highly problematic. Here’s why: scientific consensus in the past has been notoriously unreliable. In 1960, for instance, the geosynclinal theory was the consensus explanation for mountain formation. The authors of Geological Evolution of North America considered geosynclinal theory “one of the great unifying principles of geology.”¹⁰

Whatever happened to geosynclinal theory? Within ten years of this declaration it had been utterly abandoned and decisively replaced with plate tectonics, which explains mountain formation through continental drift and sea-floor spreading.

This is not an isolated example in the history of science. In 1500, the scientific consensus was that the Earth was at the center of the universe, but Copernicus and Newton shattered that misconception by showing that astronomical data were better explained by the Earth circling the Sun. The scientific consensus in the mid-1700s was that a substance called phlogiston caused heat, but Lavoisier shattered that misconception by showing that combustion was due to oxygen. At the end of the nineteenth century—forty years after the publication of The Origin of Species—the scientific consensus was to reject Darwinian evolution!

Today, when Darwinism is touted so widely as fact, it surprises many to learn that most biologists at the start of the twentieth century rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the 1930s Darwinism revived when a handful of scientists merged Darwin’s theory with Mendelian genetics, which is now known as neo-Darwinism. Within neo-Darwinism, natural selection acted on genes that were randomly mutating. The history of science is filled with such turnabouts. As ID develops, we can expect Darwinism’s fortunes to change again, this time for the worse.

Darwinism remains the scientific consensus, but that consensus is shrinking. Dissent from Darwinism continues to grow in the scientific population. In 2001, Seattle’s Discovery Institute launch­ed the Web site www.dissentfromdarwin.org to encourage scientists who are skeptical of Darwinism to make their dissension public. Since its inception, more than seven-hundred scientists from top universities worldwide have stepped forward and signed their names in dissent. Moreover, for every signatory of this list, there are tens if not hundreds who would sign it if their research and livelihoods would not be threatened by challenging Darwinism. (The documentary Expelled makes this perfectly clear.)

The very idea of “consensus science,” ironically, is bogus. In a speech at the California Institute of Technology, medical doctor, author, and public intellectual Michael Crichton said it best:

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.¹¹

OBJECTION #5:

ID DOESN’T GO FAR ENOUGH/ISN’T HONEST ENOUGH TO ADMIT THAT ITS DESIGNER IS THE CHRISTIAN GOD

ID does not identify the designer. Why not? Is it for lack of honesty, as this objection suggests? No. The identity of the designer goes beyond the scientific evidence for design. Most advocates of ID are in fact Christians, but many Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and agnostics also see evidence for design in nature. (David Berlinski’s recent book The Devil’s Delusion¹² is a case in point.) The evidence of science can identify a designer consistent with the God of the Bible (one that is powerful, creative, skilled, and so forth), but science alone cannot prove that this designer is the Christian God or, for that matter, the God of any other religious faith.

In the foreword for our book Understanding Intelligent Design, apologist Josh McDowell offers a helpful comparison between ID and archaeology. To make the strongest case possible for the historical resurrection of Jesus, the deity of Christ, and the reliability of the Scriptures, for example, McDowell often uses recent findings from the field of archaeology. Regardless of the religious conviction of the archaeologist, the findings still can be used to support the biblical accounts of history—we owe some of the most significant archaeological finds that support the Bible to non-Christians.

As McDowell suggests, we ought to think of ID scientists in the same way as these archeologists. Should we dismiss an archaeological find because it happens also to be consistent with Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, or some other religion? Of course not. Regardless of their religious beliefs, ID theorists are finding evidence for design in the natural world that is consistent with the biblical view of creation. If they don’t identify the designer in their academic work, it is because such claims go beyond the scientific data.

OBJECTION #6:

ID IS CREATIONISM IN A CHEAP TUXEDO

Darwinists and the media regularly confuse ID with traditional creationism. Why? To discredit it. In their minds, creationism has no intellectual credibility. To refer to ID as creationism is thus meant to ensure that ID likewise will be denied intellectual credibility. This is why Leonard Krishtalka, professor at the University of Kansas, famously referred to ID as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.”¹³ Creationism and ID, however, are distinct.

Creationism holds that a Supreme Being created the universe. Creationists come in two varieties: young-earth and old-earth creationists.¹⁴ Young-earth creationists interpret Genesis as teaching that creation took place in six twenty-four-hour days, that the universe is between six- and ten-thousand years old, and that most fossils were deposited during Noah’s global flood.

Old-earth creationists, on the other hand, allow a wider range of interpretations of Genesis. They accept contemporary scientific dating, which places the age of the Earth at roughly 4.5 billion years old and the universe at 13.7 billion years old. They accept microevolution as God’s method of adapting existing species to their changing environments, but they reject macroevolution (the large-scale transformation of one species into a completely different species).

ID, though often confused with creation science, is in fact quite different from it. Rather than beginning with some particular interpretation of Genesis (as young-earth and old-earth creationists typically do), ID begins with investigating the natural world. ID looks for patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence. Given what the world reveals about itself, ID proponents reason that a designing intelligence best explains certain patterns in nature.

The great difference between ID and creation science, then, is that ID relies not on prior assumptions about divine activity in the world, but on methods developed within the scientific population for recognizing intelligence.¹⁵ Even Judge Jones in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial mentioned earlier recognized that ID proponents do not base their theory on “the Book of Genesis,” “a young earth,” or “a catastrophic Noachic flood.” Despite incessant comparisons in the media with creation science, ID is actually quite different from it (although the majority of ID proponents believe in some form of creation, and, indeed, many of them are Christians).

OBJECTION #7:

ID IS RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED

According to many critics of ID, design proponents oppose evolution not because they have fairly assessed the evidence for it, but because they are religiously motivated. In particular, critics suppose that design theorists worry that Darwinism undermines traditional morality. Now, it is true historically that Darwinism has been used to undercut traditional morality. History professor Richard Weikart, for instance, details how Darwinism has been used to justify eugenics, abortion, and racism in his must-read book From Darwin to Hitler.¹⁶

Although the tension between Darwinism and traditional morality is undoubtedly fascinating and noteworthy, design theorists reject Darwinism for a more basic reason: its lack of scientific support. Design theorists oppose Darwinian evolution because natural selection acting on random variation gives no evidence of being able to account for the diversity and complexity of life as found in nature.

Biochemist Michael Behe, who is a Roman Catholic and perhaps the best-known design theorist, has repeatedly declared that his opposition to Darwinian evolution stems not from religious reasons, but on account of the scientific data. Behe had no theological problem wedding Darwinian evolution with his Catholic faith. The issue for Behe was the lack of evidence for evolution and the positive case for design.

Even if design proponents were religiously motivated, how would that render their findings unscientific? Why is motivation even relevant? The motivation of scientists is immaterial to the status of their research. Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking hopes his work in physics will help us understand the mind of God. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg hopes his work in physics will help destroy religion: “I hope that this [i.e., the destruction of religion] is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”17 Weinberg is not less of a scientist than Hawking because of his atheistic motivations, and Hawking is not less of a scientist than Weinberg because of his theistic motivations. Likewise, ID is not less of a science because its proponents happen to be motivated one way or another.

The real question for ID is not motivation, but evidence. Philosopher Francis Beckwith explains that “labeling a point of view, or the motives of its proponents, ‘religious’ or ‘nonreligious’ contributes nothing to one’s assessment of the quality of the arguments for that point of view. Either the arguments work or they don’t work or, more modestly, they are either reasonable or unreasonable, plausible or implausible.”¹⁸

OBJECTION #8:

ID IS A SCIENCE-STOPPER

Design critics regularly warn the public that allowing ID into science will either destroy science or significantly deter its progress. According to science writer Michael Shermer, for example, “The point of the [ID] movement is not to expand scientific understanding—it is to shut it down.”¹⁹

The truth, however, is just the opposite—by rigidly excluding ID from science, Darwinists themselves impede scientific progress. Consider “junk DNA.” The word “junk” suggests that useless portions of DNA have arisen together through a blind, unguided process of evolution. Evolutionary theorists thus have come to regard only a small portion of DNA as functional. By contrast, if DNA is the product of design, we would expect much of it to be functional.

Current research indicates that much of what was previously termed “junk DNA” is now known to have a function. This finding has become so well known in the scientific community that the popular press has picked up on it. In a recent Newsweek article, Mary Carmichael describes the transformation in how DNA is understood: “Researchers have realized that this forgotten part of the genome is, in fact, profoundly important. It contains the machinery that flips the switches, manipulating much of the rest of the genome….Genes make up only 1.2 percent of our DNA. The rest of the DNA, once called ‘junk DNA’ was thought to be filler. Recent finds prove otherwise.”²⁰

Design thus encourages scientists to look for deeper insight into nature, whereas Darwinian evolution discourages it. The criticism that design stifles scientific progress is therefore mistaken. The criticism applies more readily to Darwinism than to design.

OBJECTION #9:

ID IS INHERENTLY RELIGIOUS, NOT SCIENTIFIC

One of the most common tactics that critics of design employ is to label ID as religious rather than scientific. According to philosopher of biology David Hull, Darwin rejected design not just because he thought the evidence was against it, but because he thought it wasn’t even scientific: “He [Darwin] dismissed it [design] not because it was an incorrect scientific explanation, but because it was not a proper scientific explanation at all.”²¹ Critics, accordingly, suppose design to be an inherently religious idea.

How can this be? As noted earlier, ID studies patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence. Many special or specific sciences already study such patterns and draw agency or design inferences. Examples include forensic science (agency—did that person die of natural causes, or was there foul play?) and archaeology (design—is that an arrowhead or a naturally formed rock?). It is scientifically legitimate to recognize the work of an intelligent agent, even if the identity of that agent is unknown, as is often the case in archaeology.

Critics counter that we cannot apply design to biology because we only have experience with human designers (and any designer in biology would be nonhuman). The sciences of design, however, do not apply merely to human designers. We have evidence of animals that design things. Beavers, for instance, build dams that we recognize as designed. Design also need not be restricted to Earth. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI, as seen in the movie Contact) is a well-established scientific program that attempts to identify radio signals sent from outer space by intelligent aliens. The working assumption of SETI is that we can distinguish an intelligently produced signal from random radio noise.

Some critics discount ID because its designer is supposed to be unobservable. These same critics, however, often will turn around and postulate the “many-worlds hypothesis” (i.e., that multiple universes exist) to discount how finely tuned the laws of physics are to allow for the emergence and sustenance of life. If we are only one of many universes, critics surmise, then it shouldn’t surprise us that we find ourselves in a universe uniquely crafted for our existence. The existence of multiple universes has never been observed. In fact, they are such that they can never be observed! Does this mean the many-worlds hypothesis is rendered unscientific? Of course not. Science often progresses by proposing theoretical entities that have yet to be observed and even may be unobservable, because of their explanatory power. Observability is therefore not a necessary condition for an explanation to be scientific; macroevolution has never been observed, yet it is still considered scientific.

Another common way of excluding ID from science is to charge that science only deals with what is repeatable, and nature’s designs are unrepeatable. The problem is that scientists study many things that are unrepeatable, such as the Big Bang and the origin of life. Scientists have no clue how to repeat either of these events in a laboratory; yet they are clearly within the realm of science. If repeatability is considered a necessary condition for science, then disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, cosmology, and paleontology must be excluded from science as soon as they discover some unique artifact or feature of nature. Since those disciplines are included within the realm of science despite their unrepeatability, ID also must be included. The repeatability objection therefore fails to exclude ID.

Other objections to ID’s status as a science are also readily answerable.²² The answers presented here, however, suffice to demonstrate that ID does not have to prove that it is a science—it already is. Popular atheist Richard Dawkins, surprisingly, agrees. Dawkins says, “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.”²³

OBJECTION #10:

ID IS AN ARGUMENT FROM IGNORANCE

Sometimes also called the “God-of-the-gaps” objection, the argument-from-ignorance objection is perhaps the most common criticism leveled against ID. In an argument from ignorance, the lack of evidence against a proposition is used to argue for its truth. For instance, a typical argument-from-ignorance might be: “Ghosts and goblins exist because it hasn’t been shown that they don’t exist.” The proponent of this view believes the lack of evidence against ghosts and goblins is positive evidence for their existence, which, of course, is logically absurd. According to critics, design theorists argue for the truth of ID simply because design has not been shown to be false.

On closer inspection, however, it is the Darwinists who are arguing from ignorance. Darwinists frequently charge that just because it is not known how complex biological systems evolved doesn’t mean that Darwinism is false. If Darwinists can’t explain how complex biological systems evolved, however, what right do they have to claim that such systems evolved in the first place? Lacking an evidentially based model for how certain biological structures evolved means that Darwinists are arguing from ignorance.

In these encounters, Darwinists will often attempt to turn the tables, suggesting that ID reasons from, “Gee, I can’t see how evolution could have done it,” to the conclusion, “Shucks, I guess God must have done it.” This misrepresents ID, however. When we examine complex biological systems, we do not infer design merely because naturalistic approaches to evolution fail. We infer design not from what we don’t know, but from what we do know.

We have empirical evidence for the capacity of intelligent agents to design irreducibly complex systems such as the bacterial flagellum (the bacterial flagellum is a bidirectional motor-driven propeller on the backs of certain bacteria). Human engineers invented motors like this long before the flagellum was even discovered. If we apply the same reasoning to the flagellum as we do to human technology, it is obvious that the flagellum bears the marks of intelligence. ID is a positive argument from what we do know, not from ignorance.

Many evolutionary biologists pretend that the “house of evolution” is in good order, but occasionally a few come clean about its disarray. University of Chicago biologist James Shapiro, for instance, admits that “there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”²⁴ University of Iowa rhetorician David Depew likewise concedes, “I could not agree more with the claim that contemporary Darwinism lacks models that can explain the evolution of cellular pathways and the problem of the origin of life.”²⁵

There currently are no naturalistic explanations for the origin of life, the information content of DNA, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the privileged status of Earth, irreducibly complex biological structures, human consciousness, and morality. Given the lack of scientific evidence for these basic elements of life, it is more than fair to ask, “Who is ignorant here?” Naturalistic causes give no evidence of adequately accounting for any of these features of the universe. Intelligent causes, by contrast, have demonstrated this ability time and again.

It is high time not only to give ID the credit it deserves, but also to give Darwinism the discredit it deserves. Intelligent design is a young research program that still has a long way to go. Darwinism, by contrast, has become an outdated dogma ready to be consigned to the trash heap of history, and evolutionary theory, as developed by Darwin and prolonged by contemporary devotees, is essentially a relic of failed nineteenth-century economic theories about competition for scarce resources. We, on the other hand, live in the twenty-first century, an age of information where information is limitless. ID theory is the study of intelligently produced information. Despite all the protestations by Darwinists that ID is unscientific, ID is the cutting-edge of science. Get on board!

William A. Dembski and Sean McDowell are coauthors of Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language (Harvest House, 2008).

notes

1 Kevin Miller and Ben Stein, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, directed by Nathan Frankowski (Dallas: Premise Media, 2008).

2 See William Dembski and Sean McDowell, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2008); William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (Dallas: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008); Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2007); Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006); Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004).

3 J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 13.

4 Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design (New York: Times Books, 2006), 17.

5 See Dembski and McDowell.

6 Gregory Koukl, “Answering the New Atheists, Part 1,” Solid Ground (May/June, 2008), 4, available at http://www.str.org/site/DocServer/5-6_SG_2008.pdf?docID=3021.

7 See Dembski and Wells; Gonzalez and Richards.

8 Inside Science News Service, “Physics Nobelist Takes Stand on Evolution,” Story Archive (2003), American Institute of Physics, http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2003/081.html.

9 The case of Kitmiller v. Dover evaluated whether teachers were required to read a four-paragraph statement to students, informing them that ID is an alternative theory to Darwinian evolution.

10 Thomas Clark and Colin Stearn, Geological Evolution of North America: A Regional Approach to Historical Geology (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1960).

11 Michael Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming” (Caltech Michelin Lecture, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, January 17, 2003), available at http:// www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html (last accessed July 23, 2008).

12 David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Crown Forum, 2008).

13 See this link: https://tv.ku.edu/news/2005/11/08/evolution-and-faith-a-peaceful-coexistence/.

14 Ken Ham and Hugh Ross are well-known defenders of young-earth and old-earth creation­ism, respectively. For a good discussion on the different interpretations of Genesis see, The Genesis Debate: Three Views on the Days of Creation, ed. David Hagopian (Mission Viejo, CA: Crux Press, 2001).

15 William Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chaps. 2, 7.

16 Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

17 “Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg: Free People from Superstition,” Free Thought Today (April 2000), Freedom From Religion Foundation, available at http://ffrf.org/fttoday/ 2000/april2000/weinberg.html (last accessed July 23, 2008).

18 Francis J. Beckwith, “Intelligent Design, Religious Motives, and the Constitution’s Religion Clauses” in Intelligent Design: William Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

19 Shermer, 99.

20 Mary Carmichael, “A Changing Portrait of DNA,” Newsweek, December 10, 2007, 64.

21 David Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 26.

22 See Dembski and McDowell, chap. 5.

23 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006), 58–59.

24 James Shapiro, “In the Details…What?” (Review of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box), National Review, September 16, 1996, 62–65.

25 David Depew, “Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity: A Rejoinder,” in Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, ed. Stephen C. Meyer (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003), 447.

Let’s meet the feuding parties. On one side, we see the mostly likable, mostly friendly folks who use simple, clear, scientifically erroneous analogies, as well as political means and public relations campaigns, to support their view that Darwinism is false, and that living things show evidence of intelligent design. On the other side, we find the often arrogant, overeducated academics and lousy communicators—otherwise known as “scientists”—who nevertheless have the biological evidence firmly in their corner.

These are the contending camps in the intelligent design (ID) debate, as depicted in the eighty-six-minute film Flock of Dodos (FOD). FOD has played at film festivals and on university and college campuses nationwide, as well as on the cable network Showtime. Written, produced, and directed by ex-evolutionary biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, FOD offers an amusing look at the ID debate in the United States, emphasizing the educational public policy arguments over ID in Kansas, Olson’s home state. FOD traces the history of debates over evolution in the United States from the Scopes Trials in 1925 to various events within the past couple of years, such as those in Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Ohio. The film, which includes animation, interviews, and even an offbeat experiment, is fun to watch. Its accuracy, however, is hit and miss. Let the viewer beware: if you watch FOD for the laughs—and there are many—maintain skepticism about the scholarship and reporting.

The Praiseworthy Aspects. The easy-going, humorous, candidly watchable flavor of FOD is reflected in Randy Olson’s treatment of his own family history and career in the film. He speaks, for example, with self-deprecating charm about being tongue-tied as a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1980s while in the presence of his scientific hero, the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. (I can testify to the overwhelming, speech-destroying effect of Gould’s powerful personality at close quarters.)

Olson describes his career change, from biologist to filmmaker in the wake of a divorce, relating that event with empathy toward the similar experiences of one of his interview subjects, Kansas lawyer and ID activist John Calvert. The nonconfrontational, relaxed tone of most of the interviews in FOD speaks to a filmmaker with genuine curiosity about his subjects. Olson clearly states his sympathies for Darwinian evolution, but he allows his pro-ID interviewees to make their points without interruption.

Olson, moreover, is unsparing regarding his natural allies, evolutionary biologists. In the film’s most striking scene, a poker party Olson organized that included evolutionary biologists from Harvard University and other leading institutions, Olson’s filming and editorial choices allow the academic arrogance of the assembled scientists to strike viewers with full force. The plain message of this and other sequences in FOD is unflattering to mainstream biology. Even if these guys are right about the facts, one wouldn’t want to spend much time with them.

The Problematic Aspects. The ID/evolution debate, however, calls for more. Having the sort of companionable personality that might make one a pleasant acquaintance with whom to share a cross-country drive, as Olson has, is no guarantee of reportorial or scientific accuracy.

Consider the issue of poor reporting. Olson portrays biologist Jonathan Wells as misrepresenting the use of fraudulent embryo diagrams in modern biology textbooks. In the late nineteenth century, German embryologist Ernst Haeckel drew figures purporting to depict similarities in vertebrate embryos across organisms such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. Haeckel argued that these similarities could be explained only by common ancestry. Olson acknowledges that Haeckel’s drawings are suspect but also asserts that the drawings are not used in modern biology textbooks. Lending humor to Olson’s assertion is the vain search of the ID activist John Calvert, when Olson asks him to find Haeckel’s drawings in the biology textbooks in Calvert’s home.

The segment is amusing, at the expense of ID, but its factual basis is flat wrong. A number of modern biology textbooks have reproduced Haeckel’s fraudulent figures, including a widely used text, Molecular Biology of the Cell, by a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, cell biologist Bruce Alberts. It was at best a matter of happenstance that Calvert did not have those textbooks in his home on the day Olson was filming. In any case, the extent of Calvert’s personal library provides no excuse for Olson. Honest reporting requires Olson to establish facts for himself. How widely were Haeckel’s figures used? That is research to be done in the library, not a point for easy (but wholly erroneous) lampooning if the right books happen not to be around during an interview.

Consider the film’s treatment of Professor John Angus Campbell of the University of Memphis. FOD portrays Campbell as having represented himself as an evolutionist—a brave minority voice for reason—at an ID conference held in South Carolina. Only later, they claim, did the filmmakers learn that Campbell was affiliated with the Discovery Institute (consistently depicted as the somewhat sinister birthplace of ID throughout the film). FOD intimates that Campbell was less than honest in presenting himself as a person who did not promote ID.

Campbell is not an ID advocate, however, despite his association with the Discovery Institute. What he said in his interview—at least the portions excerpted in the film—fits exactly with Campbell’s long-standing public posture about the ID/evolution debate. Campbell is an expert in the rhetoric of science, Darwin’s rhetoric in particular, and cares passionately that students, teachers, and the culture at large have the same freedom Darwin enjoyed to debate different theories of origins. Campbell’s major editor’s essay in the Michigan State University Press volume, Darwin, Design and Public Education (2003), makes this clear. What then explains FOD’s near-slanderous portrayal of Campbell as a dishonest, stealth ID advocate? I suggest, charitably: shallow, lazy, or simply nonexistent fact-gathering. I think Olson owes Campbell an apology and retraction.

FOD contains other serious errors as well. It vastly overstates the Discovery Institute’s budget for ID, for instance, in keeping with the film’s depiction of Discovery as a well-funded, but less than transparent, institution.

The Hidden Assumption. Imagine a spectator watching a baseball game through a knothole in the fence—and all he sees is third base. He watches the entire game with his eye there, focused on third base, and only third base.

If someone asks him to describe the game, he says, “Well, there’s some guy that stands around kicking the dirt for quite a while, spitting on the ground, and that sort of thing; and all at once a bunch of guys come sliding in and kick the dirt all over and then swear at each other and almost fight, and pretty soon they all leave and the first guy stands around, kicking the dirt once again. And that’s about it.”

