• Icons of Evolution, Run Time: 75 minutes
• Unlocking The Mystery Of Life, Run Time: 65 minutes
• The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe, Run Time: 60 minutes
• Metamorphosis, Run Time: 64 minutes

Icons of Evolution. Explore the fascinating new conflict over evolution in the classroom-a conflict based on science, not religion. Learn about the controversy that engulfs one town when a teacher actually tries to tell students that some scientists disagree with Darwin. From the Galapagos Islands to China, Icons of Evolution will take you on a fast-paced, fascinating journey into one of the most controversial issues in today’s public arena.

Unlocking The Mystery Of Life. Unlocking the Mystery of Life is the story of contemporary scientists who are advancing a powerful, but controversial, idea—the theory of “intelligent design.” It is a theory based upon compelling biochemical evidence. Through state-of-the-art computer animation, em>Unlocking the Mystery of Life transports you into the interior of the living cell to explore systems and machines that bear the unmistakable hallmarks of design.

The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe. The conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it strangely well suited for viewing and analyzing the universe. But is this correlation between the existence of complex life and our ability to make scientific discoveries simply a coincidence or the result of blind chance? Or does it point to a deeper explanation?

Metamorphosis. Throughout history, butterflies have fascinated artists and philosophers, scientists and schoolchildren with their profound mystery and beauty. In Metamorphosis you will explore their remarkable world as few ever have before. Spectacular photography, computer animation and magnetic resonance imaging open once hidden doors to every stage of a butterfly’s life-cycle. From an egg the size of a pinhead to a magnificent flying insect. It is a transformation so incredible biologists have called it “butterfly magic.”

Stephen C. Meyer earned B.S. degrees in physics and earth science from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University) in 1981. He worked as a geophysicist for an oil company from 1981-1985, then obtained M. Phil. (1987) and Ph.D. (1991) degrees in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. After an extensive academic career, Meyer became Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, in 1996.

Signature in the Cell follows in the same great tradition as its predecessors. In Darwin’s Black Box Michael Behe developed the concept of “irreducible complexity,” the idea that some biological structures are too complex to have evolved by chance. This book was followed by The Design Inference, William Dembski’s complex mathematical demonstration that specified complexity requires ID. Both these books were based on solid science, and both were widely criticized by the scientific community.

Signature considers the information content of DNA and the improbability that this complex molecule could arise by chance. Drawing on disciplines such as biochemistry, molecular biology, information theory, probability and statistics, and computer science, Meyer makes a compelling argument for design. He looks at what he calls “the DNA enigma” to rule out other possibilities for the origin of life and to support his position on ID.

One very valuable section of the book is the discussion of possible origin-of-life scenarios. Meyer reviews the extensive literature on the subject, from the famous Miller-Urey paper in 1953 to current “RNA world” theories. By pointing out significant shortcomings in these ideas, the foundation is laid for the alternative of ID.

The broad scope of the work is both a benefit and a drawback. Signature offers a comprehensive survey of relevant material from a number of disciplines. This broad-based effort is also somewhat of a drawback because the reader needs some familiarity with the science in order to follow the arguments. However, it is well worth the effort in order to grasp the picture that Meyer so deftly paints.

One of the many enjoyable aspects of the book is the way the story unfolds. The material is not covered with just a “here are the facts” approach. Meyer shares his journey with us and relates his thoughts, experiences, and ideas as he develops his premises and conclusions. We share the questions, the challenges, the “aha” moments when things start to fall into place. We read the names of many famous scientists, not as dry footnotes of who did what, but in conversation.

In addition to the compelling science component, Meyer offers a rigorous defense of the ID movement. He is very conversant with the major objections to ID and answers them convincingly. The accusation that ID is a “science stopper” is dealt with effectively with his analysis of what science is and is not. In addition, Meyer lists a number of testable predictions (one of the requirements for any scientific theory) that come out of ID research.

Many evolutionists argue that ID is nothing more than “stealth creationism,” a not-so-subtle attempt to introduce the Genesis creation story into schools. What the critics fail to realize, as Meyer points out, is that there are ID supporters in many world religions and some who profess no religion. Yes, there are theological and metaphysical implications for ID, just as there are for Darwinism or any number of currently controversial scientific issues. Just because these implications exist should not exclude the theory from the scientific arena.

