-Caveat Lector-
Scientists Find Evidence of God
Insight on the News, April 19,1999
by Stephen Goode
Reprinted with permission of Insight
The Darwinist hegemony in the natural sciences may be threatened by a
cutting-edge, revolutionary
movement that sees intelligent design in nature - and a Designer.
Chemist Charles Thaxton was amazed 15 years ago when The Mystery of
Life's Origin, a book he
coauthored on chemical evolution with two other scientists, provoked a
very positive response from
scientists around the country. Thaxton, a visiting assistant professor
at Charles University in Prague,
expected a negative reaction, if indeed the book (which since has come
to be regarded as one of the
opening salvos in what is called the Intelligent Design Movement) even
was so much as noticed.
After all, The Mystery of Life's Origin, which became a best-selling
college text, tentatively
proposed the case for intelligent design in nature and pointed out
serious flaws in Darwinism. Such
views were regarded as unthinkable and most definitely unscientific by
the vast majority of scientists
at the time, not only because Intelligent Design suggested that
evolution wasn't the random, chaotic
process most biologists believed it to be but (even more unacceptably)
indicated the probable
existence of a designer - God, perhaps - who was responsible for the
design. The notion that a
designer might be at work behind nature was a concept no self-respecting
scientist wanted to bring
into the scientific scheme of things.
"I didn't think anyone would accept the book. When we wrote it, it was
like being a lone wolf out
there," Thaxton tells Insight. "Hard-core materialists aren't going to
tolerate intelligence in nature," he
says. "Then I got lots of calls from scientists and
mathematicians who did" - men and women in a variety of scientific
fields who were coming to the
same conclusions that Thaxton had described in The Mystery of Life's
Origin. They (like Thaxton
and his coauthors) daily were coming across data in their laboratories
and scientific pursuits that no
longer could be explained by the standard model of Darwinian evolution.
Such data could be better -
and more scientifically - understood by arguing that certain highly
complex entities in nature - the
DNA molecule, for example - had been designed to do what they do and
hadn't evolved randomly,
by accident, which is how Darwinian evolution says they came about.
William Dembski was one of those who got in touch with Thaxton. Dembski,
a young man with a
Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, a second Ph.D. in
philosophy from the
University of Illinois at Chicago and a master's degree in theology from
Princeton Theological
Seminary, had a strong conviction that Thaxton not only was right but
onto something that was going
to revolutionize the way man looks at nature and the way biologists
approach their field. He wanted
to be part of that revolution.
Dembski recently published his own addition to the ever-growing
Intelligent Design Movement, a
closely argued book that he calls The Design Inference, in which Dembski
(whose impressive list of
degrees led one friend to describe him as "the perpetual student")
brings to bear his knowledge of
symbolic logic and mathematics to argue in favor of design in nature.
Dembski's book is one of the
latest and most impressive contributions that grace Design studies (the
name its adherents like to call
it), which is a new branch of science that has grown increasingly
sophisticated since Thaxton's
contribution 15 years ago.
Between Thaxton's coauthored book and Dembski's very recent
contribution, the Intelligent Design
Movement has traveled quite a distance, and more developments are on the
way, its adherents
promise. Intelligent Design now has its own professional journal,
Origins & Design. Many of its
advocates belong to a think tank, the Center for the Renewal of Science
and Culture at the
Discovery Institute in Seattle, though many of those associated with the
center are located elsewhere:
Dembski, for example, is in Dallas, and Thaxton remains in Prague. And
the movement has its own
magazine for nonscientists, the glossy quarterly Cosmic Pursuit, in
which scientists such as Thaxton
and Dembski present their ideas for the general reader.
What, then, are those ideas? First, they argue that their defense of
Design arises directly out of the
empirical data they have observed as scientists, rather than from any
theological or philosophical
notions they may hold. "Discoveries in mathematics and biology are
making way for Design and a
Designer," says Thaxton. And Michael Behe, a Lehigh University
biochemist who is author of one of
the Intelligent Design Movement's most important texts, Darwin's Black
Box (1996), tells Insight,
"Intelligent Design flows directly out of the data that now are
available."
What makes this claim significant is that it makes Intelligent Design a
phenomenon to be dealt with
and studied scientifically rather than a topic left to religion or other
pursuits. It's a claim that leads
directly to the other principal argument made by Intelligent Design
adherents: that science as it now is
constituted isn't adequate to deal with the discovery of intelligent
design in nature because science is
too closely wed to materialistic and naturalistic interpretations of
what nature is.