The knothole of modern science is naturalism. Now, naturalism is said to come in two forms: one philosophical (call this PN)—the physical world is the whole of reality—and the other methodological (call this MN)—the physical world is all that science can study, although there may be more to reality, in its totality, than the strictly material. MN is said to be philosophically neutral, and necessary for the practice of science, while PN is a universal claim about the nature of reality itself.

For all practical scientific purposes, however, PN versus MN is a distinction without a difference. Here’s the problem. It is possible that nonmaterial causes exist, such as minds, and bring about distinctive effects in the world. If MN rules out this possibility before the evidence has a chance to speak for itself, then the practice of science simply becomes applied naturalism, that is, PN in all but name. Science ceases to be a truth-seeking enterprise, because reality is being viewed through the knothole of naturalism.

What if life on Earth actually were designed and brought into existence by a nonhuman intelligence? If the “rules of science” (MN) kept us from ever discovering that, what passes as “science” would not be genuine knowledge at all. Science must be kept free to pursue the truth. To borrow a metaphor from Olson’s film, the poker-playing scientists would have rigged the game, by begging the question, presupposing what they were trying to establish. Olson and friends might have avoided this glaring fallacy had they invited at least one philosopher to the table for poker night.

A Qualified Recommendation. Would I recommend FOD? Yes, but only if viewers are informed about the film’s factual errors. One hopes that Olson will take his production back into the editing room, to fix the inaccuracies and misrepresentations that detract from his overall message. Given the likelihood that the intelligent design debate will be with us for a long time, Olson should have plenty of opportunities to do just that. I look forward to seeing his next film, and indeed to meeting him someday. We dodos of intelligent design, although challenged left and right, won’t be going extinct any time soon.

The arguments that support evolutionary theory are astonishingly weak.

First, the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolutionists. No verifiable transitions from one kind to another have as yet been found. Charles Darwin had an excuse; in his day fossil finds were relatively scarce. Today, however, we have an abundance of fossils. Still, we have yet to find even one legitimate transition from one kind to another.

Furthermore, in Darwin’s day such enormously complex structures as a human egg were thought to be quite simple—for all practical purposes, little more than a microscopic blob of gelatin. Today, we know that a fertilized human egg is among the most organized, complex structures in the universe. In an age of scientific enlightenment, it is incredible to think people are willing to maintain that something so vastly complex arose by chance. Like an egg or the human eye, the universe is a masterpiece of precision and design that could not have come into existence by chance.

Finally, while chance is a blow to the theory of evolution, the laws of science are a bullet to its head. The basic laws of science, including the laws of effects and their causes—energy conservation and entropy—undergird the creation model for origins and undermine the evolutionary hypothesis. While I would fight for a person’s right to have faith in science fiction, we must resist evolutionists who attempt to brainwash people into thinking that evolution is science.²

What about “Theistic Evolution”?

Under the banner of “theistic evolution,” a growing number of Christians maintain that God used evolution as His method for creation. This, in my estimation, is the worst of all possibilities. It is one thing to believe in evolution; it is quite another to blame God for it. Not only is theistic evolution a contradiction in terms—like the phrase flaming snowflakes—but in the words of the Nobel prize-winning evolutionist Jacques Monod: “[Natural] selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species….The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethic revolts….I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.”

First, the biblical account of creation specifically states that God created living creatures according to their own “kinds” (Gen.1:24–25). As confirmed by science, the DNA for a fetus is not the DNA for a frog, and the DNA for a frog is not the DNA for a fish; rather the DNA of a fetus, frog, or fish is uniquely programmed for reproduction after its own kind. Thus while the Bible allows for microevolution (transitions within “the kinds”) it does not allow for macroevolution (amoebas evolving into apes or apes evolving into astronauts).

Furthermore, evolutionary biology cannot account for metaphysical realities such as ego and ethos. Without data demonstrating that physical processes can produce metaphysical realities, there is no warrant for dogmatically declaring that humans evolved from hominids.

Finally, an omnipotent, omniscient God does not have to painfully plod through millions of mistakes, misfits, and mutations in order to have fellowship with humans. As the biblical account of creation confirms, He can create humans instantaneously (Gen.2:7).

Evolutionism is fighting for its very life. Rather than prop it up with theories like theistic evolution, thinking people everywhere must be on the vanguard of demonstrating its demise.³

— Hank Hanegraaff

NOTES

1. Adapted from Hank Hanegraaff, The Bible Answer Book (Nashville: J. Countryman, 2004).

2. For further study, see Hank Hanegraaff, Fatal Flaws: What Evolutionists Don’t Want You to Know (Nashville: W Publishing, 2003); Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).

3. For further study, see J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds, eds., Three Views on Creation and Evolution (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1999).

SYNOPSIS

During the nineteenth century Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection. His goal was to show that life was not the result of divine intervention, but the work of blind naturalistic processes. Darwin claimed to have arrived at this truth by working strictly with the facts apart from any preconceived ideas, and this is exactly how most people today perceive Darwinism. Dissenters have argued that Darwinism is not science, but that Darwin superimposed an atheistic/materialistic worldview on nature, then searched for the facts to support his theory. Darwinians responded that Darwin’s own writings show that he was not an atheist, but always believed in some form of deity. A careful study of Darwin’s writings, especially his posthumously published private notebooks and personal communication, reveals that Darwin was indeed an atheist and his theory of natural selection was formulated to replace a Creator with naturalistic processes.

The concept of biological evolution is almost as old as life itself. Many men through the centuries expressed the belief that all living beings evolved from a common ancestor. Some attributed this evolutionary process to God and others to nature, but until the nineteenth century, no one had posited a mechanism by which it could have occurred that was remotely plausible.

In 1859, however, Charles Darwin published what is commonly called The Origin of Species, or Origin.¹ His theory of natural selection working on chance variations revolutionized the world.

Today Darwinism is accepted by many people as a genuine scientific theory. The popularity of his theory is such that anyone who questions it is suspect and “inevitably attracts the speculative psychiatric eye to himself.”² Dissenters, such as Adam Sedgwick, have argued from the beginning, however, that Darwinism is not science, but is founded on a philosophy of atheism and materialism.³

Many Darwinians have denied this assertion, believing that Darwinism is not atheistic. They claim that Darwin was always a believer in God, or that he became an unbeliever many years after he developed his natural selection theory. They argue that religion and evolution can be reconciled and that neither atheism nor naturalism influence belief in evolution.

The truth is that natural selection was Darwin’s attempt to provide atheism with its much-needed “creation” story.⁴ Scientist Richard Dawkins maintains that because evolution made God unnecessary, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”⁵ The first step in connecting Darwinism with atheism is to examine the evidence that the theory’s founder was an atheist and that the theory was formulated to make God unnecessary.

Darwin’s Belief

Early in his life Darwin believed in a personal God, Christ, the afterlife, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His autobiography, written for his children, pictures him as a man who started out with a theistic worldview.

In 1828, at the age of 19, Darwin entered Cambridge to become a clergyman. At that time in his life he believed in the “strict and literal truth of every word of the Bible.”⁶ During his three-year stay at Cambridge he read William Paley’s Evidences for Christianity and Natural Theology with great delight and found Paley’s teleological argument—that the apparent design in nature implies a Designer—to be conclusive.

On December 27, 1831, Darwin set out on a sailing voyage that would last several years. While onboard a ship named the Beagle, Darwin was still quite orthodox: “I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.”⁷

After this excursion, Darwin spent the next few years (October 1836–January 1839) cogitating religion. He discovered what he perceived to be problems with the biblical record, and while he was at first unwilling to abandon his faith, disbelief eventually triumphed:

I can remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.⁸

Darwin claimed that he remained a theist for many more years and that it wasn’t until shortly after the publication of Origin that his theism began to weaken, even though his belief in the Christian God was extinguished. As he stated, theism “was strong in my mind…when I wrote the Origin of species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker.”⁹

Many scholars allude to passages in Darwin’s writings to support their claim that while Darwin’s theism began to weaken, he never completely abandoned his belief in God. In his chapter “Difficulties on Theory” he posed this question to those who compare the eye to a telescope: “Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intelligent powers like those of man?” In the second and subsequent editions of Origin, Darwin closed with the following words: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”¹⁰

In 1879, a few years before Darwin’s death (1882), a German student wrote to ask Darwin about his religious beliefs. A member of his family replied, “Mr. Darwin…considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God.”¹¹

Darwin’s rejection of Christianity and his continued belief in some form of deity is the picture most people have of him; and, I believe, this was the picture Darwin wanted to portray. A case can be made for a theistic Darwin; however, a careful and thorough study of his writings reveals that not only was the latter part of his life (following Origin) atheistic, but his disbelief can be traced back much earlier than Darwin had claimed.

Darwin’s Doubt

Darwin’s autobiography discusses arguments for and against the existence of God. “The old argument,” says Darwin, “of design in nature, as given by Paley, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.”¹² Darwin also found the problem of suffering quite convincing as an argument against belief in God:

A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage could there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.¹³

Darwin argued that it was natural selection alone that could account for the facts. In Darwin’s worldview, natural selection was incompatible with God and was meant to replace Him. He told Charles Lyell in 1859, “If I were convinced that I required such additions [new powers and attributes and forces] to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish.”¹⁴ In his 1868 work he said that either God or natural selection is unnecessary, leaving his readers to decide between the two.¹⁵ He had even referred to his theory as “the Devil’s gospel”¹⁶ and called natural selection “My deity.”¹⁷

Toward the end of the religious section of his autobiography, Darwin summarized his position: “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic…Nothing is more remarkable than the spread of skepticism or rationalism during the latter half of my life.”¹⁸

Despite Darwin’s claim that skepticism ruled only the latter part of his life, evidence from a large number of recently published private notebooks, dating from 1836 to 1844, has revealed that Darwin expressed belief in atheism and materialism as early as May 1838, several months before he developed natural selection. The notebook entries of 1838 were, according to evolutionist Ernst Mayr, “thoroughly materialistic.”¹⁹ Darwin wrote, “Being hereditary it is difficult to imagine [thought] anything but structure of brain,”²⁰ and, “Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist!…Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?”²¹ By July of 1838, he wrote, “To avoid stating how far, I believe, in materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock.”²² It has also been pointed out that the marginal comments of the physiological books Darwin was reading at that time show that he sided with the materialists.²³

Did Darwin lie about his late rejection of theism? Some seem to think so. Others, such as Neal Gillespie, have tried to reconcile Darwin’s theism with the notebook entries: “I would suggest that not only was Darwin’s materialism compatible in his mind with theism, but that it represented no interest in a thoroughgoing atheistic philosophical or metaphysical materialism.”²⁴

The problem with Gillespie’s explanation is that it fails to account for the entries that were so apparently atheistic, such as, “The above argument [for free will] would tend to make man a predestinarian of a new kind, for the man would tend to become an atheist.”²⁵ In a letter to J. D. Hooker a few years later, Darwin wrote, “I am almost convinced…that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”²⁶

Many scholars are coming to the conclusion that Darwin was in fact an atheist well before the publication of Origin.²⁷ Howard Gruber stated, “The material gives clear evidence for Darwin’s realization during this period that his ideas were indeed materialistic, tending toward atheism, and therefore dangerous.”²⁸ Stephen Jay Gould likewise said, “The notebooks prove that, Darwin was interested in philosophy and aware of its implications. He knew that the primary feature distinguishing his theory from all other evolutionary doctrines was its uncompromising philosophical materialism.”²⁹

Darwin’s Ambiguity

In addition to showing that he tended toward atheism, Darwin’s writings also show, as we saw earlier, that he made recourse to “God-talk” on many occasions. Darwin’s language on the subject is so ambiguous that it has long frustrated scholars:

The ambiguity of Darwin’s “God-talk” is notorious. What is meant when he speaks of the “laws impressed on matter by the Creator” and yet ridicules special creation? What ground does he stand on when in the same letter he writes “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars…” and “I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what may be called chance” and “all these laws have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every event and consequence.”³⁰

Darwin’s writings have allowed both sides of this debate to find in them what they want to find; nonetheless, those who see Darwin as a theist (or deist) have more difficulty reconciling the atheistic passages with their view than those who see Darwin as an atheist have reconciling the theistic passages with their view. The Darwin-as-atheist school has offered at least two plausible explanations for Darwin’s so-called theistic language.

Some believe that Darwin used God-talk because he didn’t want to offend his friends, and especially didn’t want to upset his wife, Emma, who was a very religious (Christian) woman. Emma married Charles in 1839, and shortly afterwards discovered his unbelief. She wrote to Charles revealing how dismayed she was, and expressed how unhappy she would be if Charles didn’t belong to her for all eternity.³¹

Years later, Edward Aveling and Ludwig Buchner were afforded the opportunity to have lunch with Charles, Emma, and some close friends. In Emma’s presence they spoke only of scientific matters. Later, in Darwin’s private study, away from Emma, Darwin immediately initiated a conversation about religion. He told his guests how his wife was very orthodox on all points and he expressed “how he experienced no little pain in publishing his scientific discoveries from the fact that the statement of them in some cases was liable to hurt those who were very near and dear to him.”³²

Emma certainly influenced Darwin to temper his writings, but I believe there was a more significant reason behind Darwin’s ambiguity. Darwin witnessed the “crucifixion” of many materialists in his day. Even Robert Chambers, who spoke repeatedly of God in his 1844 book on evolution, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, was severely criticized and labeled a materialist.³³ If Chambers couldn’t achieve acceptance, how much more difficult would it have been for Darwin, whose theory was materialistic to the core? Darwin wasn’t fond of controversy, which may account for Origin’s late publication. When it finally was forced into publication many rejected its theory for religious reasons. It was always possible to reconcile God with his theory, however, and so I believe Darwin spiced up his God-talk to overcome this chief objection.

If this seems like mere speculation, consider what Darwin wrote to his good friend J. D. Hooker in 1863: “I have long regretted that I have truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process.”³⁴

David Kohn has recently pointed out that Darwin amended passages in his 1844 essay on which Emma had commented. He believes Emma became Darwin’s model of the conventional Victorian reader. Emma’s ability to alter the construction of Darwin’s texts means one crucial thing for Kohn: “Not a word of the ambiguous God-talk in…Origin can be taken at face value.”³⁵

Darwin’s Conversion?

In the remaining (postautobiography) years of Darwin’s life, he did not, as some claim, rediscover his Christian faith or even his belief in God. As mentioned earlier, Aveling and Buchner, two militant atheists, visited Darwin in 1881, one year before his death. Darwin at one point asked his guests, “Why do you call yourselves atheists, and say there is no God?”³⁶ Aveling explained that they did not say there was no God; rather, that because there was no evidence of deity, they were unable to believe in the idea of God and were therefore without God. Darwin agreed fully with their position, but chose a different word for it: “I am with you in thought, but I should prefer the word Agnostic to the word Atheist.”³⁷

The Duke of Argyll likewise had a conversation with Darwin a year before his death. The Duke pointed out some wonderful designs in nature and suggested they were the expression of Mind. Darwin looked hard at the Duke and said, “‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ shaking his head, ‘it seems to go away.’”³⁸

Though these two meetings confirm that Darwin retained his unbelief, there was another meeting that supposedly took place with Lady Elizabeth Hope in the very last days of his life, in which he spoke of his conversion to Christianity. The story first appeared in the Boston Watchman Examiner in 1915:

It was on one of those glorious Autumn afternoons, that we sometimes enjoy in England, when I was asked to go in and sit with the well known professor, Charles Darwin. He was almost bedridden for some months before he died…He was sitting up in bed…[holding] an open Bible, which he was always studying. “What are you now reading?” I asked. “Hebrews!” he answered—“still Hebrews. ‘The Royal Book,’ I call it. Isn’t it grand?”…I made some allusion to the strong opinions expressed by many persons on the history of the Creation, its grandeur, and then their treatment of the earlier chapters of the book of Genesis. He seemed greatly distressed…“I was a young man of unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.”…Then he paused…he suddenly said, “I have a summer house in the garden, which holds about thirty people…I want you very much to speak there…Will you speak to them?” “What shall I speak about?” I asked. “Christ Jesus!” he replied in a clear, emphatic voice, adding in a lower tone, “and his salvation. Is not that the best theme?”³⁹

Only a very small band of Christians have ever believed and propagated this story. Evolutionists and the majority of creationists reject this story, and rightly so, for the evidence against Darwin’s end-of-life conversion is convincing.

The story contains inconsistencies. For example, it claims that Darwin was almost bedridden for months; but, as one of Darwin’s biographers noted, “He refused to be bedridden and worked whenever he had the strength.”⁴⁰ There also appears to be many different versions of the same story.⁴¹

When rumors of Darwin’s conversion first surfaced in 1887, the editor of the Toronto Mail, Charles Deduchson, wrote to Darwin’s close friend Thomas Huxley to verify whether the story was true.⁴² Huxley denied the allegation⁴³ and forwarded a copy of Deduchson’s letter to Darwin’s son, Francis, who likewise denied his father’s conversion.⁴⁴

Darwin’s eldest daughter also was present at his death and has testified that her father never met Lady Hope and never recanted his “scientific views.” She stated that the whole story was a fabrication that probably originated in the United States.⁴⁵

Darwin’s Faith

It appears that Darwin had a deep and abiding faith in atheistic materialism. The controversial question I now wish to address is, Did Darwin’s atheistic and materialistic beliefs play any part in the development of his theory, or was Darwin led strictly by the facts? Darwin would have us believe that the facts alone led him to his theory: “My first notebook was opened in July 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions, by printed enquires, by conversation with skillful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading.”⁴⁶

Darwin’s writings also demonstrate, however, that the facts played a very small part in the formulation of his theory. His early notebooks show that he entertained two other theories of evolution before finally arriving at his final theory. George Grinnell, in his study of Darwin’s first theory of evolution, asks this question: “Were these three theories complementary or were they mutually exclusive? If they were complementary, then the implication is clearly in favor of the importance of the empirical data in shaping Darwin’s thought, but if they were mutually exclusive, the implication is that Darwin approached the data with a prior world view which he attempted to superimpose on the data by means of various hypothetical models and mechanisms.”⁴⁷

Grinnell has come to believe that Darwin’s three models were indeed mutually exclusive. Darwin rejected theory one (variation by isolation) because it contained too many anomalies. Darwin then turned his attention to theory two (variation by habit), but soon abandoned it for a third model (variation by domestic breeding), which turned out to be the most fruitful. “The extent to which he was willing to push one model,” argues Grinnell, “and after its collapse, to entertain new models suggests that he was philosophically inclined to transmutation theories for reasons that transcend the empirical data with which he originally worked.”⁴⁸

That Darwin had a philosophical inclination toward evolutionary thinking is further supported by his response to evidence that contradicted his theory, including: (1) lack of transitional forms, (2) sudden appearance of Cambrian fossils, (3) the problem of coordinated development, (4) persistent types (i.e., species that do not change), and (5) the existence of nonadaptive structures.⁴⁹ Rather than allowing contrary evidence to falsify the theory, as a good scientist would, Darwin offered a plethora of ad hoc hypotheses to save the theory from falsification.⁵⁰ Later, he even embraced theories that he once ridiculed, such as Lamarckism (the theory that evolution occurs through the inheritance of traits acquired through the use or disuse of body parts) and group selectionism, to solve special problems that natural selection could not solve.⁵¹

Further, when pressed on why there are persistent types, Darwin admitted that his theory must be based entirely on general considerations (i.e., the struggle for survival) and, when it gets right down to it, the theory requires faith: “When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed…nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. Nor can we explain why some species have changed and others have not.”⁵² Darwin’s theory was not scientific, as he claimed it to be. He had such a blind faith in materialism that he was willing to ignore or bend observations, and resort to ad hoc reasoning on an unprecedented level.

Why did Darwin lie about how his theory was formulated? The advice he gave to John Scott in 1863 may provide the answer: “I would suggest to you the advantage, at present, of being very sparing in introducing theory in your papers…let theory guide your observations, but till your reputation is well established be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations” (emphasis in original).⁵³ Darwin recognized that people are more apt to accept a new theory if they believe it arose from the facts rather than from a preconceived idea, especially one that is inherently atheistic.

DARWIN’S EVOLUTION

Though Charles Darwin was a theist in his early life, the evidence suggests his worldview began to change after his sea voyage. As early as 1837, Darwin became an evolutionist, and in the spring of the following year he embraced a materialistic and atheistic worldview that would go with him to his grave. In the fall of 1838 Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection.

Darwin claimed to have developed his theory of natural selection without any preconceived notions, but his writings indicate that his newfound materialistic faith was foundational in its development.⁵⁴ On finding a theory that “worked,” or at least worked better than the other theories he entertained, he then searched for the facts that supported his theory, ignoring and explaining away all contrary evidence.

Scholars such as George Grinnell, who have studied Darwin for years, are also coming to a similar conclusion: “I have done a great deal of work on Darwin and can say with some assurance that Darwin also did not derive his theory from nature but rather superimposed a certain philosophical world-view on nature and then spent 20 years trying to gather the facts to make it stick.”⁵⁵

The popular understanding of Darwin’s beliefs and his practices as a scientist is contrary to the facts. Darwin’s theory was never meant to be compatible with a Creator. Its purpose was to remove God from the last sphere of life He had so dominated. It was an attempt to demolish Paley’s argument from design and give atheism its own “creation” story.

Notes

1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Modern Library, 1993).

2. Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate (New York: Mentor, 1959), 216.

3. In 1860, Sedgwick called Darwin’s Origin “a cold atheistical materialism.” David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 161.

4. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), 6.

5. Ibid.

6. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 57.

7. Ibid., 85.

8. Ibid., 86–87.

9. Ibid., 93.

10. Darwin, Origin, 648–49.

11. Family Member, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols., ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 1:277.

12. Darwin, Autobiography, 87.

13. Ibid., 90.

14. Darwin, Life and Letters, 2:6.

15. Charles Darwin, Variations of Domesticated Animals and Plants, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 428.

16. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 8, 1860, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 316.

17. Darwin, Life and Letters, 2:165.

18. Darwin, Autobiography, 94–95. Writers such as Maurice Mandelbaum have rightly called Darwin’s agnosticism “an undogmatic form of atheism.” “Darwin’s Religious Views,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (June 1958): 376.

19. Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 15.

20. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), C166, 291.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., M57, 532–33.

23. David Kohn, “Darwin’s Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning,” British Journal for the History of Science 22 (1989): 224.

24. Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 139.

25. Charles Darwin, August 1838, in Notebooks, M74, 536.

26. Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols., ed. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward (London: John Murray, 1903), 1:40–41; see also Life and Letters, 1:384.