Signature in the Cell provides two valuable contributions to the debate about life. First, the “DNA enigma” directly challenges the reigning scientific paradigm as to how life in all its complexity originated and is replicated. Second, the book contains a very useful overview of the basic concepts of intelligent design, the arguments offered by ID opponents, and the responses to those arguments. The book deserves to be on the bookshelf of anyone even remotely interested in this issue.

—Donald E Calbreath

Donald F. Calbreath, PhD, retired in 2006 after twenty-two years on the chemistry faculty at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. His research interests involve the relationships between brain neurochemistry and human behavior.

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.

Some years ago an anonymous well-wisher sent Richard Dawkins a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth.” The T-shirt inspired Dawkins with the title for his latest book, which he describes as his “personal summary of the evidence that the ‘theory’ of evolution is actually a fact—as incontrovertible a fact as any in science” (p. vii).

Dawkins is a good writer, and his book is quite entertaining, so it is appropriate that he named it after the famous Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. Let’s imagine The Greatest Show on Earth as a three-ring circus being performed before an audience of farm families somewhere in the Midwest.

The first ring holds the menagerie. In the center, a towering Great Dane peers down at a tiny Chihuahua. Ringmaster Dawkins announces to the audience that these dogs prove beyond any conceivable doubt that all living things are descended from a common ancestor, modified by the amazing, death-defying power of natural selection. “Anybody can understand the principle of evolution by artificial selection,” he explains (28). And “artificial selection is not just an analogy for natural selection. Artificial selection constitutes a true experimental—as opposed to observational—test of the hypothesis that natural selection causes evolutionary change” (66).

The kids in the audience stare wide-eyed at the two dogs. The grown-ups, however, shake their heads in disbelief. As farmers, they know that dogs remain dogs no matter how long you breed them. Evolution, indeed!

The first ring also has a cage full of birds, bees, and moths that are marvelously adapted to extract nectar from nearby flowers—and in the process spread their pollen. Another cage holds flightless birds and flying mammals, and a large tank holds brightly colored guppies and marine iguanas. The ringmaster explains how these also prove that “our common ancestry with porcupines and pomegranates” is a fact “beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt” (8, 16).

Some in the crowd start to boo, but an African antelope suddenly charges out, pursued by a lioness that drags it down and makes a meal of it. The ringmaster announces that the “arms race between the gene pools of the two species is run in evolutionary time” (color pp. 30-31) and this explains how they evolved from a common ancestor. The audience is too startled to react.

The second ring contains the magicians and jugglers. In the center is Michigan State University biologist Richard Lenski, wearing a white lab coat and holding some liquid-filled flasks. The ringmaster announces that Lenski’s experiments “are distressing to creationists, and for a very good reason. They are a beautiful demonstration of evolution in action, something it is hard to laugh off even when your motivation to do so is very strong” (117). Lenski’s experiments show that artificial selection over tens of thousands of generations can cause E. coli bacteria to change their metabolism slightly. The grownups in the audience wonder what this proves, since the bacteria in Lenski’s flasks are still E. coli.

Though the ringmaster uses “creationist” repeatedly, he never defines it. Usually he seems to mean people who believe the Earth was created just a few thousand years ago. In the Lenski act, however, the unnamed and unseen “creationist” is not a young-Earther, but Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe. Behe has published scientific critiques of Lenski’s work, and the ringmaster defends Lenski against them, but he never acknowledges Behe’s existence. Even the kids in the audience groan at this cheap disappearing act; they know that a good magician would at least show them the victim before making him vanish.

Off to one side is Norwegian paleontologist Jørn Hurum, whose act was added to the program at the last minute. Hurum holds up a hat, out of which he pulls a cat-sized fossil named Darwinius masillae, nicknamed “Ida.” Ida looks like a lemur, but Hurum calls it the oldest link to human beings, the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail, the long-awaited confirmation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The ringmaster hastens to point out that Darwin’s theory was “confirmed long ago,” though he says that the fossil “will certainly shed some light on our ancestry” (color p. 9).

The announcement of Ida in a scientific journal in May 2009 (just before Dawkins’s circus hit the road) was accompanied by a huge fanfare that included a press conference and a TV special. By October 2009, however, Ida had been discredited. Scientists realized it was not part of the human lineage; in fact, it may have left no descendants at all. Adding Hurum’s act to The Greatest Show on Earth was an embarrassing mistake.

