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REEDINGS . . .
Notes on Books by Gerard Reed
May 2004
Number One Hundred Forty-nine ************************************************************************
In 1959, Chicago hosted a Centennial
Celebration marking the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species. Speakers like Sir Julian
Huxley boldly portrayed the Darwinian theory as fully established, and Stanley
Miller’s recent origin-of-life experiment seemed to prove that lifeless
chemicals, properly jolted by electricity, had fused to make amino acids, the
organic building blocks for proteins and thus life. James Watson and Francis Crick had just unraveled the mystery of
DNA, which promised to deliver a fully naturalistic explanation for terrestrial
organisms. Evolution through natural
selection reigned as absolutely in the life sciences as did Marxism in the
U.S.S.R.
Few then would have imagined that, 40 years later, a
vigorous scholarly movement labeled “Intelligent Design” would challenge
Darwinian dogmas and elicit serious attention, including discussions in the New
York Times and the Los Angeles Times and essays in prestigious
journals such as Natural History, the publication of the American Museum
of Natural History. A fine scholarly
overview of this movement is now available in Thomas Woodward’s Doubts about
Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design
(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, c.
2003), a highly readable rendition of his Ph.D. dissertation.
“Murmurs of dissent” from Darwinism
had occasionally rippled the scientific waters, as was evident when the noted
French zoologist Pierre Grasse published L’Evolution du Vivant in 1973
and boldly rejected its core concepts.
The fossil record, he insisted, holds all the evidence we have for life’s ancient history, and it reveals
nothing akin to the “gradualism” basic to Darwin’s theory. Sir Fred Hoyle, a Nobel Prize winner in
physics, evaluating the mathematical probability of life evolving through
chance and necessity, concluded that it was about as possible as a tornado
putting together a Boeing 747 with materials sucked up from a junkyard. Darwinian disciples, such as Stephen Jay
Gould, occasionally admitted this—all the while devising improbable hypotheses
to sustain it.
But such “murmurs” hardly troubled the scientific
community’s entrenched commitment to Darwinism. “Intelligent Design” surfaced in the 1980s, Woodward says, with
the revisionist scientific work of Michael Denton, an agnostic who
declared: “’Neither of the two
fundamental axioms of Darwin’s macroevolutionary theory—the concept of the
continuity of nature . . . and the belief that all the adaptive design of life
has resulted from a blind random process—have been validated by one single
empirical discovery of scientific advance since 1859’” (p. 47, italics
Woodward’s). Indeed, as he concluded Evolution: A Theory in Crisis: “’One might have expected that a theory of
such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have
been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.’” But in fact, “’the Darwinian theory of
evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth
century’” (p. 24).
Denton’s work was soon absorbed by Phillip Johnson,
a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed an
interest in Darwinism fueled by his conviction that neither the evidence nor
the argumentation demonstrate its truth.
It seemed obvious to him that “metaphysical naturalism,” not empirical
data, sustained the evolutionary creed.
Johnson maintains, Woodward says, that “’Darwinism functions as the
central cosmological myth of modern culture—as the centerpiece of a
quasi-religious system that is known to be true a priori, rather than as
a scientific hypothesis that must submit to rigorous testing’” (p. 95). Following Johnson’s wedge in the 1990s
came “the four horsemen” of the Intelligent Design movement who were just
finishing their graduate studies:
Steven Meyer, earning a degree from Cambridge University; William
Dembski and Paul Nelson at the University of Chicago; and Jonathan Wells, at
the University of California, Berkeley.
Linked up through the internet and scholarly conferences, they published
and argued their position in collections of essays such as The Creation
Hypothesis and Mere Creation.
A well-established scholar, Michael Behe, was also
drawn to the movement by his own disillusionment with orthodox Darwinism. As a tenured biochemist at Lehigh
University, he defended Phillip Johnson
in a 1991 letter to the prestigious journal Science. Then, five years later, he tossed one of
two “rhetorical bombs [that] jarred the world of biological science” (p.
153). The first, an article by David
Berlinksi (a Jewish mathematician) in Commentary, launched “a full-scale
attack on the credibility of Darwinian evolution” and then Behe published Darwin’s
Black Box, vividly and persuasively showing that tiny parts of the cell,
like the flagellum, appeared to be “irreducibly complex” and thus
inexplicable in Darwinian categories.
The book was reviewed in more than 100 publications and enjoyed
unexpected sales.
Like Johnson, Behe was influenced by Michael
Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in
Crisis, which dealt him “the greatest intellectual shock of his life” (p.
157). But he was also angered by the
scientific establishment’s deceit in portraying (especially in school
textbooks) macroevolution as demonstrably factual. Rethinking what he knew best, biochemistry, he suspected that
complicated systems, including “blood clotting, the cilium, and intracellular
transport” defied Darwinian explanations.