27. Silvan Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology 10, 2 (1977): 233–34; Ernst Mayr, “Darwin and Natural Selection,” American Naturalist (May–June 1977): 323; Michael Ghiselin, “The Individual in the Darwinian Revolution,” New Literary History 3, 1 (1971): 122.

28. Howard Gruber, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1974), 14.

29. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 24.

30. Kohn, 215–16.

31. Autobiography, 237.

32. Edward Aveling, “Charles Darwin and Karl Marx,” New Century Review 1 (1897): 322.

33. For example, one critic states that Chambers “is at least consistent in his own materialism…We have nothing but bare assertion; and we defy him…to prove this single point.” Adam Sedgwick, review of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in Edinburgh Review 82 (July 1845): 12, 31. Darwin read Sedgwick’s review with “fear and trembling.” Life and Letters, 1:312.

34. Darwin, Life and Letters, 2:202–3.

35. Kohn, 226.

36. Aveling, 323.

37. Charles Darwin, quoted in Edward Aveling, “A Visit to Charles Darwin,” National Reformer 40, 18 (October 29, 1882): 292.

38. Charles Darwin, quoted in Duke of Argyll, “What Is Science?” Good Words 26 (1885): 244.

39. Cited in Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 47.

40. William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians (New York: Time, 1955), 277.

41. Pat Sloan, “The Myth of Darwin’s Conversion,” Humanist (British) 75 (March 1960): 70–72.

42. Warren Dawson, The Huxley Papers (London: Imperial College of Science and Technology, 1946), 34, letter 13.136.

43. Ibid., letter 13.138.

44. Ibid., 33, letter 13.67.

45. See “Charles Darwin’s Death-Bed,” The Christian, February 23, 1922, 12.

46. Darwin, Autobiography, 119; Life and Letters, 2:371, 412.

47. George Grinnell, “The Rise and Fall of Darwin’s First Theory of Transmutation,” Journal of the History of Biology 7, 2 (Fall 1974): 259.

48. Ibid., 273.

49. Hull’s book Darwin and His Critics (see n. 3) is a compilation of many critiques of Darwin from his contemporaries. Also, an early work that contains these objections and more is George Mivart, The Genesis of Species (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871).

50. For example, imperfect fossil record, functional shift (today it is called preadaptation), less severe competition, correlations of growth, and sexual selection (i.e., female choice).

51. Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 209–11; Michael Ruse, “Charles Darwin and Group Selectionism,” Annals of Science 37 (1980): 627.

52. Darwin, Life and Letters, 2:210.

53. Darwin, More Letters, 2:323.

54. Darwin was also influenced by Comte’s positivism, Lyell’s uniformitarianism, and Malthus’s struggle for survival.

55. George Grinnell, “Reexamination of the Foundations,” Pensee 2, 2 (May 1972): 44.

Robert Pennock is a philosopher with a mission — he wants to keep science safe from intelligent design. His most recent book, Tower of Babel, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and targeted Phillip Johnson’s “intelligent design creationism,” as Pennock calls it. 1

What is intelligent design? Intelligent design (ID) is a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes. Note that ID studies the effects of intelligent causes and not intelligent causes per se. ID does not try to get into the head of a designing intelligence; rather, it looks at what a designing intelligence does and draws inferences therefrom.

Intelligent design is both old and new. It’s old because many sciences already fall under ID. Forensic science, intellectual property law, cryptography, random number generation, and the SETI program (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) all look at features of the world and try to infer an intelligent cause responsible for those features. Where ID gets controversial is when one takes its methods for detecting design in human contexts and shifts them to the natural sciences where nothing humanlike could have been present. What if, for instance, the methods of ID are applied to biology and show that biological systems are designed? The application of ID to the natural sciences is both novel and threatening and has prompted full-scale rebuttals such as Pennock’s.2

ID: THREAT TO MECHANISM

ID threatens the scientific establishment because ever since Darwin, scientists have increasingly assumed that a divine architect was not needed to start creation on its course. Consequently, any designing agents, including ourselves, must result from a long evolutionary process that itself was not designed. According to this view, designing agents such as ourselves occur at the end of an undesigned natural process and cannot be prior to it.

If there is design in biology and cosmology, that design could not be an evolved intelligence. Instead, it must be a transcendent intelligence. Enter “the big G.” If there’s a designer behind biology and cosmology, the options for who that designer is are limited, with God being the preferred option. Yet for God to play a substantive role in science is more than most scientists can handle. Hence the increasing attacks against ID, such as the one by Pennock.

What underlies these critiques is one main worry: To permit a transcendent designer into science will destroy science, reintroducing magical, superstitious, and occult entities that modern science had banished from our understanding of the world. Pennock aptly expresses this worry. In criticizing Phillip Johnson, Pennock points to a particularly worrisome legal consequence of Johnson’s views on intelligent design. According to Pennock, Johnson advocates “that science admit the reality of supernatural influences in the daily workings of the world.”3

What if the same reasoning that Johnson is trying to import into science were adopted into Johnson’s own area of specialization — law (Johnson is a law professor at UC Berkeley)? Here’s the concern as Pennock lays it out in Tower of Babel:

For the law to take [Johnson’s view] seriously as well, it would have to be open to both suits and defenses based on a range of possible divine and occult interventions. Imagine the problems that would result if the courts had to accept legal theories of this sort. How would the court rule on whether to commit a purportedly insane person to a mental hospital for self-mutilation who claims that the Lord told her to pluck out her eye because it offended her? How would a judge deal with a defendant, Abe, accused of attempted murder of his son, Ike, who claims that he was only following God’s command that he kill Ike to prove his faith?4

Implicit in this passage and throughout Pennock’s book is a forced choice between mechanism and magic: either the world works by mechanisms that obey inviolable natural laws and that admit no break in the chain of natural causation, or the world admits supernatural interventions that ruin science and our understanding of the world, and pandemonium breaks loose (including in legal studies). Pennock is offering his readers mechanism while Johnson is offering them magic. Any reasonable person knows which option to choose.

As with most forced choices, however, Pennock has conveniently ignored a tertium quid, which, when properly understood, shows that the real magician is Pennock and not Johnson. The tertium quid is intelligent design, which is entirely separable from magic. Pennock knows that design is an old notion that requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator.5 Intelligent design is detectable. In fact, we have reliable methods for detecting it, and its detection involves no recourse to the supernatural. Design is common, rational, and objectifiable.6

Indeed, there exists a rigorous criterion for discriminating intelligently from unintelligently caused objects. Many special sciences already use this criterion, though an intuitive form of it (e.g., forensic science, artificial intelligence, cryptography, archeology, and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). What intelligent design does is make precise this criterion and apply it in sciences such as biology. I refer to this criterion as the complexity-specification criterion. When intelligent agents act, they leave behind a characteristic trademark or signature known as specified complexity.7 The complexity-specification criterion detects design by identifying this key trademark of designed objects.

DETECTING DESIGN THROUGH SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY

A detailed exposition of the complexity-specification criterion is discussed in The Design Inference.8 Though technical, its basic idea is straightforward and easily illustrated. Consider how the radio astronomers in the movie Contact detected an extraterrestrial intelligence. This movie, based on a novel by Carl Sagan, was an enjoyable piece of propaganda for the SETI research program (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). In this film, the SETI researchers discovered an extraterrestrial intelligence (the nonfictional SETI program has yet to be so lucky).

To increase their chances of finding an extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI researchers monitor millions of radio signals from outer space. Many natural objects in space produce radio waves (e.g., pulsars). Looking for signs of design among all these naturally produced radio signals is like looking for a needle in a haystack. To sift through the haystack, SETI researchers run these signals through computers programmed with pattern-matchers. As long as a signal doesn’t match one of the preset patterns, it will pass through the pattern-matching sieve (even if it has an intelligent source). If it does match one of these patterns, then, depending on the pattern matched, the SETI researchers may have cause for celebration.

The SETI researchers in Contact did find a signal worthy of celebration, namely the following:

The Contact SETI researchers received this signal as a sequence of 1,126 beats and pauses, where 1s correspond to beats and 0s to pauses. This sequence represents the prime numbers from 2 to 101, where a given prime number is represented by the corresponding number of beats (i.e., 1s), and the individual prime numbers are separated by pauses (i.e., 0s). These SETI researchers took this signal as decisive confirmation of an extraterrestrial intelligence.

What about this signal indicates design? Whenever we infer design, we must establish two factors: complexity and specification. To see why complexity is crucial for inferring design, consider the following sequence of bits:

These are the first 12 bits in the previous sequence representing the prime numbers 2, 3, and 5 respectively. Certainly no SETI researcher, if confronted with this 12-bit sequence, is going to contact the science editor at the New York Times, hold a press conference, and announce that an extraterrestrial intelligence has been discovered.

The problem is that this sequence is too short (and thus too simple) to establish that an extraterrestrial intelligence with knowledge of prime numbers produced it. A randomly beating radio source could output this sequence by chance. A sequence of 1,126 bits representing the prime numbers from 2 to 101, however, is a different story. Here the sequence is sufficiently long (and therefore sufficiently complex) that only an extraterrestrial intelligence could have produced it.

Such complexity is a form of probability. To see the connection between complexity and probability, consider a combination lock. The more possible combinations of the lock, the more complex the mechanism and, correspondingly, the more improbable that the mechanism can be opened by chance. To determine whether something is sufficiently complex to implicate design is thus to determine whether it has sufficiently small probability.

Even so, complexity (or improbability) isn’t enough to eliminate chance and establish design. If I flip a coin 1,000 times, I’ll participate in a highly complex (i.e., highly improbable) event. Indeed, the sequence I end up flipping will be one in a trillion trillion trillion…, where the ellipsis needs 22 more “trillions.” This sequence of coin tosses won’t, however, trigger a design inference. Though complex, this sequence won’t exhibit a suitable pattern. Contrast this with the previous sequence representing the prime numbers from 2 to 101. Not only is this sequence complex, but it also embodies a suitable pattern. The SETI researcher who discovered this sequence in Contact put it this way: “This isn’t noise, this has structure.”

What is a suitable pattern for inferring design? Not just any pattern will do. Some patterns can legitimately be employed to infer design whereas others cannot. The intuition underlying the distinction between patterns that alternately succeed or fail to implicate design is, however, easily motivated. Consider the case of an archer. Suppose an archer stands 50 meters from a large wall, which is sufficiently large so that the archer cannot help hitting it. Now suppose each time the archer shoots an arrow at the wall, the archer paints a target around the arrow so that the arrow sits squarely in the bull’s-eye. What can we conclude from this scenario? Absolutely nothing about the archer’s ability as an archer. Yes, a pattern is being matched, but it is a pattern fixed only after the arrow has been shot. The pattern is thus purely ad hoc.

Suppose, however, the archer paints a fixed target on the wall, then shoots a hundred arrows at it, and each time hits a perfect bull’s-eye. Confronted with this second scenario, we must infer that he or she is a world-class archer, whose shots cannot legitimately be attributed to luck but rather to the archer’s skill and mastery, which are instances of design.

The type of pattern where an archer fixes a target first and then shoots at it is common to statistics. It is known as setting a rejection region prior to an experiment. In statistics, if the outcome of an experiment falls within a rejection region, the chance hypothesis supposedly responsible for the outcome is rejected. The reason for setting a rejection region prior to an experiment is to forestall what statisticians call “data snooping” or “cherry picking.” Just about any data set will contain strange and improbable patterns if we look hard enough. By forcing experimenters to set their rejection regions prior to an experiment, the statistician protects the experiment from spurious patterns that could result from chance.

A little reflection makes clear that a pattern need not be given prior to an event to eliminate chance and implicate design. Consider the following cipher text:

Initially this looks like a random sequence of letters and spaces, but suppose we treat this sequence as a Caesar cipher, moving each letter one notch down the alphabet. Now the sequence reads:

Even though this pattern is given after the fact, it still is the right sort of pattern for eliminating chance and inferring design. In contrast to statistics, which always identifies its patterns before an experiment is performed, cryptanalysis must discover its patterns after the fact. In both instances, however, the patterns are suitable for inferring design.

For a pattern to count as a specification, it is not important when the pattern was identified, but whether it is independent of the event it describes. Drawing a target around an arrow already embedded in a wall is not independent of the arrow’s trajectory. Consequently, such a pattern cannot be used to attribute the arrow’s trajectory to design. Patterns that are specifications cannot simply be read off the events whose design is in question. In other words, it is not enough to identify a pattern simply by inspecting an event and noting (i.e., “reading off”) its features. Rather, patterns must be suitably independent of events to count as specifications. I refer to this relation of independence as detachability and say that a pattern is detachable if and only if it satisfies that relation.

Detachability can be understood by asking, “Given an event whose design is in question and a pattern describing it, would we be able to construct that pattern if we had no knowledge which event occurred?” Here is the idea. An event has occurred. A pattern describing the event is given. The event is one from a range of possible events. If all we knew was the range of possible events without any specifics about which event actually occurred (e.g., we know that tomorrow’s weather will be rain or shine, but we don’t know which), could we still construct the pattern describing the event? If so, the pattern is detachable from the event.

Patterns thus divide into two types, those that warrant a design inference in the presence of complexity and those that do not warrant a design inference despite the presence of complexity. The first type of pattern I call a specification, the second a fabrication. Specifications are the non-ad hoc patterns that can legitimately be used to eliminate chance and warrant a design inference. In contrast, fabrications are the ad hoc patterns that cannot legitimately be used to warrant a design inference. This distinction between specifications and fabrications can be made with full statistical rigor.9

To sum up, the complexity-specification criterion detects design by establishing complexity and specification. When called to explain an event, object, or structure, we have to decide whether to attribute it to design. According to the complexity-specification criterion, to answer this question is to break it into two separate questions: Is it complex? Is it specified?

WHO’S GOT THE MAGIC?

Specified complexity is a form of information and falls within the information sciences.10 Design theorists therefore have a bonafide information-theoretic criterion for detecting design. Robert Pennock and evolutionary naturalists, however, lack a well-supported scientific theory. Instead, they espouse a form of magic that masquerades as a scientific theory. Indeed, the real magician in Pennock’s Tower of Babel is not Phillip Johnson and design theorists, but rather Pennock himself and other evolutionary naturalists.

There are at least three forms of magic. One is the art of illusion, where appearance is crafted to distort reality. As entertainment, this form of magic is unobjectionable. Another form of magic is to invoke the supernatural to explain a physical event. To call this magic is a recent invention and makes most theists into magicians. (Was Thomas Aquinas a magician for accepting the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact?) According to Pennock, intelligent design is guilty of this form of magic. Nonetheless, as a professional philosopher Pennock must realize that intelligent design can avoid this charge.

Pennock is guilty of his own form of magic, however. This third form of magic is the view that something can come from nothing. The “nothing” here need not be an absolute nothing; and the transformation of nothing into something may involve minor expenditures of effort. For instance, the magician may utter “abracadabra” or “hocus-pocus.” Likewise, the Darwinian just-so stories that attempt to account for complex, information-rich biological structures are incantations that give the illusion of solving a problem but merely cloak ignorance.

Darwinists, for instance, explain the human eye as having evolved from a light sensitive spot that successively became more complicated as increased visual acuity conferred increased reproductive capacity on an organism.11 In such a just-so story, all the historical and biological details in the eye’s construction are lost. How did a spot become innervated and thereby light-sensitive? How did a lens form within a pinhole camera? With respect to embryology, what developmental changes are required to go from a light-sensitive sheet to a light-sensitive cup? None of these questions receive an answer in purely Darwinian terms. Darwinian just-so stories are no more enlightening than Rudyard Kipling’s original just-so stories about how the elephant got its trunk. Such stories are entertaining, but they hardly engender profound insight.

The great appeal behind this third form of magic is the offer of a bargain — indeed, an incredible bargain for which no amount of creative accounting can ever square the books. The idea of getting something for nothing has come to pervade science. In cosmology, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin, and Peter Atkins all claim that this marvelous universe could originate from quite unmarvelous beginnings (a teaspoon of ordinary dust for Guth, black-hole formation for Smolin, and set-theoretic operations on the empty set for Atkins).12 In biology, Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins, and Stuart Kauffman claim that the panoply of life can be explained in terms of quite simple mechanisms (chance and necessity for Monod, cumulative selection for Dawkins, and autocatalysis for Kauffman).13

We have become so accustomed to this something-for-nothing way of thinking that we do not appreciate just how magical it is. Consider the following evolutionary account of neuroanatomy by Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and neurologist at Emory University: “Neuroanatomy in many species — but especially in a brain-ridden one like ours — is the product of sloppy, opportunistic half-billion year [evolution] that has pasted together, and only partly integrated, disparate organs that evolved in different animals, in different eras, and for very different purposes.”14 Since human consciousness and intelligence are said to derive from human neuroanatomy, it follows that these themselves are the product of a sloppy evolutionary process.

Think what this means. How do we make sense of “sloppy,” “pasted together,” and “partly integrated,” except with reference to “careful,” “finely adapted,” and “well integrated.” To speak of hodge-podge structures presup­poses that we have some concept of carefully designed structures; and, of course, we do. Humans have designed all sorts of engineering marvels, everything from Cray supercomputers to Gothic cathedrals. That means, if we are to believe Melvin Konner, that a blind evolutionary process (what Richard Dawkins calls the “blind watchmaker”) cobbled together human neuroanatomy, which in turn gave rise to human consciousness, which in turn produces artifacts like supercomputers, which in turn are not cobbled together at all but instead are carefully designed. Out pop purpose, intelligence, and design from a process that started with no purpose, intelligence, or design. This is magic.

Of course, to say this is magic is not to say it is false. It is after all a logical possibility that purpose, intelligence, and design emerged by purely natural means out of a physical universe initially devoid of these qualities. Intelligence, for instance, may just be a survival tool given to us by an evolutionary process that places a premium on survival and that is itself not intelligently guided. The basic creative forces of nature might be devoid of intelligence; yet if that is so, how can we know it? If it is not so, how can we know that? It does no good simply to presuppose that purpose, intelligence, and design are emergent properties of a universe that initially is devoid of these.

Whether nature has been front-loaded with purpose, intelligence, and design is not a new debate ¾ the ancient Epicureans and Stoics engaged in it. The Stoics argued for a design-first universe: the universe starts with design and any subsequent design results from the outworkings of that initial design. The Epicureans argued for a design-last universe: the universe starts with no design and any subsequent design results from the interplay of chance and necessity.15

What is new, at least since the Enlightenment, is that it has become intellectually respectable to cast the design-first position as disreputable, superstitious, and irrational; and the design-last position as measured, parsimonious, and alone supremely rational. Indeed, the charge of magic is nowadays typically made against the design-first position and not against the design-last position, as I have done here.

Why should the design-first position elicit the charge of magic? Historically in the West, design has principally been connected with Judeo-Christian theism. The God of Judaism and Christianity is said to introduce design into the world by intervening in its causal structure. Such interventions cannot be anything but miraculous, and miracles are the stuff of magic. So goes the argument, which is flawed because there is no necessary connection between God introducing design into the world and God intervening in the world in the sense of violating its causal structure (which is not to endorse deism; but there are separate reasons for preferring theism over deism, notably the miracles in salvation history). Theists such as Richard Swinburne, for instance, argue that God front-loads design into the universe by designing the very laws of nature.16 Paul Davies takes a similar line.17 Restricting design to structuring the laws of nature precludes design from violating those laws and thus violating nature’s causal structure.

Design easily resists the charge of magic. Rather, it’s the a priori exclusion of design that has a much tougher time resisting it. Indeed, the design-last position is inherently magical. Consider the following remark by Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin in The New York Review of Books:

If this isn’t magic, what is?

Nevertheless, the scientific community continues to be skeptical of design. The worry is that design will give up on science. In place of a magic that derives something from nothing, design substitutes a designer who explains everything. Magic gets you something for nothing and thus offers a bargain. Design gets you something by presupposing something unimaginably bigger and thus asks you to sell your scientific soul. Design, however, can be explanatory without giving away the store. Certainly this is the case for human artifacts, which are properly explained by reference to design. Nor does design explain everything. There’s no reason to invoke design to explain a random inkblot; but a Dürer woodcut is something else altogether. The point of the intelligent design research program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences. The program may ultimately fail, but it is only now being tried and it is certainly worth a try. Moreover, specified complexity gives this program a rigorous information-theoretic underpinning.

Just as truth is not decided at the ballot box, so truth is not decided by the price one must pay for it. Bargains are all well and fine, but ultimately you get what you pay for. Some areas of science are open to bargain-hunting and some are not. Self-organizing complex systems, for instance, are a great place for scientific bargain-hunters to shop. Bénard cell convection, Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions, and a host of other self-organizing systems offer complex organized structures apparently for free.19 There are other areas of science, however, that frown upon bargain-hunting. The conservation laws of physics, for instance, allow no bargains. The big question confronting design is whether it can be bought cheaply or must be paid for at full value. Design theorists argue that design admits no bargains.

Pennock and evolutionary naturalists are bargain hunters. They want to explain the appearance of design in nature without admitting actual design. That’s why Richard Dawkins begins The Blind Watchmaker by saying, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”20 He then requires an additional 350 pages to show why it is only an appearance of design. Pennock and evolutionary naturalists certainly haven’t demonstrated that they are right. Indeed, they are nowhere near pulling the rabbit out of the hat.

The smart money is on design.

Notes

[1] Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

2 See also Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin’s God (New York: Harper Collins, 1999).

3 Pennock, 295.

4 Ibid.

5 See F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), especially chap. 4.

6 See William A. Dembski, ed., Mere Creation (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

7 William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), chap. 5.

8 William A. Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In The Design Inference, I develop a “specification/small probability criterion,” which is equivalent to the complexity-specification criterion described here.

9 Dembski, The Design Inference, chap. 5.

10 Dembski, Intelligent Design, chap. 6.

11 See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1987), 85–86.

12 See respectively Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997); Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Peter Atkins, Creation Revisited (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1994).

13 See respectively Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage, 1972); Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker; Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

14 Quoted in Moshe Sipper and Edmund Ronald, “A New Species of Hardware,” IEEE Spectrum 37(4), April 2000: 59.

15 See Sandbach, 14–15.

16 Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), chap. 8, entitled “Teleological Arguments.”

17 Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Touchstone, 1992), chap. 8, entitled “Designer Universe.”

18 Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, 31.

19 For instance, see Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1995).

20 Dawkins, 1.

SYNOPSIS

Until recently, the majority of active dissenters from neo-Darwinian (naturalistic) evolution could be classified as “young-earth” (or what I call “traditional”) creationists. Their dissent could be dismissed as motivated by biblical literalism, not scientific evidence. While this criticism of traditional creationists is unfair to the actual content of their views — many prominent creationists are outstanding scientists — the absence of a wider community of dissent from Darwinism hindered the growth of scientific alternatives to the naturalistic theory. Such a wider community now exists in the “intelligent design” (ID) movement.