Also in the second ring stands a juggler tossing three sets of bones in the air: a human hand, a bat’s wing, and a small horse’s foreleg. The ringmaster explains, “The human hand and the bat hand are obviously—no sane person could deny it—two versions of the same thing” (288). Although the horse’s leg is not as similar as those two, it also retains “unmistakable traces of the original” (291). This “pattern of resemblances among the skeletons of modern animals is exactly the pattern we should expect if they are all descended from a common ancestor” (295).

“Are there any alternative explanations?” asks the ringmaster. “Well, just barely! The hierarchical pattern of resemblances was spotted by creationists in pre-Darwinian times, and they did have a non-evolutionary explanation—an embarrassingly far-fetched one. Patterns of resemblance, in their view, reflected themes in the mind of the designer” (296). The ringmaster ridicules that explanation, stating that “there is a strong element of special pleading and wishful thinking” (297) in it.

Many people in the audience shake their heads, since the idea that such similarities “reflect themes in the mind of the designer” makes perfect sense to them. A few people also know that the “creationists in pre-Darwinian times” were not young-Earth creationists, but included world-renowned anatomist Richard Owen. Beyond mocking the design alternative, however, the ringmaster offers no justification for his claim that similarities in the juggled bones were inherited from a common ancestor.

The third ring contains the clowns. One with a white face and big, bulging eyes on the back of his head is running around backwards. The ringmaster explains that he is making fun of the vertebrate retina, which is “badly designed” because it is “back to front” in the sense that the light detecting rods and cones face away from the pupil. According to the ring master, the vertebrate eye is a “glaring example of imperfection,” a “catastrophic blunder” (353, 355) that proves our eyes were not designed, but evolved.

The audience howls with laughter. The kids laugh at the clown, while the grownups laugh at the ringmaster. They know that the hawks preying on their chickens have extra ordinary eyesight. A few in the audience who are medically trained also know that the rods and cones in our retinas face away from the light because they require a blood-rich tissue to nourish them. If the retina were constructed the way the ringmaster imagined it should be, the blood-rich tissue would be in front of the rods and cones, blocking the light.

Another whiteface clown dances around the ring waving a miniature tree with pictures of various animals at the tips of its branches. The ringmaster explains that this is Darwin’s Tree of Life, which shows how all living things spring from a common ancestor (the trunk). Evolutionary biologists used to rely on anatomical comparisons to construct such trees, but now they compare DNA sequences as well. “What turns this into extremely powerful evidence for evolution,” the ringmaster proclaims, “is that you can construct a tree of genetic resemblances separately for each gene in turn, and the important result is that every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life. Once again, this is exactly what you would expect if you were dealing with a true family tree” (321-322), but not what you would expect from a designer.

The kids laugh at the clown. Some grownups laugh, too— at the ringmaster. They have studied enough biology to know that different genes can yield different evolutionary trees; in fact, the same gene can yield different trees when analyzed by different laboratories. As more genes are included, the problem gets worse. A 2005 article in Science reported a study comparing fifty genes in seventeen animal groups and noted that different analyses can produce significantly different trees, each seemingly supported by solid evidence.

Apparently without realizing that many in the audience were laughing at him, the ringmaster introduces one more clown—a hobo like Emmett Kelly, trying to sweep up the light from a spotlight moving across the floor. Projected in the middle of the spot is the word “pseudogene.” The ringmaster explains that pseudogenes “are genes that once did something useful but have now been sidelined and are never transcribed or translated” (332). The ringmaster continues: “What pseudogenes are useful for is embarrassing creationists. It stretches even their creative ingenuity to make up a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene…unless he was deliberately trying to fool us” (332).

While the kids laugh at the clown, the biologically literate grownups get their last laugh of the day at the ringmaster. They know that so-called pseudogenes (like virtually all DNA sequences) are transcribed; even though they may not produce proteins, they perform important biological functions. After the show, some people wonder whether the ringmaster knew he was being funny.

Sadly, no. Dawkins expects The Greatest Show on Earth to be taken seriously. A serious reader, however, would note that the book’s arguments rest on equivocation. Dawkins uses “evolution” to mean things as different as changes within existing species, the origin of species, and the common ancestry of all living things; and he uses “creationism” to mean things as different as young-Earth creationism, pre-Darwinian biology, and Intelligent Design. Dawkins also gets much of his biology wrong: Behe’s critiques of Lenski’s work remain valid; Darwinius masillae tells us nothing about human ancestry; vertebrate retinas are not “catastrophic blunders,” but remark ably efficient organs of sight; gene comparisons are not converging on a single tree of life, but are plagued with inconsistencies; and so-called pseudogenes are not useless junk, but biologically functional. In a book that claims to present the “evidence for evolution,” these are serious defects, and they deserve serious criticism.