Subsequent searches of the literature confirmed his suspicion, for he
found therein a “’thundering silence.’
Not one biochemist in the past forty hears had even attempted a testable
explanation for the origin of any of the systems about which he was writing”
(p. 158). Indeed, the intricate design
he observed in tiny cells seemed best understood as a product of Intelligent
Design rather than chance and necessity.
Finally there’s William Dembski, with earned
doctorates in both mathematics and philosophy of science, who brought intensity
and high velocity intelligence to the movement. Establishing his “explanatory filter” as a means whereby one can
differentiate between events that are merely natural and those that are clearly
designed, Dembski roots his presentation in advanced mathematics and
probability theory. In the words of Ron
Koons, an erudite philosopher at the University of Texas, Dembski is the “Isaac
Newton of information theory, and since this is the Age of Information, that
makes Dembski one of the most important thinkers of our time” (p. 178). A torrent of articles and books by Dembski,
addressing both highly scholarly and lay readers, have bolstered the ID
case.
******************************
In 1966, at the age of 14, sitting in a high school
biology class, Lee Strobel embraced atheism, confident that some basic truths
he was learning fully justified his decision.
He took as demonstrable four propositions: 1) life had originated—as Stanley Miller allegedly proved—that
life could accidentally spring from primordial soup; 2) Darwin’s “tree of life”
demonstrated the evolution of everything from a common ancestor; 3) Ernst
Haeckel’s portraits of different embryos showed the similarity of fish, hogs,
rabbits, humans, et al. at the beginning of their development; 4) a “missing
link,” the archaeopteryx fossil—half reptile, half bird—validated the
Darwinian hypothesis. Alas, all those
planks of his childhood atheism, Strobel says—in The Case for a
Creator: A Journalist Investigates
Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, c. 2004)—have been largely
refuted by recent scientific developments.
He—and many others whose atheism seemed justified by science—had based
his worldview on fantasy rather than fact!
And since science should relentlessly seek for truth he wrote this book
to illustrate how some eminent thinkers—loosely aligned in their support for
“Intelligent Design”—find it reasonable to believe in a Creator.
As an experienced journalist, Strobel first
interviewed Jonathan Wells, the author of Icons of Evolution, whose
undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology were earned at U.C.
Berkeley. Responding to a question
concerning the origin of life, Wells noted that “Science magazine said
in 1995 that experts now dismiss [Stanley] Miller’s experiment because ‘the
early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation’” (p. 37). In fact, doing Miller’s experiment with the
chemicals now thought to have constituted early earth’s surface would produce
formaldehyde and cyanide, hardly the building blocks of living organisms! Wells also deconstructed Darwin’s “tree of
life.” Darwin himself admitted that the
fossil record looked nothing like the tree he drew in The Origin of Species,
but he trusted evidence would turn up in time to demonstrate it. In fact, Wells says, fossil finds during the
past 150 years “have turned his tree upside down by showing” that virtually all
major forms of life appeared suddenly in the Cambrian explosion, a five million
year window of time in earth’s five billion year history (p. 43). According to one expert, “the major animal
groups ‘appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus—full
blown and raring to go’” (p. 44).
Rather than a tree, one sees something like a lawn! The fossil record, one Chinese
paleontologist asserts, “’actually stands Darwin’s tree on its head, because
the major groups of animals—instead of coming last, at the top of the tree—come
first, when animals make their first appearance’” (p. 45).
Haeckel’s embryos were Strobel’s next “facts” to
fall! It turns out, Wells says, that
Haeckel forged the drawings that have been endlessly reproduced in biology
textbooks! Though some of his German
colleagues asserted, in the 1860s, that the drawings were false, devout
Darwinians found them helpful illustrations and continued to use them. Eight of ten textbooks on evolutionary
biology currently used by universities contain them! On a popular level, “in 1996, Life magazine described how
human embryos grow ‘something very much like gills,’ which is ‘some of the most
compelling evidence of evolution’” (p. 51).
In fact, Wells says, human embryos have no gills! What looks like gills are simply wrinkles on
the neck of the tiny baby! No less an
authority than Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, late in life, condemned the
fraudulent drawings, labeling them “’the academic equivalent of murder’”—though
he did little for 20 years to expose them.
Finally, the fourth of Strobel’s childhood
certainties, “the archaeopteryx missing link,” collapsed under the
evidence presented by Jonathon Wells.
Allegedly, the archaeopteryx fossil demonstrated the transition
from reptiles to birds, a basic Darwinian assumption. Actually, we now know, it’s not a reptile at all. “’It’s a bird with modern feathers, and
birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways—their breeding
system, their bone structure, their lungs, their distribution of weight and
muscles” (p. 57). It’s a strange
looking extinct bird, to be sure, but it’s purely bird! Even more striking, this bird, so long cited
as proof for the Darwinian theory, appears much earlier in the fossil record
than the alleged reptilian ancestors of birds!