Within the past decade, the ID community has matured around the insights of UC Berkeley professor Phillip Johnson, whose central insight is that science must be free to seek the truth, wherever it lies. The possibility of design, therefore, cannot be excluded from science. This outlook has deep roots in the history of Western science and is essential to the health of science as a truth-seeking enterprise. Under the canopy of design as an empirical possibility, however, any number of particular theories may also be possible, including traditional creationism, progressive (or “old-earth”) creationism, and theistic evolution. Both scientific and scriptural evidence will have to decide the competition between these theories. The “big tent” of ID provides a setting in which that struggle after truth can occur, and from which the secular culture may be influenced.

The observation was only a pair of sentences near the end of a review, just the sort of point made in passing that a hasty reader might overlook. Those two sentences, however — appearing in the journal Science and written by Yale University biology professor Timothy Goldsmith — reflect a historic shift in the debate over origins, a shift that promises both opportunities and challenges for evangelical Christians.

Goldsmith was reviewing the public broadcasting series Evolution, a program assembled to counter the recent growth of skepticism about naturalistic evolution in the United States. In commenting on the last segment of the program, “What about God?” which surveyed the creation-evolution debate, Goldsmith noted, “My one criticism of this coverage is that it may leave the impression that antievolutionists are all young-earth creationists. Such is not the case; antievolutionists occupy a broad theological spectrum and they are not all Christians.”¹

Now, why is this observation significant? The authorities of science have long said “antievolutionists” — meaning those who dissent from Darwin’s theory of the common descent of life via undirected natural causes — are simply Protestant fundamentalists whose literal reading of Genesis cannot allow them to accept the obvious truth of evolution. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, such persons primarily would have occupied the categories of “antievolutionist” or “creationist.” I shall term this group “traditional creationists,” meaning anyone who thinks that God directly created everything in six 24-hour days, several thousand years ago.²

Over the past decade, however, the demographics of dissent from neo-Darwinian evolution have changed dramatically. In some discussions on university campuses or Internet listserves, traditional creationists now find themselves distinctly in the minority among skeptics of neo-Darwinism. Although they have grown accustomed to scorn from evolutionary scientists, traditional creationists may be unhappy to discover that their own allies (other anti-Darwinians) regard them as poor cousins visiting from the trailer park — sincere but somewhat embarrassing folk, whose unsophisticated manners and naíve beliefs should be kept quietly in the background when others are talking about science.

One might say, nevertheless, such is the price of success. What creationists have sought throughout the twentieth century is an open-ended debate about the truth of Darwinian evolution. That debate has now arrived in the emergence of the “intelligent design” (ID) movement. As Goldsmith noted, one can no longer accurately characterize dissenters from Darwinian evolution strictly as “young-earth” creationists. In this article, I shall briefly recount the history of this shift, locating it (in large measure) in the work of the UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson. I then explain that, while it may prove unsettling to many Christians, the growth of a broader debate about evolution and creation can actually be seen as a boon for those struggling to discern the proper relationship between science and faith, how to understand the Book of Genesis, and how to defend the Christian worldview in a hostile secular culture. Life in the “big tent” of the intelligent design community certainly requires a period of acclimation, but Christians — in particular, traditional creationists — should welcome their new ID surroundings.

THE LAW PROFESSOR ON SABBATICAL IN LONDON

Let’s begin with some history. The year 1987 marks a noteworthy turning point in the American debate over the science and philosophy of origins. In that year, a long cultural battle that had begun more than a quarter century earlier (with Henry Morris and John Whitcomb’s classic The Genesis Flood in 1961) appeared to many onlookers to have come decisively to an end when the Edwards v. Aguillard decision of the U.S. Supreme Court declared “creation-science” to be a religious belief. As University of Wisconsin historian Ronald Numbers explains in his recent survey, Darwinism Comes to America, the publication of The Genesis Flood had sparked the rapid growth of “creation-science,” as it came to be called. It emphasized a young earth, a global flood, separately created kinds of animals and plants, and a specially created Adam and Eve as the progenitors of humankind.³ In 1963, the Creation Research Society (CRS) was founded to articulate these ideas. The CRS quickly gathered a membership of hundreds of scientists, and, in 1964, it began to publish a quarterly research journal. In 1970, the CRS brought out the biology textbook Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity in an attempt to provide an alternative “model” for the teaching of biology in public schools. In 1972, Henry Morris left a professorship at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute to establish the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in San Diego, which, through its publications and lectures, vigorously promoted the “two model” approach.

It was, however, the legislative efforts of creation science supporters to mandate equal time for creation science in state science education that really ignited the national controversy. Alarmed by the passage of “balanced treatment” laws in Arkansas and Louisiana in 1981, a coalition of civil liberties, scientific, and religious groups formed to combat the spread of creationism. In 1982, Federal Judge William Overton declared the Arkansas balanced treatment law unconstitutional in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education; but it was the 1987 Supreme Court opinion, Edwards v. Aguillard, that seemed to shut the door permanently on creationism (at least as admissible dissent in public school science teaching). Creation science, said the Court, is “the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind.” The teaching of a particular religious belief in public schools violates the First Amendment, and thus “balanced treatment” laws have no genuine secular purpose.⁴

The “two-model” approach to the origins controversy was now dead. Shortly after the decision was handed down, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leader of the anticreation coalition, observed, “We who have fought this battle for so many years were jubilant. The Court, by ruling so broadly and decisively, has ended the legal battle over creationism as a mandated subject in science classrooms.”⁵

Edwards v. Aguillard seemingly had ended the public debate over origins. A revolution from an unexpected quarter, however, was about to occur. In 1987, Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, was taking a year’s sabbatical in London, England. Every day on the walk to his office, he passed a bookshop where Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker and Michael Denton’s Evolution, A Theory in Crisis were on sale. Curious, Johnson bought the books and read them through. He noticed immediately that the ostensible issues of Edwards v. Aguillard were not the real issues at all.

The creationists in Louisiana never had a chance. Because of the way “science” was defined in the debate, the very possibility of evidence against Darwinian evolution had been excluded at the outset. Reading the amicus briefs in Edwards v. Aguillard, such as that filed by the National Academy of Sciences (the most prestigious group of scientists in the nation), Johnson discovered that what had been presented as the ground rules of science had tilted the playing field irrevocably in favor of Darwinian evolution. In Darwin on Trial, the influential book that grew out of his 1987 insights, Johnson wrote, “The Academy thus defined ‘science’ in such a way that advocates of supernatural creation may neither argue for their own position nor dispute the claims of the scientific establishment.”⁶

The key issue, Johnson recognized, was neither the literal truth of Genesis nor the merits of “creation science.” It was whether there could be, even in principle, any evidence against Darwinian evolution or in favor of design by an intelligence. Was science allowed to consider the possibility of intelligent design? Johnson saw that if science were forbidden by its own rules even to look in the direction of intelligent design, the evidence, whatever it might be, would be irrelevant. Any science that is not free to pursue the truth could be only a blind enterprise, unable to see the testimony of nature.

Despite appearances, this was in some ways a far more radical critique than the traditional creationism of the “two-model” approach. Many creationists advocated a philosophy of science according to which any discipline that deals with historical events is not really science, with the same standing as experimental disciplines such as physics or chemistry. ICR biochemist Duane Gish, for instance, argued in 1985 that, by definition, traditional creationism was not science at all: “Creation is, of course, unproven and unprovable and thus cannot be considered as fact. It is not subject to test by the ordinary methods of experimental science — observation and falsification. It thus does not, in a strict sense, even qualify as a scientific theory.”⁷ Nor does evolution qualify as science, Gish and other traditional creationists hastened to add.

Johnson rejected this philosophical dichotomizing. Definitions of science, he argued, could be contrived to exclude any conclusion we dislike or to include any we favor. It was not a coincidence, after all, that the definition promoted by the ACLU and the National Academy of Sciences placed creationism outside the province of science. We should rather be asking, Johnson urged, a more fundamental question: What do we have reason to think is true?

Darwin on Trial laid out these arguments and provided the philosophical core for a research community that had already begun to form in the 1980s around such books as The Mystery of Life’s Origin.⁸ In June 1993, Johnson invited several of the (mostly younger) members of that community to a conference at the California beach town of Pajaro Dunes. Present were scientists and philosophers who themselves would later become well known, such as biochemist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box (1996); mathematician and philosopher William Dembski, author of The Design Inference (1998) and Intelligent Design (1999); and developmental biologist Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution (2000). Of the 14 participants at the Pajaro Dunes conference, only three (microbiologist Siegfried Scherer of the Technical University of Munich, paleontologist Kurt Wise of Bryan College, and me) could be seen as traditional creationists. Moreover, theological diversity marked the meeting: in addition to the expected presence of evangelicals, Behe was Roman Catholic; Wells was a member of the Unification Church; and one participant — paleontologist David Raup of the University of Chicago — was an agnostic.

Pajaro Dunes thus became a model for what has come to be known as the “intelligent design movement.” Unlike other science and faith organizations (such as the traditional creationist CRS or the moderate American Scientific Affiliation [ASA]), no statement of faith was required at Pajaro. What united the participants (with the possible exception of Raup) was a deep dissatisfaction with neo-Darwinism and its naturalistic philosophical foundation and an interest in scientifically exploring the possibility of design.

Johnson’s revolution was simplicity itself. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, our scientific understanding of origins, he argued, has been saddled with a particular philosophy — naturalism.⁹ Now, naturalism might be true, but it might also be false. The wise course of action for science, therefore, is not to assume naturalism’s truth but to let the evidence speak for itself. If someone is interested in discovering the truth and wants to take a fresh look at the evidence, then that person is welcome to join the community. The admission price is minimal: one need only allow for the possibility of design.

GOD’S FREEDOM AND THE LOGIC OF DESIGN

What Johnson had noticed was revolutionary in one respect, but profoundly historical (i.e., deeply rooted) in another. The word “science” in its original sense did not entail naturalism — the doctrine that only natural causes are admissible in an explanation. Instead, “science” referred to knowledge, from the Latin word for “knowledge,” scientia. We know all sorts of things: the atomic number of gold (79), the diploid chromosome number of Homo sapiens (46), and the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles). We also know that someone constructed Stonehenge, that e-mail messages have authors, that missing valuables may well have been stolen, and that it is possible that intelligence exists in others besides humans. If we can know, as we surely do, that an intelligence generated the information contained in the lines of the poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” then might it be possible that an intelligence composed the original information-rich DNA sequences in organisms? Yes — and in that yes lies the falsity of naturalism as a philosophy of science.

The founders of Western science did not know about DNA, but they certainly knew, as Thoreau famously quipped, that something was afoot when “a trout was in the milk.” It is genuine scientia (knowledge) that a stone will fall to the ground when it is released; but it is also genuine scientia that a letter has an author. It would be absurd to say that only the first — physical regularity — counts as knowledge, whereas the second — intelligent design — does not. Robert Boyle or Isaac Newton would have laughed at such a suggestion.

Newton and Boyle also held a conviction about God’s freedom as author of the world, and here we return to the matter of traditional creationism within the tent of the intelligent design community. In his treatise, A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, an argument against the naturalism of his time, Robert Boyle concluded by stressing God’s freedom to create as He pleased: “God is a most free agent, and created the world not out of necessity but voluntarily, having framed it as he pleased and thought fit at the beginning of things, when there was no substance but himself and consequently no creature to which he could be obliged, or by which he could be limited.”¹⁰

If the author of the world acted freely, then we will need to discover what He did by enlisting our intellectual labor (including the labor of interpreting the Bible). Johnson saw that allowing for the possibility of design as special divine action (for instance, God creating human beings directly) meant that one must also allow for other possibilities, such as God electing, if He so chose, to use an evolutionary process that was itself designed. “I believe,” Johnson wrote, “that a God exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but He might have chosen to work through a natural evolutionary process instead.”¹¹ God could have created everything in six 24-hour days — or not. The fundamental point is to allow for the possibility of design. The scientific narrative of design — when God acted, and how — might capture any number of competing theories. We would have to see. Such narrative would need to be discovered, and an answer might be a long, and possibly painful, time in coming.

This point can be expressed by a pair of diagrams (Figure 1 and Figure 2):

Consider the first diagram. If traditional creationism (the circle) is true, then so too, by logical implication, is intelligent design (the box). Any specially created world would necessarily be a designed world, but the reverse is not the case. Because of God’s freedom to create as He pleases, design might be true while traditional creationism is false. A second diagram, where other theories of God’s action (e.g., progressive or “old earth” creation) are possible within the larger box of design, illustrates this point.

Some prominent traditional creationists are unhappy with what they perceive to be the dangerously wide content of ID. “This approach, even if well-meaning and effectively articulated,” writes ICR President Emeritus Henry Morris, “will not work! It has often been tried in the past and has failed, and it will fail today.”¹² The inclusion of progressive creation and theistic evolution as design possibilities (Figure 2, above) is, in Morris’s view, a weakness, not a strength, of the ID community.¹³ Morris argues that pantheism and New Age ideas might also fit comfortably within the big tent of design, a sure sign that the ID community has been much too broadly defined to be of any value for Christians.

Other Christian critics have taken just the opposite tack, stressing that the ID community is little more than “creationism in designer clothing.” The big tent is an illusion, erected for public relations purposes, and under the fancy inclusive language one finds (as before) the same old-fashioned interventionist creationism. “Does the intelligent design movement,” asks one such critic, Howard Van Till, “have a chance? From my perspective, No. Not until it is willing to place its theological and philosophical cards on the table so that its foundational presuppositions may be opened to public scrutiny and evaluation.”¹⁴

THE PROMISE OF DESIGN

The attentive reader will have noticed that both of these critics of ID have settled views on which scientific narrative of design is true: six-day, young earth creation for Morris; the “fully-gifted” evolutionary scenario for Van Till.¹⁵ A greater contrast in scientific perspectives among Christians is hard to imagine. Neither Morris nor Van Till has much, or any, interest in talking to his counterpart, whom each sees as hopelessly in error and doing severe damage to the cause of Christianity.

Despite this, both Morris and Van Till affirm the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” A cynic might say, given the very different meanings Morris and Van Till attach to those 12 words, the intersection of their joint affirmations is empty, but the cynic would be wrong. More than enough content in the First Article exists to distinguish its affirmation from the naturalism held by most scientists. However much Morris and Van Till may despise each other’s positions, both believe God designed the universe and brought it into existence for His pleasure and purposes.

That theological commonality — namely, God is the Author of the Universe, in whatever way He chose to act — has a secular counterpart in the philosophy of science: intelligent design is possible.16 Now, the mere possibility of design may seem a modest claim, but for the majority of the scientific community it is a deeply radical breach of the rules. The whole point of methodological naturalism is to keep ID well outside of the province of science. Everything within the ID box (see Figure 2) offends the philosophical naturalist. If some members of the big tent of design (e.g., theistic evolutionists) appear acceptable to the naturalistic mainstream of science, it is only because of political expediency. If theistic evolutionists were the only people to occupy the ID position, however, they would not be spared the scorn now directed mainly at traditional creationists. At the moment, the latter simply present an easier target.

“But theistic evolution is still an incoherent theory for any orthodox Christian,” the reader may protest. Yes, very likely that’s the case, I want to say (as a traditional creationist), but does that mean I have nothing to learn from my theistic evolutionary brother or sister? Not at all. Every position within the ID tent faces real scientific and theological difficulties. In a fair competition between design simpliciter and naturalism, design wins hands down; but it would be the height of blind pride to say that any particular design theory has taken the day, solved its outstanding puzzles, and now needs to sweep away only the last bits of confusion residing in the minds of the unpersuaded.

Do traditional creationists have a geological or geophysical theory capable of explaining all radiometric data? No — which is exactly the reason the ICR and CRS are pouring resources into the problem.¹⁷ Do progressive (or “old earth”) creationists have a theologically satisfactory understanding of the origin of so-called “natural evil” (e.g., parasites, many of which have complex life cycles that are amazing examples of intricate design)? No — and many progressive creationists even seem unaware that such problems exist. Have theistic evolutionists sorted out the grave explanatory hurdles facing current theories of evolution to which they wish to attach God as author? No — and over the past few decades, the shortcomings of evolutionary theories have grown much worse. Do evangelical exegetes agree on how best to interpret Genesis 1–11? No — and the controversies that have raged for nearly two centuries, if not longer, show no signs of abating.¹⁸

In short, humility on all sides is in order — but so is joyful confidence. What is the fastest way for any design theorist to discover what’s wrong with his or her theory of origins and how that theory might be improved? Talk to someone who shares the foundational design premise, but disagrees about the details. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17). The promise of the big tent of ID is to provide a setting where Christians (and others) may disagree amicably, and fruitfully, about how best to understand the natural world, as well as Scripture. In a recent article on the interpretation of Genesis 1–11, theologian R. C. Sproul wrote that the issue is “both neglected to our peril and elevated to a degree of importance it does not deserve.”¹⁹ The issue is often elevated too high, said Sproul, because Christians historically have affirmed not any particular theory of earth history, but rather God’s authorship of the universe: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The issue cannot be neglected, however, because the Bible does speak unequivocally of creation and the evidence of God’s authorship in nature.

As painful as it may sometimes be, Christians must continue the struggle to understand the relationship between science and faith. The existence of a research community where design is taken seriously and where all inquirers are welcome means that the ongoing struggle need not be solitary. It may even turn out to be a tremendous adventure.

notes

1. Timothy Goldsmith, “Everyday Impacts of a Most Influential Theory,” Science, 21 September 2001, 2209–10.

2. The usual term for this group is “young-earth creationists.” John Mark Reynolds and I have argued that “young-earth” is a misleading adjective. “If you are asked to give your age on a legal form,” we wrote, “you do not write ‘old,’ ‘young,’ ‘recent,’ or any other relative term; rather, you give an exact number. The world is precisely as old or as young as it actually is. Young-earth creation is thus a confusing misnomer, seeming to imply that the earth or universe are young relative to some unspecified (‘old’) reference point.” (Nelson and Reynolds, “Young Earth Creationism,” in Three Views on Creation and Evolution, ed. J. P. Moreland and Reynolds, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999], 41.)

3. Ronald Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4–7.

4. Edwin W. Edwards, etc., et al, Appellants, v. Don Aguillard et al., Full Text of Opinions, The United States Law Week, 55 LW 4860.

5. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Verdict on Creationism,” the New York Times Magazine, 19 July 1987, 32.

6. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 8.

7. Duane Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1985), 19.

8. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984). Mystery was not only a powerful and analytically deep critique of naturalistic theories of the origin of life, but it also contained suggestions for a revival of the neglected hypothesis of design in science proper. Like several others, I first learned about Phillip Johnson at a June 1988 conference on the origin of information content in DNA, organized by Charles Thaxton. Stephen Meyer, at the time a graduate student at Cambridge University, attended Thaxton’s conference, bringing with him a manuscript from (as Meyer put it with a grin) “this wild lawyer I met in the UK.” I can still recall my excitement at the conference when I read through the manuscript, which later became Darwin on Trial.

9. It is customary for defenders of naturalism to distinguish between “philosophical” and “methodological” naturalism. The former, they say, is indeed a philosophy that excludes theism (and thus does not belong in any philosophically disinterested science), whereas the latter is simply a neutral rule needed to ensure that science sticks to what it can actually observe and test. If design is an empirical possibility, however, methodological naturalism is anything but a neutral rule. “One may employ only natural causes in scientific explanation” — a good short formulation of methodological naturalism — guarantees, if design is actually the case (true), that science will either (a) come up with false theories, or (b) search fruitlessly for nonexistent natural explanations. In both instances, truth will not be served. As a philosophy of science, therefore, methodological naturalism is nothing but rubbish. To see this point made more calmly, but with insightful rigor, the reader should consult Del Ratzsch’s Nature, Design, and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001).

10. Robert Boyle, A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, ed. Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160.

11. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 14.

12. Henry Morris, “Design Is Not Enough!” http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-a/btg-127a.htm.

13. By “theistic evolution” I mean any theory of evolution where the adjective “theistic” makes an explanatory difference or genuinely affects the content of biological science. I do not include in the design tent those accounts of theistic evolution where “theistic” is an empirically empty modifier. Like “chocolate ice cream” or “cold water,” the adjective “theistic” should have meaningful, detectable content.

14. Howard J. Van Till, “Does ‘Intelligent Design’ Have a Chance?” Zygon 34 (1999): 675.

15. By “fully gifted,” Van Till means that from its inception the universe was endowed with every causal capacity needed to bring forth (in time) all objects, both nonliving and living, now observed; thus, “there are no gaps (caused by missing capabilities) in the formational economy of the universe that had to be bridged by episodes of extranatural assembly, most commonly envisioned as form-imposing acts of divine intervention.” See ibid., 674.

16. I have argued that Van Till’s “fully-gifted” scenario has discernable empirical content, making it a design theory in the broad sense (see “Is ‘Intelligent Design’ Unavoidable — Even by Howard Van Till? A Response,” Zygon 34 (1999): 677–82. In personal communication, Van Till has indicated some unhappiness with this reading of his work, but he has not explained in any detail where I have understood him incorrectly. While waiting for clarification, then, I prefer my understanding of his position as making more sense than any (unarticulated) alternative.

17. See Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: A Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative, ed. Larry Vardiman, Andrew A. Snelling, and Eugene F. Chaffin (El Cajon, CA, and St. Joseph, MO: Institute for Creation Research and Creation Research Society, 2000).

18. David Hagopian, ed., The Genesis Debate (Mission Viejo, CA: Crux Press, 2000).

19. R. C. Sproul, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” Tabletalk, July 2001, 7.

SYNOPSIS

Intelligent design (ID) theory — which seeks to explain the cause of the specified complexity in the universe — is a new factor in the debate over origins. The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically dealt with state laws concerning creation and evolution in public school science curricula, but it has never addressed ID. If the Supreme Court were to assess a law permitting or requiring the teaching of ID in public schools it would likely employ the standard set down in its most famous creation/evolution case, Edwards v. Aguillard. It is possible, however, to construct a statute that would pass constitutional muster: First, ID has no historical connection to the creation/ evolution debate in the Scopes trial; therefore, it should not suffer from guilt by association. Second, ID literature and curricula are not transparently derived from the book of Genesis, as is creationist literature. The arguments for ID are not grounded in any particular religion’s interpretation of its special revelation. They are, rather, the result of empirical facts, well-grounded conceptual notions, and critical reflection. The conclusions of ID are consistent with creationism, it is true, but ID is essentially different. Finally, an ID statute could be justified using two secular lines of reasoning: by challenging the state endorsement and biased promotion of evolution, and by arguing that an ID statute would promote students’ exposure to important scholarship and protect the academic freedom of ID adherents.