Maybe it’s kinder just to laugh.

Jonathan Wells has a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in theology from Yale University. He is the author of Icons of Evolution (Regnery, 2000) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), and the coauthor (with William Dembski) of The Design of Life (Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008). He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, Seattle, Washington.

Plinius was famous for letters, which have been rightly dubbed literary classics; however, he is equally famous—and you don’t find as much written about this in the literature—for the interrogation, torture, and murder of Christians. By his own account, he extracted information from two church deaconesses, and he did it by torture. His manner was to ask three times whether or not you were a follower of Jesus Christ, and if your answer was “yes,” he wrote, “I then ordered them to be taken away to be executed.” Now if a person responded by denying the faith, Plinius had them repeat an invocation to the gods, offer rites with wine and incense before the statue of Trajan, and then utter imprecations at the same time against the very name of Christus. For Plinius the end game was simply this: It was the reclamation of multitudes from the worship of Jesus Christ to the worship of Caesar.

Plinius was confident that through intimidation and threat of death, the tide of Christianity could be stemmed. In the end of course, he was wrong. He was wrong for one singular reason: the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The early Christians had seen the resurrected Christ, and their lives were radically impacted. They no longer lived for prosperity, for the favor of Caesar, but they lived for eternal verities. For this reason, they turned an empire upside-down, for out of the bowels of the Roman Empire would come the greatest civilization in the history of the planet. A civilization founded on the DNA of biblical manuscripts. A civilization that recognized Christ had been raised from the dead.

All of this is but a prologue to something that I want to put into your hands, something that allows you with passion and purpose to communicate the truth of resurrection.

Christ rose from the dead. Now that’s not just a historical reality, though we’re going to talk about how it is a historical reality, but it is something that has implications for you right now. If it is indeed true that Christ rose from the dead, it means you too will rise. If it is not true, it means your faith is useless and so is this broadcast. It all hinges on whether or not Christ rose from the dead.

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Recently I’ve been reading through the prophets, specifically Isaiah. In Isaiah 35:5-6 it says, “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the dead unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.” Isaiah here is very clearly depicting the final eschaton, the final state and what it will be like. This of course begs the question, will there be a resurrection in which we have babies and old people or will we be resurrected at the same age we died?

      Answering this question does require a bit of sanctified speculation. First of all, when God created Adam and Eve in Eden, He created them with apparent age. Also, Jesus apparently died and resurrected at the prime of His physical development.

       Furthermore, our DNA is programmed in such a way that, at a particular point, we reach optimal development from a functional perspective. For the most part, it appears that we reach this stage somewhere in our twenties or thirties. Prior to that stage, the development of our bodies exceeds the devolution of our bodies. From this point on, the rate of breakdown exceeds the rate of buildup, which eventually leads to physical death. With age, our muscles get shorter, our connective tissues degenerate, our hormone levels decline, our neurological functions break down. All of this is to say that if the blueprints for our gloried bodies are in the DNA, then it would stand to reason that our bodies will be resurrected at the optimal stage of development determined by our DNA. So it stands to reason that when a person dies in faith as an infant or in old age that they will be resurrected physically mature as God originally intended them to be.

      Finally, one thing can be stated with complete certainty: In the resurrection, there will be no deformities. You will be the perfect you, and I will be the perfect me. Peter Kreeft provides a poignant portrayal of how the body, tarnished by the Fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, will be utterly transformed in the resurrection:

      The fall turned things upside down between soul and body. Before the Fall, the body was a transparent window, a totally malleable instrument, a perfectly obedient servant of the soul. The Resurrection restores this relationship. Once the perfected soul is perfectly subject to God, the perfected body can be perfectly subjected to the soul, for the soul’s authority over the body is a delegated and dependent authority…Soul will no longer be frustrated by a semi-independent, recalcitrant body…and body will be a bright ray of light from soul, not an opaque object; it will be more subject, less object, more truly mine, truly me. No more will I crave ecstatic out-of-the-body experiences, for the higher flights of mystic ecstasy will be in this new body.[1]

      We will then have a new body-soul unity for which we long. If we say we want to go to heaven, I think it is incumbent upon on us to know just what heaven will be like.

       For further information on this topic, please see my  new CD or DVD resource Heaven: What is it? All available at our website of www.equip.org