This is a very revolutionary claim. What's at the basis of the argument,
says Dembski, is a
controversy over "the nature of nature." Dembski finds naturalistic
science "impoverished" when it
comes to handling intelligent design. How impoverished? Because
materialism and naturalism assume
that natural explanations will suffice to answer every question that
arises in science, and this simply
won't do when it comes to dealing with the phenomenon of Design.
(Indeed, any Intelligent Design
Movement advocate will tell you that understanding how to deal with
design in nature scientifically is
one of the chief problems facing the movement.)
Intelligent Design does not argue any specific theology. "The word
'Designer' doesn't necessarily
mean the God of Genesis," says Thaxton (though it doesn't exclude Him).
"My view is that from the
empirical data we have we cannot make affirmation of a deity. It is the
possibility of a deity that we
arrive at." Thaxton explains that it is a "generic design that we talk
about in Intelligent Design. When
people want to go beyond that, that's where their particular views about
God come in."
What makes the Intelligent Design Movement so revolutionary is that it
goes full force against the
perceived wisdom of science, and particularly biology. Darwinism
pervades every aspect of Western
civilization, Dembski notes. And Darwinists argue that there is no
design in nature, none at all that
would suggest a designer. Everything in nature, say the Darwinists, is
the result of random evolution,
with no design that would suggest direction or planning.
Here is how one of the world's foremost Darwinists, Oxford University's
Richard Dawkins,
described this worldview in his 1995 book, River Out of Eden: A
Darwinian View of Life, a
direct attack on the possibility of design in nature: "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."
The Darwinian position was put in even starker words by Peter Atkins in
his book The Second
Law, which appeared in 1984, the same year that Thaxton and his
coauthors published The
Mystery of Life's Origin: "We are the children of chaos, and the deep
structure of change is decay.
At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos.
Gone is purpose; all that is left
is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply
and dispassionately into the
heart of the universe."
Against this dominant Darwinian view, Thaxton's argument for Intelligent
Design, reduced to simplest
terms, runs like this: The DNA molecule, the basis of life, is a
message, he says. It is information
coded in a double helix. It's not like a message; it is the message. The
molecule itself is an elaborate,
complex design that is a message.
We humans know from experience that, when there's a message, an
intelligence created that
message, Thaxton says. No other explanation will suffice to account for
the existence of the
message. We don't receive letters from a random, undirected source, for
example. Thus the
implication is clear that DNA, a message, was produced by intelligent
design. "We know from
experience that when there is a design, there is a designer."
Behe takes on Darwinism from a different angle. A Ph.D. in biochemistry
from the University of
Pennsylvania, Behe argues that life at its most fundamental is
"irreducibly complex," a phrase he has
added to the Intelligent Design debate. To explain what he means by
irreducibly complex, Behe talks
about a mousetrap, a human construction made up of a base, hammer,
spring and holding bar, each
of which is needed for the mousetrap to work. Without any one of the
aspects, the mousetrap would
not be a mousetrap.
Nature, too, has examples of irreducible complexity - the system in a
cell that targets proteins for
delivery to subcellular compartments, for example. Almost every one of
the components that make
up this system is necessary for the system to work. Without one of the
components, the proteins are
not delivered to their proper destination.
Behe argues that the development of such an elaborate and complex system
in Darwinian
evolutionary terms by one small step after another simply won't do,
because during any step prior to
all the complex parts working together, the system would be
nonfunctional. What is the probability of
all those parts that have to work together starting to work together at
a given moment? Just as the
irreducible complexity of a mousetrap indicates a design that renders
the possibility of its parts
working together, so the irreducible complexity of the cellular
protein-delivery system indicates
design.
Behe likes to quote from Darwin himself to show the importance of
irreducible complexity when it
comes to Darwinian theory. In the Origin of Species Darwin wrote: "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." Behe
believes that the existence of
such a complex organ already has been demonstrated.
It's very important to scientists such as Thaxton, Behe and others in
the Intelligent Design Movement
that their design arguments be recognized as scientific. Indeed Thaxton,
a Christian, spent a great
deal of time asking himself, "Am I outside the bounds of science?" and
finally decided that he wasn't
but adds that it's incumbent upon Intelligent Design adherents that "we
come to a realistic
understanding of what the movement is without destroying the integrity
of science."
Thaxton takes a certain solace in the fact that the contemporary Design
Movement isn't introducing
something new to science. The great physicist Sir Isaac Newton (who died
in 1727), for example,
wrote, "This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets, could
only proceed from the counsel
and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."