What if a government body required or permitted its public schools to include criticisms of evolution and presentations of intelligent design (ID) theory in their science curricula? The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically dealt with state laws that either forbade evolution (Epperson v. Arkansas)¹ or required balanced treatment between evolution and creation (Edwards v. Aguillard),² but it has never addressed this particular question. To require or permit the teaching of ID in public schools, nevertheless, is constitutional. To make this case, we must first define creation, evolution, and intelligent design.

DEFINING CREATION, EVOLUTION, AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Creation. Creation, as understood by the courts, is synonymous with young-earth creationism. This view, according to Phillip E. Johnson, U.C. Berkeley law professor, is associated with the “term ‘creation-science,’ as used in the Louisiana law [in the Edwards case], [and] is commonly understood to refer to a movement of Christian fundamentalists.” “Creation-scientists,” continues Johnson, “do not merely insist that life was created; they insist that the job was completed in six days no more than ten thousand years ago.…[Young-earth creationism] attributes the existence of fossils to Noah’s flood” (emphasis in original).³ The statutes struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Epperson and Edwards, and by a federal district court in McLean v. Arkansas,⁴ had this type of creationism in mind.

Evolution. Evolution can mean different things. Sometimes it is a synonym for “Darwinism,” the theory defended by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) in The Origin of Species, as well as subsequent refinements of Darwin’s theory. Arguing from what he observed when domestic breeders engaged in selection, Darwin offered natural selection as the engine by which living organisms adapt, survive, acquire new characteristics, and pass them on to their offspring:

Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by the offspring.…Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.⁵

Not even hard-line creationists deny that biological species adapt to changing environments over time and genetically pass those adaptations to their offspring. This is microevolution, which is distinguished from macroevolution — the view that through small, incremental, and beneficial mutations over eons of time, all living things in our world originated from one bacterial cell.

The notion of common descent is fundamental to evolution even if Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of this descent are supplemented by another theory (e.g., punctuated equilibrium, recombination, the founder effect, genetic drift). This is why atheist philosopher Antony Flew points out that “it is wrong to identify either the Darwinism of The Origin of Species or Neo-Darwinism with biological evolution without prefix or suffix. That to which any account of the evolution of species is necessarily opposed is any doctrine of their immutability; combined, presumably, with the claim that they were…specially created by ad hoc supernatural agency.”⁶

Evolutionists assert that the bacterial cell from which all life arose sprung from inorganic matter. According to biologist Douglas J. Futuyama, “We will almost certainly never have direct fossil evidence that living molecular structures evolved from nonliving precursors. Such molecules surely could not have been preserved without degradation; [nevertheless] a combination of geochemical evidence and laboratory experiment shows that such evolution is not only plausible but almost undeniable” (emphasis added).⁷

Inorganic matter, moreover, is said to have resulted from an initial explosion called the big bang over 15 billion years ago that naturalists believe will one day be accounted for scientifically.⁸ Evolution is thus a grand materialist explanation for the diversity and apparent design of entities that make up nature.⁹ Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson explains the “meaning of evolution”: “Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained in purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors.…Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”¹⁰

Naturalistic evolution says the entire universe can be accounted for by strictly material processes without resorting to any designer, creator, or nonmaterial entity. To say such a view of evolution is true, therefore, is to say naturalism (or materialism) as a worldview is true, for such a strictly material and random version of evolution necessarily entails naturalism. This means a threat is posed to materialism when evolution is challenged, for naturalistic evolution seeks to answer the very same question as ID: What is the origin of the apparent design in biological organisms and/or the rest of the natural universe and/or the universe as a whole? Evolution answers this question by appealing to the forces of unguided matter (and/or energy) whereas ID appeals to an intelligent agency.

Intelligent Design. Intelligent design is a research program. A small, though growing, platoon of academics embraces this program and maintains that, rather than the blind forces of unguided matter, an intelligent agency better explains the specified, and sometimes irreducible, complexity of some physical systems. These systems include biological entities as well as the existence of the universe as a whole.

Two aspects of ID are relevant to the constitutionality of an ID statute: (1) the case against methodological naturalism, and (2) the case for intelligent design. The literature supporting ID is sophisticated, vast, and growing; therefore, the presentation of its case will be cursory.

THE CASE AGAINST METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM

ID proponents, such as mathematician William A. Dembski, maintain that most scholars who hold to evolutionary theory do so because of a prior commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), “the view that science must be restricted solely to undirected natural processes.”¹¹ According to Johnson, “a methodological naturalist defines science as the search for the best naturalistic theories. A theory would not be naturalistic if it left something out (such as the existence of genetic information or consciousness) to be explained by a supernatural cause.”¹² If one defines science as a discipline that allows only naturalistic explanations, and if one maintains that science is the only field that provides truth on the question of origins, then evolution (not necessarily Darwinism) must be true even if it leaves many unanswered questions. The real question, according to design theorists, is not whether ID conflicts with MN but whether their arguments for ID work. If ID arguments work, then MN is not a necessary precondition of natural science and cannot be employed to exclude positions contrary to it.

THE CASE FOR INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Detecting Specified Complexity. At the core of the ID research program are criteria that proponents claim can be used to detect or falsify design. Dembski offers one such criterion. He posits an explanatory filter in order to detect specified complexity (SC), something we recognize as evidence of intelligent agency in many fields, such as “forensic science, intellectual property law, insurance claims investigation, cryptography, and random number generation.”¹³ Dembski proposes that we extend these insights, which have proved fruitful in other fields, to the natural sciences.

According to Dembski, “Whenever we infer design, we must establish three things — contingency, complexity and specification. Contingency, by which we mean that an event was one of several possibilities, ensures that the object is not the result of an automatic and hence unintelligent process.”¹⁴ In other words, an event that is not contingent is one that can be completely accounted for by natural law (or an algorithm). For instance, a salt crystal “results from forces of chemical necessity that can be described by the laws of chemistry. A setting of silverware does not.”¹⁵

“Complexity,” writes Dembski, “ensures that the object in question is not so simple that it can readily be explained by chance.”¹⁶ For Dembski, “complexity…is a form of probability.”¹⁷ For example, because the improbability of opening a combination lock by chance depends on the complexity of the mechanism, “the greater the complexity, the smaller the probability. Thus to determine whether something is sufficiently complex to warrant a design inference is to determine whether it has sufficiently small probability.”¹⁸ Complexity alone, however, does not necessarily indicate design. The result of 1,000 coin flips is complex but can be explained by randomness. This is why specification is also essential.

“Specification ensures that this object exhibits the type of pattern that is the trademark of intelligence.”¹⁹ Specificity alone does not necessarily indicate design. For example, redundant order, such as the earth’s orbiting the sun every 365 days, can be explained by law and necessity. If specification is combined with complexity, however, a design inference may be warranted. Dembski often cites an example from one area of science, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In attempting to detect intelligence outside earth, SETI researchers have developed a filter with preset patterns so that it may discard radio waves that do not exhibit specified complexity. In Carl Sagan’s novel and film, Contact, SETI researchers detect extraterrestrial intelligence when they discover a sequence of beats and pauses that correspond to the prime numbers from 2 to 101.²⁰

Dembski distinguishes between specification and fabrication. The latter occurs when one infers a pattern ad hoc (that fits only one instance) after the fact. For example, suppose a hurricane moved through my neighborhood, destroying four out of the seven homes on my street, and the three homes not destroyed are owned by my two brothers and me.²¹ We own the second, fourth, and sixth homes on the block, which means that the hurricane destroyed only the odd-numbered homes. Suppose I were to infer from this pattern either that the hurricane intentionally spared the homes of the Beckwith brothers and/or that the hurricane did not like odd-numbered homes on my block. This design inference would not be warranted since the “pattern” may be adequately accounted for by chance and necessity and thus is ad hoc. The pattern detected by the SETI researchers in Contact, however, is not a fabrication. It is an instance of SC because it is not only highly complex and improbable, but it also has specification, a pattern that is independent of, or detachable from, the event it explains. In other words, the pattern is not derived exclusively from the event, but one we could construct even if we did not know which one of the possible events would occur.

On the one hand, the pattern of eight randomly selected numbers in a lottery is not detachable, for it cannot be a specified pattern apart from the event. On the other hand, the pattern of the message from space in Contact is detachable, for our background knowledge (or side information, as Dembski calls it²²) about binary arithmetic provides the resources by which we can construct this pattern independent of the message itself. As a researcher in the film Contact exclaimed, “This isn’t noise, this has structure.”²³ The message is not merely complex but has “structure,” a pattern that one could have constructed independent of the message itself. According to Dembski, “this distinction between specifications and fabrications can be made with full statistical rigor.”²⁴

There are several ways in which design theorists employ Dembski’s filter in order to detect design in nature. We will look at two.

Irreducible Complexity of Certain Biological Systems. Biochemist Michael Behe takes seriously Darwin’s claim that “if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”²⁵ A system that is irreducibly complex (IC) is thus a serious challenge to the explanatory power of Darwin’s theory. Behe defines an IC system as “a single system of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”²⁶

A mechanical mousetrap is an example of such a system.²⁷ Behe notes that a mousetrap consists of a number of parts, and it will not function if any one of its parts is removed. An IC system has no function until all its parts are in place, and therefore it cannot be accounted for by gradual changes over time, but according to natural selection a biological entity must have some function so that it may exist, change, and pass that change on to its progeny. With IC systems, however, there can be no functioning intermediate forms that have yet to acquire the necessary parts. Behe concludes, “If there is no function, selection has nothing to work on, and Darwinian evolution is thwarted.”²⁸

Behe cites a number of examples of irreducibly complex biological systems, including those contained within the cell. One of the cell’s molecular machines is the cilium.²⁹ Behe explains the necessity of its parts:

Ciliary motion certainly requires microtubules; otherwise, there would be no strands to slide. Additionally, it requires a motor, or else microtubules of the cilium would lie stiff and motionless. Furthermore, it requires linkers to tug on neighboring strands, converting the sliding motion into a bending motion, and preventing the structure from falling apart. All of these parts are required to perform one function: ciliary motion. Just as the mousetrap does not work unless all of its constituent parts are present, ciliary motion simply does not exist in the absence of microtubules, connectors, and motors. Therefore we can conclude that the cilium is irreducibly complex — an enormous monkey wrench thrown into its presumed gradual, Darwinian evolution.³⁰

Reviewers of Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box “admit[ted] the current lack of Darwinian explanations,” even though most “expressed confidence that in the future such explanations will be found.”³¹ Behe does not share this optimism. He rather argues that the data are more consistent with an ID explanation. He maintains that we do have legitimate criteria by which to detect design (e.g., SC) and that an IC system exhibits the characteristics these criteria are meant to detect: it is contingent, complex, and specified.

The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for the Existence of Human Life. In the 1960s, some physicists observed that our universe appears to have been fine-tuned for the existence of human life.³² During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of works have assessed this “anthropic coincidence” in differing ways.³³ According to science philosopher Stephen C. Meyer, these scientists “discovered that the existence of life in the universe depends upon a highly improbable but precise balance of physical factors. The constants of physics, the initial conditions of the universe, and many other of its features appear delicately balanced to allow for the possibility of life.”³⁴ Any slight alteration in these constants would have made human life impossible. In 1998, astrophysicist and design advocate, Hugh Ross, estimated that there are “twenty-nine characteristics of the universe that must be fine-tuned for any kind of physical life to be possible” and that our solar system has 45 characteristics necessary for human life.³⁵

Given the individual and collective probabilities for these characteristics all to arise by chance with precisely the correct values to make human life possible, Ross estimated that there is “much less than 1 chance in one hundred billion trillion trillion trillion [that there] exists…even one” planet on which life “would occur anywhere in the universe.”³⁶ This is why Nobel laureate in physics, Arno Penzias, writes that “astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.”³⁷

ID advocates have applied Dembski’s explanatory filter to this phenomenon.³⁸ According to some design theorists, the fine-tuning of the universe for the possibility of human life exhibits the characteristics of specified complexity; and thus, it can be attributed to an intelligent agent, for it is contingent (i.e., it is one of many possibilities), complex (i.e., it is a highly improbable arrangement of independent variables), and specified (i.e., it is a cosmological pattern a capable intelligence could have constructed if it intended to make the universe conducive to human life).

ID AND THE EDWARDS STANDARD

Having defined creation, evolution, and intelligent design, we now turn to the possibility of constructing a constitutional ID statute. If the Supreme Court were to assess a law (statute) that permitted or required the teaching of ID, it would likely employ the test it set down in Edwards, the case that set the standard by which public school curricula on origins should be evaluated.

The Louisiana statute assessed in Edwards was struck down for four reasons: (1) its historical continuity with the Scopes trial and the creation/evolution debate, (2) its textual connection to the Genesis-inspired statutes struck down in Epperson and McLean, (3) the religious motivation of its supporters, and (4) its illegitimate means (i.e., advancing religion, limiting what teachers may teach) to achieve appropriate state ends — that is, academic freedom — though the Court concluded that the statute’s purported purpose (or end) was “a sham,”³⁹ and thus the statute had no real secular purpose.

ID’s Historical Connection to the Creation/Evolution Debate. ID has no historical connection to the creation/evolution debate in the Scopes trial. Boston University law professor Jay Wexler, however, argues that because ID has some historical connection to the creation/evolution controversy, it would not pass the Edwards standard,⁴⁰ but that would make the genetic fallacy a principle of constitutional jurisprudence.⁴¹ After all, if historical connection of any sort, no matter how distant or loose, is sufficient to prohibit the teaching of a subject, then astronomy and chemistry ought to be prohibited since they have their origin in the religiously oriented practices of astrology and alchemy.

ID’s Connection to the Genesis Account. The Court’s problem with the creationism curriculum required in the Edwards statute was its transparent connection to the book of Genesis and the contents of previously repudiated statutes in Epperson and McLean. The courts in these cases asked, How closely does the curricular content required by the statute parallel the creation story in Genesis? If there are no essential differences between ID and creationism, then the teaching of ID in public schools would not pass constitutional muster. The essentials of ID are:

1. If an apparently designed entity exhibits specified complexity (SC), the inference is warranted that the entity is the result of an intelligent agent.

2. SC can be reliably detected by an explanatory filter.

3. The irreducible complexity of some biological systems, and the fine-tuning of the universe for the existence of life, are instances of specified complexity.

4. Presupposing methodological naturalism (MN) and relying exclusively on its resources (i.e., chance and necessity) cannot account for SC in the instances listed in (3).

5. ID cannot be excluded from serious consideration simply because it is inconsistent with an a priori commitment to MN.

6. Given points one through five, ID best accounts for the irreducible complexity of some biological systems and the fine-tuning of the universe for life.

No doubt ID has implications for the veracity of evolution: If its arguments are sound, then ID defeats evolution. ID’s premises and propositions, unlike the ones from creationism, are neither derived from, nor grounded in, any particular religion’s interpretation of its special revelation. They are, rather, the result of empirical facts (e.g., the structure of the cell), well-grounded conceptual notions (e.g., SC, IC), and critical reflection. These subsequently serve as the basis from which one may infer that an intelligent agent is likely responsible for the existence of certain apparently natural phenomena. Granted, the conclusions inferred by these premises may be consistent with, and lend support to, one or more tenets of creationism, but that fact alone does not make ID creationism or even constitutionally suspect. Even though the big bang theory, the most widely accepted theory of the universe’s origin, is consistent with theism, it is not the same as theism;⁴² neither is ID the same as creationism.

ID’s Motivation and Purpose. In order to address the concerns of reasons (3) and (4) of the Edwards standard, any government body requiring or permitting ID to be taught in its public schools would have to justify it by appealing to secular reasons. The following four secular reasons can be employed.

The Endorsement Test. In Lynch v. Donnelly, Justice O’Connor proposed an “endorsement test” by which the Court may assess alleged trangressions of the Establishment Clause. No government action is to create a perception that it is either endorsing or disfavoring a religion. The concern of this test is whether the disputed activity suggests “a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.”⁴³ If a particular curriculum gives the impression that a certain disputed, irreligious point of view is favored, a state could argue that in order to erase that perception, a statute requiring or permitting the teaching of ID is necessary.

The Neutrality Test. The Supreme Court in Epperson wrote that the “government…must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or nonreligion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.”⁴⁴ An ID statute, therefore, could be justified on the basis of neutrality by arguing that to teach only one theory of origins (evolution), the state is in fact advocating, aiding, fostering, and promoting irreligion, which it is constitutionally forbidden from doing. The state is not merely teaching what some religious people find antagonistic or offensive to their faith, which would not be unconstitutional. It is, rather, promoting a philosophical point of view “that occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by” traditional belief in God.⁴⁵

Perhaps this is why Justice Black asked, “If the theory [of evolution] is considered anti-religious, as the Court indicates, how can the State be bound by the Federal Constitution to permit its teachers to advocate such an ‘anti-religious’ doctrine to schoolchildren?” According to Justice Black, “this issue presents problems under the Establishment Clause.…The very cases cited by the Court as supporting its conclusion that the State must be neutral” assert that the State should not favor “one religious or anti-religious view over another.”⁴⁶

When government schools, whose attendance is generally compulsory, delve into matters that touch on the ultimate nature of things and imply or affirm an “orthodox” position on such matters, they violate what the Court maintains is a fundamental liberty.⁴⁷

Exposing Students to New and Important Scholarship. A state could appeal to the importance of exposing students to reputable scholarship that critiques evolution. The Edwards ruling clarifies that it does “not imply that the legislature could never require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught.…Teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.”⁴⁸ The Court also pointed out that the Balanced-Treatment Act it struck down in Edwards was unnecessary because Louisiana already permitted teachers to introduce alternative points of view.⁴⁹

ID proponents have had their works published by prestigious presses and in academic journals,⁵⁰ have aired their views in major universities and other institutions,⁵¹ and have been recognized by leading periodicals.⁵² Students, therefore, should be exposed to these works.

Furthering and Protecting Academic Freedom. A state could make the argument that an ID statute protects the academic freedom of teachers and students. They may suffer marginalization, hostility, and public ridicule because of their support of ID and doubts about the veracity of the evolutionary paradigm.

Consider the following example. In 1999, a Burlington, Washington, high school biology teacher, Roger DeHart, was instructed by his superiors, following a student complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to “drop references to design and stick to the textbook.”⁵³ In 2001, “DeHart was told he could not even introduce materials questioning Darwin’s theories,” something he had been doing for more than nine years until the 1999 incident.⁵⁴ No one disputes that he correctly taught the required curriculum, and although he never mentioned God, he nevertheless was accused of encouraging pupils to think deeply about the philosophical implications that flow from Darwinism. According to the Los Angeles Times, DeHart “dissected such scientific topics as bacterial flagella, fossil records and embryonic development. Examine the evidence, he told the students, and ponder the Big Question: Is life the result of random, meaningless events? Or was it designed by an intelligent force?”⁵⁵

The Supreme Court has affirmed that teachers engage in protected speech under the rubric of academic freedom (and the First Amendment) when they bring into the classroom relevant material that is supplementary to the curriculum (and not a violation of any other legal duties) and they have adequately fulfilled all of their curricular obligations.⁵⁶ It follows, then, that any legislation passed to protect the academic freedom of teachers and students to discuss scientific alternatives to evolution would simply be affirming what is already a fixed point in constitutional law.

THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE

In a society of contradictory religious and philosophical points of view, the law must address how public schools ought to deal with the question of origins with fairness while violating neither the presentations of science nor the rights of the nation’s citizens.

The infusion of intelligent design into this debate has changed the legal landscape. Unlike the creationism repudiated by the Supreme Court in Epperson and Edwards, ID cannot be dismissed as an attempt on the part of religious people to introduce their views into the public schools.

NOTES

1. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968).

2. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).

3. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1991), 4.

4. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (1982).

5. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, A Facsimile of the 1st ed. (1859) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 61.

6. Antony Flew, Darwinian Evolution, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997), 42.

7. Douglas J. Futuyama, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 95.

8. See Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution, 3d ed. (Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2000), 76.

9. See ibid., chaps. 1–25.

10. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 279.

11. William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 119.

12. Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 208.

13. William A. Dembski, “Reinstating Design within Science,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1, 4 (1998): 506.

14. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, vol. 9 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 25.

15. Ibid., 26.

16. Ibid., 25–26.

17. Ibid., 27.

18. Ibid.

19. Dembski, “Reinstating Design,” 508.

20. Ibid., 507–9.

21. This is my example, not Dembski’s.

22. See Dembski, Science and Evidence for Design, 47–51 n. 17.

23. Quoted in Dembski, “Reinstating Design,” 509.

24. Dembski, “Reinstating Design,” 510. Citing William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 5.

25. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (1872), 154, quoted in Michael Behe, “Intelligent Design as an Alternative Explanation for the Existence of Biomolecular Machines,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1, 4 (1998): 566.

26. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 39.

27. Ibid., 42.

28. Behe, “Intelligent Design,” 567. Controversy surrounds Behe’s mousetrap example. For a response to criticisms, see William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 256–67, 279–89.

29. Behe also includes the bacterial flagellum, blood clotting, vesicular transport, and immune systems as examples of irreducibly complex biological systems.

30. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 64–65.

31. Behe, “Intelligent Design,” 569.

32. K. Giberson, “The Anthropic Principle,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 9 (1997).

33. See John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); John Leslie, Universes (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

34. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design, 56–57.

35. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Refined by Fire,” Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 372.

36. Ibid., 381.

37. Quoted in Walter L. Bradley, “Designed or Designoid,” in Mere Creation, 40, quoting from D. L. Brock, Our Universe: Accident or Design? (Wits, South Africa: Star Watch, 1992), n.p.

38. See Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design, 56–66.

39. Edwards, 482 U.S., 587.

40. Jay D. Wexler, “Of Pandas, People, and the First Amendment: The Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in the Public Schools,” Stanford Law Review (1997): 465.

41. The genetic fallacy occurs when the origin of a viewpoint or argument, rather than its merits, is used to dismiss the view.

42. See William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

43. Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 688 (1984) (O’Connor, J., concurring).

44. Epperson, 393 U.S., 103–4.

45. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 176 (1965).

46. Epperson, 393 U.S., 113 (Black, J., concurring).

47. The Court wrote in Epperson (93 U.S., 105): “This Court said in Keyishian v. Board of Regents [385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967)], the First Amendment ‘does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.’”

48. Edwards, 482 U.S., 593–94.

49. Ibid., 587.

50. See Dembski, The Design Inference; Paul A. Nelson, On Common Descent, Evolutionary Monograph Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); Del Ratzsch, Nature, Science, and Design: The Status of Design in Natural Science, Philosophy and Biology Series (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology; John A. Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, eds., Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003); William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004); and William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2000).

51. In 2000, both Baylor University (“The Nature of Nature: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Naturalism in Science,” Baylor University, 12–15 April 2000) and Yale University (“Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe,” Yale University, 2–4 November 2000) hosted major conferences on ID science and the evidence for design in the universe. The American Museum of Natural History (New York City) presented a public discussion entitled, “Evolution or Intelligent Design? Examining the Intelligent Design Issue” in April 2002 (http://www.amnh.org/programs/ lectures/index.html?src=p_h#).

52. See James Glanz, “Biologists Face a New Theory of Life’s Origins,” New York Times, 8 April 2001, sec. 1, 18; Teresa Watanabe, “Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator,” Los Angeles Times, 25 March 2001(http://www.arn.org/docs/news/fingerprints 032501.htm); Beth McMurtrie, “Darwinism under Attack,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 December 2001 (http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i17/17a00801. htm); Brian Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, and Elliot Sober, “How Not to Detect Design,” Philosophy of Science 66, 3 (1999); Neil W. Blackstone, “Argumentum Ad Ignorantam,” Quarterly Review of Biology 72 (1997); J. A. Coyne, “God in the Details,” Nature 383 (1996); and Robert Dorit, review of Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, American Scientist 85, 5 (1997) (http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/bookshelf/leads97/dawin97%2D09.html).

53. Watanabe.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. See David K. DeWolf, “Academic Freedom after Edwards,” Regent University Law Review 13, 2 (2000–2001): 480–81.

Moyers’s 10-part discussion series, Genesis: A Living Conversation, premiered on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in October 1996. This series had its own genesis when Moyers read about a monthly Genesis seminar conducted by Rabbi Burton Visotzky in The New York Times. Moyers visited the seminar, found a spirited discussion, and “came away resolved then and there to test whether the communal reading of these stories could happen on television.”

“The Visotzky seminar was too large for the small screen to treat kindly, even if the participants had been willing to surrender the intimacy of that room to an unseen audience of millions,” Moyers writes in the 361-page companion book to his PBS series. “For our PBS series, my colleagues and I settled on a circle of eight people for each program, including Rabbi Visotzky.” The people chosen for each discussion varied somewhat from week to week.

Participants included not only believers in the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also agnostics, a Buddhist, a Hindu, and some who admit to neglecting Genesis for many years, but reading it again for the discussion. Moyers invited only a few evangelicals — pastors Roberta Hestenes (former president of Eastern College) and Eugene Rivers, and Fuller Seminary professors Lewis Smedes and Marianne Meye Thompson.

Moyers and PBS encouraged his “audience of millions” to form their own Genesis discussion groups. Doubleday has published not only the companion book but also 100,000 copies of a study guide, which 50 “outreach partners” were to distribute as they helped organize local discussions modeled on the Moyers discussions.

Everybody’s a Critic. Moyers and some members of his chosen circles offered disturbing remarks about Genesis. For example:

Former Roman Catholic nun Karen Armstrong on the worldwide flood — “In Hinduism, they say that evil is one of the masks of God. I’m sorry to say it, but I think that here you see God behaving in an evil way.”

Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels — “What strikes me is that God warns that on the very day you eat of this fruit, ‘you shall surely die.’ But the serpent speaks more accurately, saying, ‘You will not die’ — and, of course, they do not.”

Feminist seminary professor Phyllis Trible and Moyers on God’s “cruelty” — “The cruelty of God is something from which the Bible does not flinch,” says Trible, “whether it’s Genesis or Job or Jeremiah…” Moyers then interrupts Trible, “or Jesus, where God actually put His son on the cross to bleed in agony for other people. This is a God Who would save us by doing that to a human being?”

While welcoming the opportunities created by the series for discussing the important themes of Genesis, Christian scholars are concerned with the postmodernist and relativist interpretations that dominate the series.

“The series is geared to focus more on audience response, not on what the text actually says,” states Marvin Wilson, professor of biblical and theological studies at Gordon College. “What I sensed in some of the programs was that God was on trial, rather than human beings going on trial.”

Douglas Groothuis, associate professor of the philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary, expresses similar concerns: “Given American subjectivism and relativism and anti-intellectualism, many will simply use Genesis as a way to express their own preconceived notions, thus making it a wax nose to be twisted any way they desire. This is the postmodernist tendency in dealing with any texts.”

“The unstated assumption of the entire discussion is that Genesis is mere mythology, a collection of human stories that reflect and illuminate the life stories of the human beings who wrote them, and who hear and read them,” says Rebecca Groot-huis, author of Good News for Women. “God is thus a rather humanlike character in the story, a figment of human imagination. At the end of the discussion on the creation account, Roberta Hestenes (the lone evangelical in that conversation) attempts to correct this fundamental flaw. She says, ‘This is more than storytelling around the campfire. This is God’s self-disclosing to the human race.’ But no one gets her point; they seem unable even to think in such terms. The dubious premise of the entire conversation remains undisputed and undiscussed to the end.”

“It is certainly fair for people outside of the Judeo-Christian traditions/faiths to participate in a discussion of the meaning of Genesis. But it does not seem fair for them to manipulate the text in a way to change its meaning to conform with their belief system,” says Stephen Moshier, associate professor of geology at Wheaton College.

“Modern pagans seem to relate to the symbolism in the Genesis text but do not realize that it is there to refute pagan ideas.”

“Writing a New Story.” Moyers repeatedly describes his series as an effort to have a “committed but civil” discussion about religion: “At this moment between two centuries, as one millennium gives way to another, we Americans need a new story about what it means to be a nation, about our identity as a people. How are we to write this new story for ourselves unless we learn to talk about our deepest religious beliefs with people not like us?”

Only time will tell whether Moyers can achieve such broad cultural goals, or whether Genesis will simply enjoy its “15 minutes of fame” alongside such heroes of syncretism as Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith.

Douglas Groothuis, for one, has low expectations for Moyers’s project. “American culture is developing an uncanny ability to trivialize the paramount and turn matters of eternal verity into trends. The Genesis craze will probably follow that pattern overall,” he says. Nevertheless, “some people may begin to read the text with the intent of discerning its objective meaning. If so, they may hear the voice of God speak.”

“The discussion of Genesis has been a long-lasting phenomenon, as evidenced by, for better or for worse, the impact of the creation science movement in our culture,” Moshier states. “Perhaps the positive impact of the Moyers programs will be an awareness within and beyond the church that Genesis is about more important things than how old the earth is and how Noah might have fit dinosaurs on the ark. It is a substantial document that reflects divine wisdom about God, humanity, and nature.”

Michael J. Behe, associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of the recent book, Darwin’s Black Box, believes the text of Genesis withstands easy distortion. “Certainly there is the danger that people could be misled, by those who call themselves Christians, as well as by non-Christians,” Behe says. “Still, the orthodox understanding of the Bible has had to contend with heterodoxy for thousands of years, and it has always survived and prospered. Given a chance to explain itself, the orthodox Christian understanding of Genesis will continue to attract large numbers of people to itself.”

“Genesis goes to the core of who we are, how we got here, and what the purpose of the world is,” continues Behe. “Especially when it is regarded poetically, as I think it should be, it provides abundant nourishment to the moral and religious senses of humanity. Without that nourishment our human nature starves. I am encouraged whenever public discussion turns to eternal things, especially in a Judeo-Christian context. Simply focusing people’s attention on God’s word is a step in the right direction.”

“The public seems to have lost faith in political solutions, and is turning to spiritual issues,” says Phillip Johnson, a law professor who wrote Darwin on Trial. “Moyers will always put these issues in a relativistic or syncretistic framework, because that’s what the contemporary intellectual culture wants. The interest in Genesis and other religious topics is genuine, and not just a fad, but it won’t go anywhere as long as it is approached strictly in humanistic terms. People have to want God in reality, not just some spiritual experience. God does divide people, because they have to choose between God’s ways and their own.”

Hestenes adds about the discussions in Moyers’s programs: “The conversation was a classical postmodern approach, with a sense of we morally superior beings sitting in judgment of the text, and even sitting in judgment of God. I believe we must be prepared for the text to judge us.”

Still, Hestenes is pleased that she joined the conversations. “I have always believed that the Holy Spirit is present when people study Scripture together. I do believe the Isaiah passage about Scripture not returning void, and about God knowing the heart,” she said. “I have such confidence in God’s own work that a conversation allowing other voices does not diminish my own faith. We complain about being marginalized, but sometimes we do that to ourselves, if we won’t be a witness in the middle of our culture.”

It’s time to FACE the facts that:

F ossil records are an embarrassment to evolutionists.

A pe-men are fiction, fraud, and fantasy.

C hance renders evolution not just improbable but also impossible.

E mpirical science supports the creation model for origins and militates against the theory

of evolution.

Fossil records

The next time you’re confronted with someone who believes that the theory of evolution is a proven fact, ask him or her this simple question: With all the millions of fossils that have been found—some 60 million specimens in the British Museum of History alone—why is there not one single fossil find that indicates verifiable transition from one species to another?

Darwin’s entire theory rests on this supposed evolution of fish becoming reptiles, reptiles transitioning into birds, and apes becoming humans. And yet, 120 years after Darwin, it is common knowledge among paleontologists that transitions from one species to another do not exist.

Yet the general public blithely accepts evolution as a fact. Even our universities teach the Darwinian theory as a proven fact of science.

Ape-Men?

Evolutionary theory predicts that scientists should be finding ample fossils of links between ape-like human ancestors and modern man. But even the scant examples for such links have been shown to be fiction, fraud, and fantasy.

There was Nebraska Man found in 1922, a “find” based on the discovery of a single tooth. After much hoopla by evolutionists, the tooth turned out to be a pig’s! There was Java Man (pithecanthropus erectus), based on a 19^th century smattering of bone fragments, which was later discounted as a pre-human in a 342-page investigative report by a team of evolutionists. The 1912 Piltdown Man fossils were shown to be a deliberate fraud after fooling a generation of scientists. The famed Peking Man turned out to be nothing more than a monkey. And the even more famous “Lucy” fossil is, even according to many evolutionists, merely an ape.

Chance replaces an intelligent Designer if evolution is true. But…

• HOW could chance account for the obvious organization of complex living systems? Especially when things of less complex organization (statues, buildings, computers) could never happen by chance?

• WHY do respected biochemists like Dr. Michael Behe of Lehigh University say that recent discoveries show living cells to be “machines” with billions of interactive parts that could never have arisen by chance or Darwinian evolution?

• WHY does Dr. James Coppedge, an expert in the science of statistical probability, calculate that the chance of forming even a single protein molecule from random processes, even in hundreds of millions of years, is an impossible 1 in 10¹⁶¹ (10 followed 161 zeroes)?

Empirical science and reason undergird the creation model for origins and undermine the evolution model.

• ISN’T evolution just another form of the scientifically discredited theory of “spontaneous generation” — which claimed that living matter springs mysteriously from non-organic matter?

• DOESN’T evolution rest on the logically absurd notion that the universe created itself? That something comes from nothing? That effects have no original cause?

• DOESN’T evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), which says that everything generally runs from order to disorder and from complexity to decay?

• WHY do leading evolutions concede that species appear in the fossil record “suddenly, and are not led up to by gradual … transitional sequences” (George Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution)? This is exactly what creationism would predict!

The debate between creationism and Darwinism is often depicted as a dispute between naive biblical literalists, who ignore the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and scientifically enlightened intellectuals. But this is a caricature that serves the purpose of helping to perpetuate a world view hostile to Christian faith: atheistic naturalism. The debate hinges on five key terms: creationism, evolution, science, religion, and truth. Instead of trying to Christianize evolution we ought instead to challenge the assumption that atheistic naturalism is true.

The popular television game show Jeopardy reverses the usual order of things. Instead of being asked a question to which they must supply the answer, contestants are given the answer and asked to provide the appropriate question. This format suggests an insight that is applicable to law, to science, and indeed to just about everything. More important than knowing all the answers is knowing what question is being asked.

That insight is the starting point for my inquiry into Darwinian evolution and its relationship to creation, because Darwinism is the answer to two very different kinds of questions. First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence. If a small population of birds happens to migrate to an isolated island, for example, a combination of inbreeding, mutation, and natural selection may cause this isolated population to develop different characteristics from those possessed by the ancestral population on the mainland. When the theory is understood in this limited sense, Darwinian evolution is uncontroversial and has no important philosophical or theological implications.

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits. They aspire to answer a much broader question — how complex organisms like birds, flowers, and human beings came to exist at all. The Darwinian answer to this second question is that the creative force that produced complex plants and animals is essentially the same as the mechanism producing variations in flowers, insects, and domestic animals before our very eyes. In the words of Ernst Mayr, the dean of living Darwinists, “Transspecific evolution [i.e., macroevolution] is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species.”

Neo-Darwinian evolution in this broad sense is a philosophical doctrine so lacking in empirical support that Mayr’s successor at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, in a reckless moment once pronounced it “effectively dead.” Yet neo-Darwinism is far from dead. On the contrary, it is continually proclaimed in textbooks and the media as unchallengeable fact. How does it happen that so many scientists and intellectuals, who pride themselves on their empiricism and open-mindedness, continue to accept an unempirical theory as scientific fact?

WHAT IS DARWINISM- DEFINING THE ISSUES

The answer to that question lies in the definition of five key terms — creationism, evolution, science, religion, and truth. Once we understand how these words are used in evolutionary discourse, the continued ascendancy of neo-Darwinism will be no mystery, and we need no longer be deceived by claims that the theory is supported by “overwhelming evidence.” As we shall see, there are powerful vested interests in this area that thrive in the midst of ambiguity and confusion. Those who insist on defining terms precisely and using them consistently may find themselves regarded with suspicion and hostility, and even accused of being enemies of science.

Creationism

The first word is creationism, which means simply a belief in creation. In Darwinist usage, which dominates not only popular and professional scientific literature but also the media, a creationist is a person who takes the creation account in the Book of Genesis as true in the most literal sense. The earth was created in a single week of six 24-hour days no more that 10,000 years ago; the major features of the geological record were produced by Noah’s flood; and there have been no major innovations in the forms of life since the beginning. It is a major theme of Darwinist propaganda that the only persons who have any doubts about Darwinism are young-earth creationists of this sort, who are always portrayed as rejecting the clear and convincing evidence of science to preserve a religious prejudice. The implication is that citizens of modern society are faced with a choice that is really no choice at all. Either they reject science altogether and retreat to a premodern world view, or they believe everything the Darwinists tell them.

In a broader sense, however, a creationist is simply a person who believes in the existence of a creator who brought about the world and its living inhabitants for a purpose. Whether the process of creation took a single week or billions of years is relatively unimportant from a philosophical or theological standpoint. Creation by gradual processes over geological ages may create problems for biblical interpretation, but it creates none for the basic principle of theistic religion. Creation in this broad sense, according to a 1991 Gallup poll, is the creed of 87 percent of Americans. Is creation in this sense consistent with evolution?

Evolution

The answer is no, when evolution is understood in the Darwinian sense. To Darwinists evolution means naturalistic evolution, an insistence that science must assume that the cosmos is a closed system of material causes and effects, which can never be influenced by anything outside of material nature, such as God. In the beginning, an explosion of matter created the cosmos, and undirected, naturalistic evolution produced everything that followed. Thus, no intelligent purpose guided evolution. If intelligence exists today, that is only because it has itself evolved through purposeless material processes.

At bottom the theory must be based on chance, because that is what is left when we have ruled out everything involving intelligence or purpose. But theories invoking only chance are not credible. One thing everyone acknowledges is that living organisms are enormously complex — far more so than, say, a computer or an airplane. That such complex entities came into existence simply by chance is clearly less credible than that they were designed and constructed by a creator. To back up their claim that this appearance of intelligent design is an illusion, Darwinists therefore need to provide a building force that is mindless and purposeless. Natural selection is by far the most plausible candidate.

If we assume that random genetic mutations provided the new genetic information needed, say, to give a small mammal a start towards wings, and if we assume that each tiny step in the process of wing-building gave the animal an increased chance of survival, then natural selection ensured that the favored creatures would thrive and reproduce. It logically follows that wings can and will appear as if by the plan of a designer. Of course, if wings or other improvements do not appear, the theory explains their absence just as well. The needed mutations didn’t arrive, or “developmental constraints” closed off certain possibilities, or natural selection favored something else. There is no requirement that any of this speculation be confirmed by either experimental or fossil evidence. To Darwinists just being able to imagine the process is sufficient to confirm that something like that must have happened.

Biologist Richard Dawkins calls the process of creation by mutation and selection “the blind watchmaker,” by which he means that a purposeless, materialistic designing force substitutes for the “watchmaker” deity of natural theology. The creative power of the blind watchmaker is supported only by very slight evidence, such as the famous example of a moth population in which the percentage of dark moths increased during a period when the birds were better able to see light moths against the smoke-darkened background trees. This may be taken to show that natural selection can change organisms, but not that it can create organisms that were not already in existence.

Even such slight evidence is more than sufficient, however, because evidence is not really necessary to prove something that is practically self-evident. The existence of a potent blind watchmaker follows deductively from the philosophical premise that nature had to do its own creating. There can be argument about the details, but if God was not in the picture something very much like Darwinism simply has to be true, regardless of the evidence.

Science

That brings me to my third term, science. We have already seen that Darwinists assume as a first principle that the history of the cosmos and its life forms is fully explicable on naturalistic principles. This reflects a philosophical doctrine called scientific naturalism, a necessary consequence of the inherent limitations of science. What scientific naturalism does, however, is transform the limitations of science into limitations on reality, in the interest of maximizing the explanatory power of science and its practitioners. It is, of course, entirely possible to study organisms scientifically on the premise that they were all created by God, just as scientists study airplanes and even works of art without denying that these objects are intelligently designed. The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important that is outside the boundaries of natural science. For scientists who want to be able to explain everything, this is an intolerable possibility.

The second feature of scientific naturalism that is important for our purpose is its set of rules governing the criticism and replacement of a paradigm. A paradigm is a general theory, like the Darwinian theory of evolution, which has achieved general acceptance in the scientific community. The paradigm unifies the various specialties that make up the research community, and guides research in all of them. Thus, zoologists, botan-ists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and paleontologists all see their research as aimed at filling out the details of the Darwinian paradigm.

If molecular biologists see a pattern of apparently neutral mutations, which have no apparent effect on an organism’s fitness, they must find a way to reconcile their findings with the paradigm’s requirement that natural selection guides evolution. This they can do by postulating a sufficient quantity of invisible adaptive mutations, supposedly accumulated by natural selection. Similarly, if paleontologists see new fossil species appearing suddenly in the fossil record, and remaining basically unchanged thereafter, they must perform whatever contortions are necessary to force this recalcitrant evidence into a model of incremental change through the accumulation of micromutations.

Supporting the paradigm may even require what in other contexts would be called deception. As Niles Eldredge candidly admitted, “We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing it does not.”² Eldredge explained that this pattern of misrepresentation occurred because of “the certainty so characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940s, the utter assurance not only that natural selection operates in nature, but that we know precisely how it works.” This certainty produced a degree of dogmatism that Eldredge says resulted in the relegation of paleontologists to the “lunatic fringe” who reported that “they saw something out of kilter between contemporary evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil record on the other.”³ Under the circumstances, prudent paleontologists understandably swallowed their doubts and supported the ruling ideology. To abandon the paradigm would be to abandon the scientific community; to ignore the paradigm and just gather the facts would be to earn the demeaning label of “stamp collector” (i.e., one who does not theorize).

As many philosophers of science have observed, the research community does not abandon a paradigm in the absence of a suitable replacement. This means that negative criticism of Darwinism, however devastating it may appear to be, is essentially irrelevant to the professional researchers. A critic may point out, for example, that the evidence that natural selection has any creative power is somewhere between weak and nonexistent. That is perfectly true, but to Darwinists the more important point is this: If natural selection did not do the creating, what did? “God” is obviously unacceptable, because such a being is unknown to science. “We don’t know” is equally unacceptable, because to admit ignorance would be to leave science adrift without a guiding principle. To put the problem in the most practical terms: it is impossible to write or evaluate a grant proposal without a generally accepted theoretical framework.

The paradigm rule explains why Gould’s acknowledgment that neo-Darwinism is “effectively dead” had no significant effect on the Darwinist faithful, or even on Gould himself. Gould made that statement in a paper predicting the emergence of a new general theory of evolution, one based on the macromutational speculations of the Berkeley geneticist Richard Goldschmidt.⁴ When the new theory did not arrive as anticipated, the alternatives were either to stick with Ernst Mayr’s version of neo-Darwinism or to concede that biologists do not know of a naturalistic mechanism that can produce biological complexity. That was no choice at all. Gould had to beat a hasty retreat back to classical Darwinism to avoid giving aid and comfort to the enemies of scientific naturalism, including those disgusting creationists. Having to defend a dead theory tooth and nail can hardly be a satisfying activity, and it is no wonder that Gould lashes out with fury at people such as myself who call attention to his predicament.⁵ I do not mean to ridicule Gould, because I have a genuinely high regard for the man as one of the few Darwinists who has recognized the major problems with the theory and reported them honestly. His tragedy is that he cannot admit the clear implications of his own thought without effectively resigning from science.

The continuing survival of Darwinist orthodoxy illustrates Thomas Kuhn’s famous point that the accumulation of anomalies never in itself falsifies a paradigm, since “to reject one paradigm without substituting another is to reject science itself.”⁶ This practice may be appropriate as a way of carrying on the professional enterprise called science, but it can be grossly misleading when it is imposed on persons who are asking questions other than the ones scientific naturalists want to ask. Suppose, for example, that I want to know whether God really had something to do with creating living organisms. A typical Darwinian response is that there is no reason to invoke supernatural action because Darwinian selection was capable of performing the job. To evaluate that response, I need to know whether natural selection really has the fantastic creative power attributed to it. It is not a sufficient answer to say that scientists have nothing better to offer. The fact that scientists don’t like to say “we don’t know” tells me nothing about what they really do know.

I am not suggesting that scientists have to change their rules about retaining and discarding paradigms. All I want them to do is to be candid about the disconfirming evidence and admit, if it is the case, that they are hanging on to Darwinism only because they prefer a shaky theory to having no theory at all. What they insist on doing, however, is to present Darwinian evolution to the public as a fact that every rational person is expected to accept. If there are reasonable grounds to doubt the theory such dogmatism is ridiculous, whether or not the doubters have a better theory to propose.