Dembski likes to mention the English divine William Paley who published
his Natural Theology in
1802 in which he made his famous argument that if we came upon a watch
in a field, we would
assume that it was made by intelligence because its various parts are
directed toward one aim: the
telling of time. (Paley also had much to say about the complexity of the
mammalian eye, which
seemed to him to indicate design. Darwin, who was equally in awe of the
complexity of the human
eye, concluded that, despite this complexity, the eye could have evolved
small step by small step
over time.)
Behe is optimistic about the future of the Intelligent Design Movement:
"I don't know whether it's
going to be two years or 20, but that's where the data of science is
heading," he says. "Scientists
sense that something's not quite right. There are new ideas we need new
definitions for."
Dembski, whose recent book, The Design Inference, presents in great
detail how the Intelligent
Design argument satisfies logic and probability, likes to compare the
movement's influence on science
to the freedom and democracy movements and their effect on Eastern
Europe. Criticism of
Darwinism now threatens the hegemony of Darwinism, he says, just as the
move toward freedom
upset the Soviet empire.
Dembski emphasizes that the Intelligent Design Movement must prove its
scientific mettle, but he
nonetheless waxes expansive about where Intelligent Design thinking may
lead: "Questions of
morality can seemingly be added." Also possible: "revival of the whole
notion of natural law."
Thaxton, who will chair a seminar on "Detecting Design in Nature" at the
annual gathering of the
American Scientific Affiliation in July, compares the situation
Intelligent Design now is in with where
quantum physics was a century ago. Max Planck, the quantum theorist,
despaired somewhat about
getting his theory accepted by his fellow physicists, Thaxton points
out. He concluded that for his
theory to gain respectability, a whole generation of scientists would
have to die off and be replaced
by younger men and women with more-flexible minds, ready to move in the
direction data took
them, which would be toward the quantum hypothesis. What has to be done
to make Intelligent
Design accepted, he concludes, "is to overcome the inertia of the age."
Where to Read More about the Intelligent Design Movement
At the layman's level the quarterly magazine Cosmic Pursuit offers very
readable essays by, and
interviews with, the Intelligent Design Movement's leading scientists
and mathematicians. Subtitled
"In Pursuit of Answers to Life's Big Questions," Cosmic Pursuit is
published by Day Star Network
in Wheeling, Ill., and is very new. Its second issue (Spring 1998) took
up the subject of "Intelligent
Design: Why Is Science Returning to the Old Way of Explaining Life."
The Intelligent Design Movement's professional journal is Origins &
Design and can be found at
www.arn.org.
William A. Dembski traces the origins of the Intelligent Design Movement
to the 1984 publication of
The Mystery of Life's Origin (Philosophical Library) by Charles Thaxton,
Walter Bradley and
Roger Olsen and Michael Denton's 1986 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
(Adler & Adler),
both of which pointed out flaws in Darwinism and evolutionary theory
from a purely scientific point
of view without reference to theological views on creation (see "A Giant
Totters: Can Darwin
Survive?" Dec. 21, 1992). More recently, Denton published Nature's
Destiny: How the Laws of
Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (Free Press, 1998).
Also essential are three books by Phillip Johnson. One is Darwin on
Trial (InterVarsity, 1991), in
which the author, who teaches law at the University of California,
Berkeley, subjects Darwinism to
the same tests of validity that would be required in a court of law.
>From the same publisher come
Johnson's Reason in the Balance (1995) and Defeating Darwinism by
Opening Minds (1997).
After these books laid the groundwork by outlining the flaws in Darwin's
version of evolution, other
books turned to the question of what evolutionary theory might look like
from the perspective of
design. Among these were Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis' Of Pandas and
People - The Central
Question of Biological Origins (Haughton, 1993) and J.P. Morland's The
Creation Hypothesis:
Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer (InterVarsity, 1994).
The first major and the most influential book in the Design Movement is
Michael Behe's Darwin's
Black Box (Free Press, 1996), which was followed by the important Mere
Creation: Science,
Faith & Intelligent Design (InterVarsity, 1998), a book edited by
Dembski, with contributions
from 20 leading Design Movement scientists, mathematicians, theologians
and philosophers, and
Dembski's very important The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance
Through Small
Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Other books significant to the movement are God and the New Physics by
the Templeton
Prize-winning physicist Paul Davies, Freeman J. Dyson's Disturbing the
Universe (1981) and The
Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1988) by John D. Barrow and Frank J.
Tipler.
Copyright © 1999 New World Communication, Inc. All rights reserved.
International copyright secured.
File Date: 4.29.99
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