To believers in creation, Darwinists seem thoroughly intolerant and dogmatic when they insist that their own philosophy must have a monopoly in the schools and the media. Darwinists do not see themselves that way, of course. On the contrary, they often feel aggrieved when creationists (in either the broad or narrow sense) ask to have their own arguments heard and considered. To insist that schoolchildren be taught that Darwinian evolution is a fact is in their minds merely to protect the integrity of science education; to present the other side of the case would be to allow fanatics to force their opinions on others. Even college professors have been forbidden to express their doubts about Darwinian evolution in the classroom, and it seems widely believed that the Constitution not only permits but actually requires such restrictions on academic freedom.⁷

Religion

To explain this bizarre situation, we must define our fourth term: religion. Suppose that a skeptic argues that evidence for biological creation by natural selection is obviously lacking, and that in the circumstances we ought to give serious consideration to the possibility that the development of life required some input from a preexisting, purposeful creator. To scientific naturalists this suggestion is “creationist” and therefore unacceptable in principle, because it invokes an entity unknown to science. What is worse, it suggests the possibility that this creator may have communicated in some way with humans, perhaps with real prophets — persons with a genuine knowledge of God. Such persons could be dangerous rivals for the scientists as cultural authorities.

Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a strategy to prevent this problem from arising: it labels naturalism as science and theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the latter as mere belief. The distinction is of critical importance, because only knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone; belief is valid only for the believer, and should never be passed off as knowledge. The student who thinks that 2 and 2 make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing a minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of education is to cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge. Thus, students in the public schools must be taught at an early age that “evolution is a fact,” and as time goes by they will gradually learn that evolution means naturalism.

The proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, since naturalistic evolution is by definition in the category of scientific knowledge and what contradicts knowledge is implicitly false, or imaginary. That is why it is possible for scientific naturalists in good faith to claim on the one hand that their science says nothing about God, and on the other to claim that they have said everything that can be said about God. In naturalistic philosophy both propositions are at bottom the same. All that needs to be said about God is that there is nothing to be said of God, because on that subject we can have no knowledge.

Truth

Our fifth term is truth. Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy. The reason for this is that “truth” suggests an unchanging absolute, whereas scientific knowledge is a dynamic concept. Like life, knowledge evolves and grows into superior forms. What was knowledge in the past is not knowledge today, and the knowledge of the future will surely be far superior to what we have now. Only naturalism itself, and the unique validity of science as the path to knowledge, are absolutes. There can be no criterion for truth outside of scientific knowledge, no mind of God to which we have access.

This way of understanding things persists even when scientific naturalists employ religious-sounding language. For example, the physicist Stephen Hawking ended his famous book A Brief History of Time with the prediction that humanity might one day “know the mind of God.” This phrasing gives some friends of mine the mistaken impression that he has some attraction to theism. In context, Hawking was not referring to a supernatural eternal agent, but to the possibility that scientific knowledge will eventually become complete and all-encompassing because it will have explained the movements of material particles in all circumstances.

The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether Darwinism is true. They will gladly concede that the theory is incomplete and that further research is needed. At any given point in time, however, the reigning theory of naturalistic evolution represents the state of scientific knowledge about how we came into existence. Scientific knowledge is by naturalistic definition the closest approximation of absolute truth available to us. To ask whether this knowledge is true is to miss the point, and to betray a misunderstanding of “how science works.”

WHAT IS DARWINISM- CHRISTIANS AND DARWINISM

So far I have described the metaphysical categories by which scientific naturalists have excluded the topic of God from rational discussion, and thus ensured that Darwinism’s fully naturalistic creation story is effectively true by definition. There is no need to explain why atheists find this system of thought control congenial. What is more difficult to understand — at least at first — is the strong support Darwinism continues to receive in the Christian academic world. Attempts to investigate the credibility of Darwinist evolution are regarded with little enthusiasm by many leading Christian professors of science and philosophy, even at institutions that are generally regarded as theologically conservative. Given that Darwinism is inherently naturalistic and therefore antagonistic to the idea that God had anything to do with the history of life, and that it plays the central role in ensuring agnostic domination of the intellectual culture, one might have supposed that Christian intellectuals (along with religious Jews) would be eager to find its weak spots.

Instead, the prevailing view among Christian professors has been that Darwinism — or “evolution,” as they tend to call it — is unbeatable, and that it can be interpreted to be consistent with Christian belief. In fact Darwinism is unbeatable as long as one accepts the thought categories of scientific naturalism that I have been describing. The problem is that those same thought categories make Christian theism, or any other theism, absolutely untenable. If science has exclusive authority to tell us how life was created, and if science is committed to naturalism, and if science never discards a paradigm until it is presented with an acceptable naturalistic alternative, then Darwinism’s position is impregnable within science. Yet the same reasoning that makes Darwinism inevitable also bans God from taking any action within the history of the Cosmos, which makes theism illusory. Theistic naturalism is self-contradictory.

Some hope to avoid the contradiction by asserting that naturalism rules only within the realm of science, and that there is a separate realm called “religion” in which theism can flourish. The problem with this, as we have already seen, is that in a naturalistic culture scientific conclusions are considered to be knowledge, or even fact. What is outside of fact is fantasy, or at best subjective belief. Theists who accommodate scientific naturalism therefore may never affirm that their God is real in the same sense that evolution is real. This rule is essential to the entire naturalistic mindset that produced Darwinism in the first place.

If God exists He could certainly work through scientifically explainable processes if that is what He wanted to do, but He could also create by some means totally outside the ken of our science. Once we put Him into the picture, there is no good reason to attribute the creation of biological complexity to random mutation and natural selection. Direct evidence that these mechanisms have substantial creative power is not to be found in nature, the laboratory, or the fossil record. An essential step in the reasoning that establishes that Darwinian selection created the wonders of biology, therefore, is that nothing else was available. Theism says that something else was available.

Perhaps the contradiction is hard to see when it is stated at an abstract level, so I will give a more concrete example. Persons who advocate the compromise position called “theistic evolution” are in my experience always vague about what they mean by “evolution.” They have good reason to be vague. As we have seen, Darwinian evolution is by definition unguided and purposeless, and such evolution cannot in any meaningful sense be theistic. For evolution to be genuinely theistic it must be guided by God, whether this means God programmed the process in advance or stepped in from time to time to push it in the right direction. To Darwinists evolution guided by God is a soft form of creationism — that is to say, it is not evolution at all. To repeat, this understanding goes to the very heart of Darwinist thinking. Allow a preexisting supernatural intelligence to guide evolution, and this omnipotent being can do a whole lot more than that.

Of course, theists can think of evolution as God-guided whether naturalistic Darwinists like it or not. One problem with having a private definition for theists, however, is that the scientific naturalists have the power to decide what the term “evolution” means in public discourse, including the science classes in the public schools. If theistic evolutionists broadcast the message that evolution as they understand it is harmless to theistic religion, they are misleading their constituents unless they add a clear warning that the version of evolution advocated by the entire body of mainstream science is something else altogether. That warning is never clearly delivered, because the main point of theistic evolution is to preserve peace with the mainstream scientific community. Theistic evolutionists therefore unwittingly serve the purposes of the scientific naturalists by helping persuade the religious community to lower its guard against the incursion of naturalism.

We are now in a position to answer the question, What is Darwinism? Darwinism is a theory of empirical science only at the level of microevolution, where it provides a framework for explaining phenomena such as the diversity that arises when small populations become reproductively isolated from the main body of the species. As a general theory of biological creation Darwinism is not empirical at all. Rather, it is a necessary implication of a philosophical doctrine called scientific naturalism, which is based on the nonscintific assumption that God was always absent from the realm of nature. Evolution in the Darwinian sense is inherently antithetical to theism, although evolution in some entirely different and nonnaturalistic sense could conceivably (if not demonstrably) have been God’s chosen method of creation.

To return to the game of Jeopardy with which we started, let us say that Darwinism is the answer. What, then, is the question? The question is: “How must creation have occurred if we assume that God had nothing to do with it?” Theistic evolutionists err in trying to Christianize the answer to a question that comes straight out of the agenda of scientific naturalism. What we need to do instead is challenge the assumption that the only questions worth asking are the ones that assume that naturalism is true.Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law at the University of California. He is the author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance, and also the forthcoming Defeating Darwinism — By Opening Minds (InterVarsity Press).

NOTES

¹This article was originally delivered as a lecture at a symposium at Hillsdale College in November 1992. Papers from the Symposium were published in the collection, Man and Creation: Perspectives on Science and Theology, ed. Michael Bauman (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 1993).²Niles Eldredge, Time Frames (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), 144.³Ibid., 93.⁴Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology 6 (1980): 119-30, reprinted in Maynard Smith, ed., Evolution Now: A Century after Darwin (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1982).⁵See Stephen Jay Gould, “Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge,” Scientific American, July 1992, 118-22. Scientific American refused to publish my response, but the response did appear in the March 1993 issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith: The Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation.⁶Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 79.⁷This issue is discussed in my article, “What (If Anything) Hath God Wrought?” at the web site (http://www.arn.org).

Christian Burial- THE CASE FOR BURIAL

Admittedly there is no direct command regarding burial or prohibition of cremation.¹⁴ While the act of cremation, as such, is not a sin or an intrinsic evil like murder, burial is the general pattern set down in Scripture.¹⁵ Its continued practice is a reasonable inference drawn from biblical truths. Thus we believe the evidence supports the conclusion that Christians, if at all possible, should practice burial. It is more symbolically appropriate to do so. There may be circumstances, however, that make burial unwise, against the law, or even impossible; but rare exceptions should not be used to eliminate the general practice of burial.

There are at least six reasons for holding that Christians should practice burial. Each will be briefly stated. Taken together they offer good evidence for preserving the Christian practice of burial.

Christian Burial- Burial Follows the Example of Christ. Jesus’ interment is described in great detail and was clearly a burial (Matt. 27:57–61; John 19:38–42). The fact that Jesus was resurrected three days later (according to Jewish reckoning), in the same body in which He died, gives assurance to the believer (John 20:1–30; Phil. 3:20–21). Burial not only shows respect for the body but it also symbolically anticipates its future — in the resurrection. Cremation, on the contrary, is more of a picture that death is the end of everything. Just as Christian baptism is symbolized by death and resurrection (Rom. 6:1ff.), so proper Christian burial can be part of the same picture.

Christian Burial- Jesus’ Burial Was According to the Gospel. Paul used Jesus’ burial as part of the Gospel message in 1 Corinthians 15. Burial is an essential part of the “gospel” since Paul defined the “gospel” as involving death, burial, and resurrection appearances. Burial is the seal of death and resurrection is proof that death is not final (cf. Rom. 4:25; 2 Tim. 1:10). Hence, burial is a significant symbol since it portrays a crucial part of the gospel.

Christian Burial- Burial Preserves the Christian Belief in the Sanctity of the Body. Christians believe God created man in His image (Gen. 1:26–27; 2:7).¹⁶ Even though God has no body (John 4:24), nevertheless in man this image of God is related to the body for at least three reasons. In Genesis 1:27 God included male and female bodies as associated with the image of God in man. According to Genesis 9:6, it is wrong to kill the body because it is linked to the image of God: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” It would make no sense to have such a curse if the image of God applied only to the soul, which man cannot kill (Matt. 10:28). Jesus Christ in a body is the exact representation of God’s nature. The Son “is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb 1:3). If the image of God could be perfectly represented in man apart from the body, then the body would not be essential to resurrection. Finally, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19–20). The body is important in Christian teaching, dead or alive, because it was uniquely designed to give expression to the image of God in man.

Christian Burial- Burial Symbolizes the Hope of Resurrection. As Paul taught, the very body that is sown perishable is raised an imperishable body (1 Cor. 15:42). This is best symbolized by burial, for it anticipates the final preservation of the body in the resurrection. The image presented of the dead being asleep (1 Thes. 4:13–18) is also preserved through burial. The Christian has escaped the judgment by fire presented in the Bible (Rev. 20:14). Cremation is the wrong picture to remind believers of salvation in the body by resurrection (cf. Rom. 8:11). On the other hand, cremation better symbolizes pantheism, which in its Eastern forms is usually associated with a salvation from the body by escaping the cycle of reincarnation.¹⁷

Christian Burial- Early Christian Practice Supports Burial. Believers in the New Testament such as Ananias, Sapphira, and Stephen, were not cremated (Acts 5:6, 10; 8:1–2). To be sure, burial was a Jewish practice, and they were Jews, but they did not hesitate to reject Jewish practices that were contrary to their beliefs, such as circumcision (e.g., Gal. 2–3) and keeping the Jewish law (2 Cor. 3; Heb. 7–8). No such rejection of burial, however, is stated in the New Testament. When possible, early Christians were buried and cremation was looked on with great disdain because fire was often used to kill their martyrs.

Christian Burial- Burial Allows Proper Memory of the Dead. Burial or entombment, as Christians practice it, allows for an important part of the Christian belief — respect for and memory of the dead in the body in which we knew them. Regardless of whether the body is present or absent in a service, the knowledge of their burial puts their life in proper perspective as God made it and will one day restore it. In this way, Christian truth can be properly proclaimed. It is particularly important to promote such doctrines as creation and redemption at such a crucial time as ours in which these defining doctrines of Christianity are being compromised.

Christian Burial- How Important Is Burial versus Cremation? The answer to the question of the importance of this debate depends on what importance one places on a proper practice of what one believes, especially appropriate symbols. In fact, only if one rejects important Christian truths does cremation make sense. This is precisely the position of liberal Christians, and it is a reason why cremation finds wider acceptance in their congregations. Yet Christianity is not left intact after such doctrines as the bodily resurrection are discarded or ignored (Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 15:16, 17). To reject symbolism is to say the thing it symbolizes is not important. An attack on the symbol of burial and the anticipated resurrection of the body is an attack on important Christian doctrines. It is analogous to burning a U.S. flag, which is a symbol of our country. To burn the flag is to attack the country it symbolizes. Likewise, to burn the body is to attack the person — and the God who created man in His image (Gen. 1:27; 2:7). Furthermore, it denies the resurrection in a symbolic way by pronouncing death final.

Of course, there are circumstances where burial is not possible. In those cases, we must do the next best thing we can do to preserve the original intent. In the Old Testament when a Jew could not keep the Feast of Passover on the first month because he was contaminated, he was commanded to keep it on the second month (Num. 9:6–13). He was not to neglect doing it altogether. Likewise, even when cremation is called for because of bacterial or viral contamination, it should be done with regret and respect. For example, the ashes should be preserved, not cast to the wind or sea.

Christian Burial- A FINAL THOUGHT

From the Christian perspective, burial is the pattern used in Scripture and has been historically followed by the church. Of course, it should be pointed out that cremation is no hindrance to the act, or event, of the resurrection. God, in His omnipotence, is certainly able, if He so chooses, to collect every atom and molecule, no matter where it is found in the universe, and reconstruct our same bodies in a glorified state. It does not follow from this, however, that cremation is an acceptable general practice. Whereas burial is an important practice and symbol in Scripture, cremation is a poor symbol of scriptural truth. While cremation is not an intrinsic evil, it nonetheless symbolically vitiates some important biblical truths. In this sense, cremation is a hindrance to the promotion of resurrection truth and should not be a regular practice of Christians. We thus conclude that all Christians should practice Christian burial unless extraordinary circumstances do not permit it.

Some people argue that morality is the result of blind evolutionary forces rather than an omnipotent Creator. This view is flawed because (1) it assumes a morality that transcends evolutionary “morality,” (2) it cannot explain motive and intent, (3) it denies rather than explains morality, and (4) it cannot account for the “oughtness” of morality. Given the existence of morality as well as the nature of moral claims, the existence of God seems to be the best explanation for morality.

Bongo is a chimp. He’s being punished by other members of the chimpanzee band for not sharing his bananas. Bongo is selfish. Bad Bongo. Moral rule: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish

One of the strongest evidences for the existence of God is man’s unique moral nature. C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity that there is a persistent moral law that represents the ethical foundation of all human cultures. This, he says, is evidence for the God who is the author of the moral law.

Not everyone agrees. Scenarios like that of Bongo the chimp have been offered as evidence for rudimentary forms of morality among animals, especially the “higher” primates like chimpanzees. This suggests that morality in humans is not unique and can be explained by the natural process of evolution without appeal to a divine Lawgiver.

This view of morality is one of the conclusions of the new science of evolutionary psychology. Its adherents advance a simple premise: The mind, just like every part of the physical body, is a product of evolution. Everything about human personality — marital relationships, parental love, friendships, dynamics among siblings, social climbing, even office politics — can be explained by the forces of neo-Darwinian evolution.

Even the moral threads that make up the fabric of society are said to be the product of natural selection. Morality can be reduced to chemical relationships in the genes chosen by different evolutionary needs in the physical environment. Love and hate; feelings of guilt and remorse; gratitude and envy; even the virtues of kindness, faithfulness, and self-control can all be explained mechanistically through the cause and effect of chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

One notable example of this challenge to the transcendent nature of morality comes from the book The Moral Animal — Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright.

Evolution and Ethics- HOW MORALS EVOLVE

In his popular defense of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins acknowledges that the biological world looks designed, but he asserts that this appearance is deceiving. The appearance of intelligent order is really the result of the workings of natural selection.

Robert Wright holds the same view regarding man’s psychological features, including morality. The strongest evidence for this analysis seems to be the explanatory power of the evolutionary paradigm when dealing with moral conduct. The argument rests on the nature of natural selection itself: “If within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.”¹

Wright argues from effect back to cause, asking what is the simplest, most elegant solution adequate to explain the effects we see. To Wright, the evolutionary explanation is “obvious.” In order to survive, animals must adapt to changing conditions. Through the process of natural selection, naturalistic forces “choose” certain behavior patterns that allow the species to continue to exist. We call those patterns “morality.”

Evolution and Ethics- Wired for Morality

An evolutionary explanation for all moral conduct requires that such conduct be genetically determined. Morality rides on the genes, as it were, and one generation passes on favorable morality to the next. Wright sees a genetic connection with a whole range of emotional capabilities. He talks about “genes inclining a male to love his offspring”² and romantic love that was not only invented by evolution, but corrupted by it.³ Consider these comments:

If a woman’s “fidelity gene” (or her “infidelity gene”) shapes her behavior in a way that helps get copies of itself into future generations in large numbers, then that gene will by definition flourish.⁴ (emphasis in original)

Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes — cold, hard equations composed of simple variables.⁵

Some mothers have a genetic predisposition to love their children, so the story goes, and this genetic predisposition to be loving is favored by natural selection. Consequently, there are more women who are “good” mothers.

What is the evidence, though, that moral virtues are genetic — a random combination of molecules? Is the fundamental difference between a Mother Theresa and an Adolph Hitler their chromosomal makeup? If so, then how could we ever praise Mother Theresa? How could a man like Hitler be truly guilty?

Wright offers no empirical evidence for his thesis. He seems to assume that moral qualities are in the genes because he must; his paradigm will not work otherwise.

Evolution and Ethics- WRIGHT’S DOUBLE STANDARD

In a public relations piece promoting his book, Robert Wright says, “My hope is that people will use the knowledge [in this book] not only to improve their lives — as a source of ‘self-help’ — but as cause to treat other people more decently” (emphasis added).

This statement captures a major flaw in Wright’s analysis. His entire thesis is that chance evolution exhausts what it means to be moral. He sees morality as descriptive, a mere function of the environment selecting patterns of behavior that assist and benefit the growth and survival of the species. Yet he frequently lapses, unconsciously making reference to a morality that seems to transcend nature.

Take this comment as an example: “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse“⁶ (emphases mine). Wright reflects on the moral equipment randomly given to us by nature, and then bemoans our immoral use of it with words like “tragic,” “pathetic,” and “misuse.”

He writes, “Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal.”⁷

It’s almost as if there are two categories of morality, nature’s morality and a transcendent standard used to judge nature’s morality. But where did this transcendent standard come from? It’s precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining. If transcendent morality judges the “morality” that evolution is responsible for, then it can’t itself be accounted for by evolution.

Evolution and Ethics- Social Darwinism

Like many evolutionists, Wright recoils from social Darwinism. “To say that something is ‘natural’ is not to say that it is good. There is no reason to adopt natural selection’s ‘values’ as our own.”⁸ Just because nature exploits the weak, he argues, it doesn’t mean we are morally obliged to do so. “Natural selection’s indifference to the suffering of the weak is not something we need to emulate. Nor should we care whether murder, robbery, and rape are in some sense ‘natural.’ It is for us to decide how abhorrent we find such things and how hard we want to fight them.”⁹

Wright argues that the reductio ad absurdum argument from social Darwinism is flawed. Though life in an unregulated state of nature is, as 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”¹⁰ we’re not required to take the “survival of the fittest” as a moral guideline.

Evolutionists may be right when they argue that we’re not compelled to adopt the morality of evolution. The threat of social Darwinism, though, is not that society is required to adopt the law of the jungle, but that it is allowed to do so. The exploitation of the weak by the strong is morally benign according to this view.

What Darwinists cannot do is give us a reason why we ought not simply copy nature and destroy those who are weak, unpleasant, costly, or just plain boring. If all moral options are legitimate, then it is legitimate for the strong to rule the weak. No moral restraints protect the weak, because moral restraints simply do not exist.

Evolution and Ethics- MONKEY MORALITY

Recent studies have attempted to show that animals exhibit rudimentary moral behavior. In one case, a group of chimpanzees “punished” one “selfish” member of their band by withholding food from it. Apparently, the moral rule was this: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.

Evolution and Ethics- Conduct, Motive, and Intent

There are several problems with this assessment. First of all, drawing conclusions about animal morality simply from external behavior reduces morality to conduct. Why should we accept that morality is exhaustively described by behavior? True morality entails nonbehavioral elements, too, like intent and motive.

One can’t infer actual moral obligations from the mere fact of a chimp’s conduct. One might talk descriptively about a chimp’s behavior, but no conclusion about morality follows from this. One can observe that chimps in community share food, and when they do they survive better. But one can’t conclude from this that Bongo, the chimp, ought to share his bananas, and if he doesn’t, then he’s immoral because he hasn’t contributed to the survival of his community.

Further, in fixing blame, we distinguish between an act done by accident and the very same act done on purpose. The behavior is the same, but the intent is different. We don’t usually blame people for accidents, such as in the case of the boy who didn’t intend to trip the old lady.

We also give attention to the issue of motive. We withhold blame even if the youngster tripped the old lady on purpose if the motive is acceptable: he tripped her to keep her out of a sniper’s line of fire.

Motive and intent can therefore not be determined simply by looking at behavior. In fact, some “good” behavior — giving to the poor, for example — might turn out to be tainted if the motive and intent are wrong, as when a man gives to be thought well of but has no real concern for the recipient. Indeed, it seems one can be immoral without any behavior at all, as when a woman plots an evil deed but never has the opportunity to carry it out.

Morality informs behavior, judging it either good or bad, but it’s not identical to behavior. Morality is something deeper than habitual patterns of physical interaction. Therefore, one can’t draw conclusions about animal morality simply based on what one observes in their conduct.

Evolution and Ethics- Morality: Explained or Denied?

This leads us to the second problem, which runs much deeper. When morality is reduced to patterns of behavior chosen by natural selection for its survival value, then morality is not explained; it’s denied. Wright admits as much: “The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truth. Truly a shameless ploy”¹¹ (emphasis added).

Evolutionists such as Wright are ultimately forced to admit that what we think is a “higher truth” turns out to be a “shameless ploy,” a description of animal behavior conditioned by the environment for survival. We’ve given that conduct a label, they argue. We call it morality. But there is no real right and wrong.

Does Bongo, the chimp, actually exhibit genuine moral behavior? Does he understand the difference between right and wrong? Can he make principled choices to do what’s right? Is he worthy of blame and punishment for doing wrong? Of course not, Wright says. Bongo merely does in a primitive way what humans do in a more sophisticated way. We respond according to our genetic conditioning, a program “designed” by millions of years of evolution.

The evolutionary approach is not an explanation of morality; it’s a denial of morality. It explains why we think moral truths exist when, in fact, they don’t.

Evolution and Ethics- Why Be a Good Boy Tomorrow?

This observation uncovers the most serious objection to the idea that evolution is adequate to explain morality. There is one question that can never be answered by any evolutionary assessment of ethics. The question is this: Why ought I be moral tomorrow?

One of the distinctives of morality is its “oughtness,” its moral incumbency. Assessments of mere behavior, however, are descriptive only. Since morality is essentially prescriptive (telling what should be the case, as opposed to what is the case) and since all evolutionary assessments of moral behavior are descriptive, then evolution cannot account for the most important thing that needs to be explained: morality’s “oughtness.”

The question that needs to be answered is: “Why shouldn’t the chimp (or a human being, for that matter) be selfish?” The evolutionary answer might be that when we’re selfish, we hurt the group. That answer, though, presumes another moral value: We ought to be concerned about the welfare of the group. Why should that concern us? Answer: If the group doesn’t survive, then the species doesn’t survive. But why should I care about the survival of the species?

Here’s the problem. All of these responses meant to explain morality ultimately depend on some prior moral notion to hold them together. It’s going to be impossible to explain, on an evolutionary view of things, why I should not be selfish, or steal, or rape, or even kill tomorrow without smuggling morality into the answer.

The evolutionary explanation disembowels morality, reducing it to mere descriptions of conduct. The best the Darwinist explanation can do — if it succeeds at all — is explain past behavior. It cannot inform future behavior. The essence of morality, though, is not description, but prescription.

Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can’t be their source.

Evolution does not explain morality. Bongo is not a bad chimp, he’s just a chimp. No moral rules apply to him. Eat the banana, Bongo.

Evolution and Ethics- WHERE DO MORALS COME FROM?

Darwinists opt for an evolutionary explanation for morality without sufficient justification. In order to make their naturalistic explanation work, “morality” must reside in the genes. “Good” — that is, beneficial — tendencies can then be chosen by natural selection. Nature, through the mechanics of genetic chemistry, cultivates behaviors we call morality.

This creates two problems. First, evolution doesn’t explain what it’s meant to explain. It can only account for preprogrammed behavior, which doesn’t qualify as morality. Moral choices, by their nature, are made by free agents — not dictated by internal mechanics.

Second, the Darwinist explanation reduces morality to mere descriptions of behavior. But the morality that evolution needs to account for entails much more than conduct. Minimally, it involves motive and intent as well. Both are nonphysical elements that can’t, even in principle, evolve in a Darwinian sense.

Where do morals come from? Why do they seem to apply only to human beings? Are they the product of chance? What world view makes sense out of morality?

We can answer these questions simply by reflecting on the nature of moral rules. By making observations about the effect — morality — we can then ask what are its characteristics and what might cause it.

Evolution and Ethics- Four Observations about Morality

The first thing we observe about moral rules is that, although they exist, they are not physical and don’t have physical properties. We won’t bump into them in the dark. They don’t extend into space. They have no weight. They have no chemical characteristics. Instead, they are immaterial entities we discover not through the aid of our five senses, but by the process of thought, introspection, and reflection.

This is a profound realization. We have, with a high degree of certainty, stumbled on something real. Yet it’s something that can’t be proven empirically or described in terms of scientific laws. From this we learn that there’s more to the world than just the physical universe. If nonphysical things — like moral rules — truly exist, then materialism as a world view is false.

Many other realities seem to populate this invisible world, such as propositions, numbers, and the laws of logic. Values such as happiness, friendship, and faithfulness exist, too, along with meanings and language. There may even be persons — souls, angels, and other immaterial beings.

It becomes clear that some things really exist that science has no access to, even in principle. Some realities are not governed by scientific laws. Science, therefore, is not the only discipline that gives us true information about the world. It follows, then, that naturalism as a world view is also false.

Our discovery of moral rules forces us to expand our understanding of the nature of reality. It opens our minds to the existence of a host of new entities that populate the world in the invisible realm.

The second thing we observe is that moral rules are a kind of communication. They are propositions — intelligent statements conveyed from one mind to another. The propositions take the form of imperatives, or commands. A command only makes sense when there are two minds involved, one giving the command and one receiving it.

We notice a third fact when we reflect on moral rules. They have a force we can actually feel prior to any behavior. This is called the incumbency of moral rules, the oughtness of morality we considered earlier. It appeals to our will, compelling us to act in a certain way, though we may disregard its force and choose not to obey.

Fourth and finally, we feel a deep discomfort when we violate clear and weighty moral rules; an ethical pain makes us aware that we have done something wrong and deserve punishment. This sense of guilt carries with it not just this uncomfortable awareness, but also the dread of having to answer for our deed. Distraction and denial may temporarily numb the pain, but it never disappears entirely.

Evolution and Ethics- Narrowing Our Options

These four observations provide us with a foundation from which to answer the question, “Where do morals come from?” We need only determine the possible options and then ask which option best accounts for our observations.

Faced with a limited number of options, we must choose something. When the full range of choices is clear, rejection of one means acceptance of another. At this point our discussion becomes personal, because the ultimate answer to our question has serious ramifications for the way we live our lives. We may be tempted to abandon careful thinking when we are forced to confront conclusions that make us uncomfortable.

Our options are limited to three. One: Morality is simply an illusion. Two: Moral rules exist but are mere accidents, the product of chance. Three: Moral rules are not accidents but are the product of divine intelligence. Which option makes most sense given our four observations about morality?

Some argue that morals simply don’t exist. They are nothing but illusions, useful fictions that help us live in harmony. This is the evolutionist’s answer we’ve already found seriously wanting.

Some take the second route. They admit that although objective moral laws must exist, they are just accidents. We discover them as part of the furniture of the universe, so to speak, but they have no explanation, nor do we need one.

This won’t do for a good reason: Moral rules without grounds or justification need not be obeyed. An example may help to illustrate. One evening in the middle of a Scrabble game, one notices the phrase “do not go” formed in the random spray of letter tiles on the table. Is this a command that ought to be obeyed? Of course not. It’s just a random collection of letters.

Commands are communications between two minds. Chance might conceivably create the appearance of a moral rule, but there can be no command if no one is speaking. Since this phrase is accidental, it can be safely ignored.

Even if a person is behind the communication, one could easily ignore the command if it isn’t backed by an appropriate authority. If I stood at an intersection and put my hand up, cars might stop voluntarily, but they’d have no duty to respond. They could ignore me without fear of punishment because I have no authority to direct traffic. But if a police officer replaced me, traffic would come to a halt.

What is the difference between the officer and me? My authority is not grounded. It doesn’t rest on anything solid. Police, in contrast, represent the government, so their authority is justified. They are legitimate representatives of the state, appointed to carry out its will.

It’s clear then that a law has moral force when an appropriate authority, operating within its legitimate jurisdiction, issues it. If people violate such a law, they could be punished. The same is true of moral laws. These laws have force if a proper authority stands behind them. Moral rules that appear by chance, in contrast, have no such grounding.

Our second option fails because it doesn’t explain the three important features we observed about morality. Chance morality fails to be a communication between two minds and therefore cannot be imperative. It doesn’t account for the incumbency of moral rules, nor does it make sense of the guilt and expectation of punishment one feels when those rules are violated.

Evolution and Ethics- One Remaining Answer

Only one answer remains as a possible source of morality. If morality is neither an illusion nor the product of chance, then morals must be the result of an intelligent lawgiver. Universal moral laws that have genuine incumbency require an author whose proper domain is the universe, who has the moral authority to enforce His laws, and ultimately the power to mete out perfect justice.

What best explains the existence of morality? A personal God whose character provides an absolute standard of goodness. An impersonal force won’t do because a moral rule encompasses a proposition and a command; both are features of minds. Ethicist Richard Taylor explains: “A duty is something that is owed. . . . but something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as a duty in isolation. . . . The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone.”¹²

Only one option makes sense of each observation about morality: a personal God who created both the material and the immaterial realms. Moral laws suggest a moral lawgiver, one who communicates His desires through His laws. He expects His imperatives to be obeyed.

The existence of God also explains the incumbency of morality. Ethics are adequately grounded because God is a proper authority for moral rules. The universe is His possession because He created it. He has the right to rule over it; His great power undergirds that right

Ethical pain — true moral guilt — also makes sense with this explanation. Morals are not disembodied principles but personal commands, and so a violation is not just a broken rule but an offense against the person who made the rule. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard pointed out that a person could not have anything on his conscience if God did not exist.

Some attempt to argue that they don’t need God to have morality. They can live a moral life even though they don’t believe in a divine being. But no one denies that an atheist can behave in a way one might call moral. The real question is, “Why ought he?” Trappist monk Thomas Merton put it this way: “In the name of whom or what do you ask me to behave? Why should I go to the inconvenience of denying myself the satisfactions I desire in the name of some standard that exists only in your imagination? Why should I worship the fictions that you have imposed on me in the name of nothing?”¹³

A moral atheist is like someone sitting down to dinner who doesn’t believe in farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cooks. She believes the food just appears, with no explanation and no sufficient cause. This is silly. Either her meal is an illusion, or someone provided it. In the same way, if morals really exist, as we have argued, then some cause adequate to explain the effect must account for them. God is the most reasonable solution.

Evolution and Ethics- The Final Verdict

Atheistic evolution cannot make sense of morality. Neither can monistic (“all is One”) Eastern religions. If duality is an illusion, as they hold, then the distinction between good and evil is ultimately rendered meaningless. Something like the Judeo-Christian idea of God must be true to account for moral laws adequately.

Morality grounded in God explains our hunger for justice. We desire for a day of final reckoning when all wrongs are made right, when innocent suffering is finally redeemed, and when the guilty are punished and the righteous rewarded.

This also explains our own personal sense of dread. We feel guilty because we are guilty. We know deep down that we have offended a morally perfect Being who has the legitimate authority to punish us. We also know we will have to answer for our own crimes against God.

In the end, we must accept one of two alternatives. Either we live in a universe in which morality is a meaningless concept and thus we are forever condemned to silence regarding any moral issue, or moral rules exist and we’re beholden to a moral God who holds us accountable to his law. There are no other choices. As Francis Schaeffer put it, “These are not probability answers; [these] are the only answers. It is this or nothing.”¹⁴ If one is certainly false, the other is certainly true.¹⁵

Gregory Koukl is president of Stand to Reason, an apologetics organization (www. str.org), and the coauthor with Francis J. Beckwith of Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Baker, 1998).

NOTES

¹Robert Wright, The Moral Animal — Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 23.²Ibid., 58.³Ibid., 59.⁴Ibid., 56.⁵Ibid., 88.⁶Ibid., 13.⁷Ibid., 377.⁸Ibid., 31.⁹Ibid., 102.¹⁰Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, edited with introduction and notes by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 76.¹¹Wright, 212.¹²Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83-84.¹³Quoted in Phillip Yancy, “The Other Great Commission,” Christianity Today, 7 October 1996, 136.¹⁴Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, from The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, vol. 1(Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 303.¹⁵This article is adapted from the forthcoming book, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1998). It can be ordered online at www.str.org.

The Miracle of Life- CHANCE DOESN’T HAVE A CHANCE

The real miracle of life is how so many people could stand for such nonsense in the twentieth century. First, how could the protozoa be the first form of primitive life if there were already organisms such as bacteria in existence? Molecular biology has demonstrated empirically that bacteria are incredibly complex. In the words of Michael Denton, “Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”³³

Furthermore, far from being primitive, the protozoa that were thought to be simple in Darwin’s day have been shown by science to be enormously complex. Molecular biology has demonstrated that there is no such thing as a “primitive” cell. To quote Denton again, “No living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.”³⁴ Finally, as Coppedge documents, giving evolutionists every possible concession, postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary, and speeding up the rate of bonding a trillion times: “The probability of a single protein³⁵ molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10¹⁶¹ using all atoms on earth and allowing all the time since the world began…..For a minimum set of the required 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life, the probability is 1 in ^10119,879. It would take 10^119,841 years on the average to get a set of such proteins. That is 10^119,831 times the assumed age of the earth and is a figure with 119, 831 zeroes.”³⁶

To provide a perspective on how enormous a one followed by a hundred and sixty one zeros is, Coppedge uses the illustration of an amoeba (a microscopic one-celled animal) that sets out to move the entire universe (including every person, the earth, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, millions of other galaxies, etc.) over the width of one universe, atom by atom, at the slowest possible speed. (The universe is 30 billion light-years in diameter — to calculate the number of miles multiply 30 billion by 5.9 trillion.) The amoeba is going to move one angstrom unit (the width of a hydrogen atom — the smallest known atom) every 15 billion years (the supposed age of the universe). Obviously the amoeba would have to move zillions of times before the naked eye could detect that it had moved at all.

At this rate the amoeba travels 30 billion light years and puts an atom down one universe over. It then travels back at the same rate of speed and takes another atom from your body and moves it one universe over. Once it has moved you over, it moves over the next person until it has moved over all five billion or so people on planet earth. It then moves over all the houses and cars, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the millions of other galaxies that exist in the known universe.

In the time that it took to do all that, we would not get remotely close to forming one protein molecule by random chance.³⁷ If, however, a protein molecule is eventually formed by chance, forming the second one would be infinitely more difficult. As you can see, the science of statistical probability demonstrates conclusively that forming a protein molecule by random processes is not merely improbable but impossible. And forming a living cell is beyond illustration. As King David poignantly put it, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1).

Finally, it should be noted that philosophical naturalism — the world view undergirding evolutionism — can provide only three explanations for the existence of the universe in which we live. One: The universe is merely an illusion. This notion carries little weight in an age of scientific enlightenment. As has been aptly put, “Even the full-blown solipsist looks both ways before crossing the street.” Two: The universe sprang from nothing. This proposition flies in the face of both the law of cause and effect and the law of energy conservation. It has been well said, there simply are no free lunches. The conditions that hold true in this universe prevent any possibility of matter springing out of nothing.³⁸ Three: The universe eternally existed. This hypothesis is devastated by the law of entropy that predicates that a universe which has eternally existed would have died an “eternity ago” of a heat-loss death.³⁹

There is, however, one other possibility. It is found in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In an age of empirical science, as in any age, nothing could be more certain, clear, or correct.

One of the primary dilemmas of naturalistic evolutionary theory is that it forces scientists to conclude that the cosmos in all of its complexity was created by chance. As biologist Jacques Monod, a Nobel prize winner, puts it, “Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, [is] at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution” (emphasis in original).² Noted theologian R. C. Sproul explains, for the materialist chance is the “magic wand to make not only rabbits but entire universes appear out of nothing.”³ Sproul also warns that “if chance exists in any size, shape, or form, God cannot exist. The two are mutually exclusive. If chance existed, it would destroy God’s sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, he is not God. If he is not God, he simply is not. If chance is, God is not. If God is, chance is not” (emphasis in original).⁴

THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE

Chance in this sense refers to that which happens without cause.⁵ Thus, chance implies the absence of both a design and a designer. Reflect for a moment on the absurdity of such a notion. Imagine suggesting that Christopher Wren had nothing whatsoever to do with the design of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Imagine asserting that the majestic Messiah composed itself apart from Handel. Or imagine claiming that the Last Supper painted itself without Leonardo da Vinci.

Now consider an even more egregious and absurd assertion — that an eye, an egg, and the earth, each in its vast complexity, are merely functions of random chance.⁶ Ironically, Darwin himself found it hard to accept the notion that the eye could be the product of blind evolutionary chance, conceding that the intricacies of the human eye gave him “cold shudders.”⁷

The Complexity of Life- The Eye

In his landmark publication, The Origin of Species, Darwin avowed, “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree possible.”⁸ He called this dilemma the problem of “organs of extreme perfection and complication.”⁹

Consider for a moment the incredible complexity of the human eye. It consists of a ball with a lens on one side and a light sensitive retina made up of rods and cones inside the other. The lens itself has a sturdy protective covering called a cornea and sits over an iris designed to protect the eye from excessive light. The eye contains a fantastic watery substance that is replaced every four hours, while tear glands continuously flush the outside clean. In addition, an eyelid sweeps secretions over the cornea to keep it moist, and eyelashes protect it from dust.¹⁰

It is one thing to stretch credulity by suggesting that the complexities of the eye evolved by chance; it is quite another to surmise that the eye could have evolved in concert with myriad other coordinated functions. As a case in point, extraordinarily tuned muscles surround the eye for precision motility and shape the lens for the function of focus.¹¹

Additionally, consider the fact that as you read this article, a vast number of impulses are traveling from your eyes through millions of nerve fibers that transmit information to a complex “computer center” in the brain called the visual cortex. Linking the visual information from the eyes to motor centers in the brain is crucial in coordinating a vast number of bodily and mental functions that are part and parcel to the very process of daily living. Without the coordinated development of the eye and the brain in a synergistic fashion the isolated developments themselves become meaningless and counterproductive.¹²

In Darwin’s Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe points out that what happens when a photon of light hits a human eye was beyond nineteenth-century science. Thus, to Darwin, vision was an unopened black box.¹³ In the twentieth century, however, the black box of vision has been opened, and it is no longer enough to consider the anatomical structure of the eye. We now know that “each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes” that demand explanation.¹⁴

Behe goes on to demonstrate that one cannot explain the origin of vision without first accounting for the origin of the enormously complex system of molecular mechanisms that make it work.¹⁵ Phillip Johnson, author of Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, has aptly summarized Darwin’s dilemma regarding the eye: “Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.”¹⁶

The Complexity of Life- The Egg

In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe further notes that there are black boxes within black boxes. As science advances, more and more of these black boxes are being opened, revealing an “unanticipated Lilliputian world” of enormous complexity that has pushed the theory of evolution beyond the breaking point.¹⁷ Evolution cannot account for the astonishingly complex synchronization process needed for, say, the shell of a developing egg to form from the calcium that is stored inside the bones of a bird’s body.¹⁸ This shell not only provides a protective covering for the egg but also provides a source of calcium for the developing embryo and a membrane through which it can breathe.¹⁹

Furthermore, evolution cannot account for the complex synchronization process needed to produce life from a single fertilized human egg. “The tapestry of life begins with a single thread.”²⁰ Through a process of incredible precision, a microscopic egg in one human being is fertilized by a sperm cell from another. This process not only marks the beginning of a new life but also marks the genetic future of that life.²¹ A single fertilized egg (zygote), the size of a pinhead, contains chemical instructions that would fill more than 500,000 printed pages.²² The genetic information contained in this “encyclopedia” determines the potential physical aspect of the developing human from height to hair color. In time, the fertilized egg divides into the 30 trillion cells that make up the human body, including 12 billion brain cells, which form over 120 trillion connections.²³

In Darwin’s day, a human egg was thought to be quite simple — for all practical purposes, little more than a microscopic blob of gelatin. Today we know that a fertilized egg is among the most organized, complex structures in the universe. In an age of scientific enlightenment, it is incredible to think that people are willing to maintain that something so vastly complex arose by chance. As Dr. James Coppedge, an expert on the science of statistical probability, puts it, “Chance requires ten billion tries on the average in order to count to ten.”²⁴

In an experiment using 10 similar coins numbered one through 10, chance will succeed on the average only once in 10 billion attempts to get the number one followed in order by all the rest. Coppedge explains that if a person could draw and record one coin every five seconds day and night, it would still take over 1,500 years for chance, on average, to succeed just once in counting to 10.²⁵ He goes on to demonstrate the difference intelligence makes by documenting that a child can do in minutes what chance would take a millennium to do. “Chance doesn’t have a chance when compared to the intelligent purpose of even a child.”²⁶ Even more revealing is the fact that a child playing with the party game Scrabble can easily spell the phrase, “the theory of evolution,” while chance requires five million times the assumed age of the earth to accomplish the same feat.²⁷

The Complexity of Life- Earth

Like an egg or an eye, the earth is a masterpiece of precision and design that could not have come into existence by chance. Astronaut Guy Gardner, who has seen the earth from the perspective of the moon, points out that “the more we learn and see about our universe the more we come to realize that the most ideally suited place for life within the entire solar system is the planet we call home.”²⁸ King David said it best:

The heavens declare the glory of God;the skies proclaim the work of his hands.Day after day they pour forth speech;night after night they display knowledge.There is no speech or languagewhere their voice is not heard.Their voice goes out into all the earth,their words to the ends of the world. (Ps. 19:1-4)

Let’s take a few minutes to explore the miracles that demonstrate life on earth, which a benevolent Creator designed and which could not be directed by blind chance. First, consider plain old tap water. The solid state of most substances is denser than their liquid state, but the opposite is true for H20, which explains why ice floats rather than sinks. If water were like virtually any other liquid, it would freeze from the bottom up rather than from the top down, killing aquatic life, destroying the oxygen supply, and making earth uninhabitable.²⁹ Furthermore, ocean tides, which are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, play a crucial role in our survival. If the moon were significantly larger, thereby increasing its gravitational pull, devastating tidal waves would submerge large areas of land. If the moon were smaller, tidal motion would cease and the oceans would stagnate and die.³⁰ Finally, consider the ideal temperatures on planet earth — not duplicated on any other known planet in the universe. If we were closer to the sun, we would fry. If we were farther away, we would freeze.³¹

From the tap water to the tides and temperatures that we so easily take for granted, the earth is an unparalleled planetary masterpiece. Like Handel’s Messiah or da Vinci’s Last Supper, it should never be carelessly devalued as the result of blind evolutionary processes. Yet, tragically, in an age of high technology and supposed scientific enlightenment, many are doing just that. Consider the following introduction to “The Miracle of Life,” an Emmy-award-winning PBS NOVA broadcast on evolution:

Four and a half billion years ago, the young planet Earth was a mass of cosmic dust and particles. It was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began….The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms….From these one-celled organisms evolved all life on earth. (emphases added)³²