Worse yet are “missing links” such as the archaeoraptor,
featuring the tail of a dinosaur and the forelimbs of a bird. In 1998 National Geographic trumpeted
that this fossil illustrated the evolution of feathered dinosaurs into
birds. Unfortunately, the fossil was a
fraud—someone glued together reptile and bird fossils and sold the artifact for
a tidy profit! Indeed, fake fossils
litter the paleontological marketplace!
Something of the same applies to “Java man,” a primary entry in the World
Book Encyclopedia Strobel religiously read as an adolescent atheist. In truth, the pictures of “Java man” were
imaginative drawings based upon a skullcap, a thigh bone, and three teeth. In fact, the thigh bone doesn’t go with the
skullcap, which seems to be the same as that of modern humans. “In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I
had been led to believe, but he was ‘a true member of the human family.’ This was a fact apparently lost on Time magazine,
which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary
ancestor” (p. 62).
The biological evidence set forth by Jonathan Wells
finds fascinating parallels in physics and astronomy. Allan Rex Sandage—as Edwin Hubble’s protégé, probably the world’s
foremost cosmologist—declared in 1985 that he’d become a Christian, at the age
of 50, because the “Big Bang” defies naturalistic explanations. “It was my science,” Sandage said, “that
drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be
explained by science. It was only
through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence” (p.
70). Similarly, Nobelist Arno Penzias
said: “Astronomy leads us to a unique
event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate
balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and
one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan” (p. 153). Indeed, he noted, “‘The best data we have
are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first
five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole’” (p. 77).
The implications of the Big Bang congealed for
Strobel when he interviewed William Lane Craig, who unpacked the deceptively
profound “Kalam” argument for God’s existence. This involves “three simple steps: ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause’” (p. 98). By contrast, atheists such as Quentin Smith claim: “’the most reasonable belief is that we came
from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing’” (p. 99). Craig, however, cited evidence for each step in the Kalam
position, responded to its critics, and established, to Strobel’s satisfaction,
the validity of taking the Big Bang as a clue to the necessity of positing an
eternal God presiding over the whole finite process of creation.
An interview with Robin Collins revealed the
intricate “fine tuning” of the universe, perfectly suited for life on earth,
and a similar talk with Jay Wesley Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez, authors of
the recently-published The Privileged Planet, demonstrated the amazing
coincidence of factors that makes the earth quite special, if not utterly
unique. The acclaimed John A. O’Keefe,
considered “the godfather of astrogeology,” summed it all up by declaring that
it is mathematically probable that “only one planet in the universe is likely
to bear intelligent life. We know of
one—the Earth—but it is not certain that there are many others, and perhaps
there are no others” (p. 191). Still
more, O’Keefe said: “We are, by
astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures; our
Darwinian claim to have done it all ourselves is as ridiculous and as charming
as a baby’s brave efforts to stand on its own feet and refuse his mother’s
hand. If the universe had not been made
with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances
indicate the universe was created for man to live in” (p. 191).
Turning from the “privileged planet” to the
miniscule cell, Strobel sought out biochemist Michael Behe, whose Darwin’s
Black Box, David Berlinski says “’makes an overwhelming case against
Darwin, on the biochemical level,” arguing with “’great originality, elegance
and intellectual power.’ Added
Berlinsky: ‘No one has done this
before’” (p. 196). Behe explained how
a tiny bacterial flagellum moves, propelled by what one scientist calls “the
most efficient motor in the universe” (p. 205). He also explained the intricate process whereby blood clots to
stop bleeding. Just as a mousetrap
illustrates a “specified complexity” indicating intelligent design, so too do
the extraordinarily more sophisticated marvels of nature.
Equally persuasive of design is the
presence of information in DNA. “Human
DNA,” says George Sim Johnson, “contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia
Britannica. If the full text of the
encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people
would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence”
(p. 219). So where does that
information come from? To Stephen A.
Meyer, this is the critical question.
“If you can’t explain where the information comes from, you haven’t
explained life, because it’s the information that makes the molecules into
something that actually functions” (p. 225).
Given its information content, it’s mathematically improbable that even
a simple protein molecule could have come into being through purely
naturalistic means during the limited time following the Big Bang. And since we cannot escape concluding that
information comes from a mind, we are justifiably inclined to conclude that the
information pervading the cosmos is derived from a Cosmic Mind.
The alternative, the purely
naturalistic view, strikes Strobel as “simply too far-fetched to be credible”
(p. 277). Such a position requires one
“to believe that:
·
Nothing
produces everything
·
Non-life
produces life
·
Randomness
produces fine-tuning
·
Chaos
produces information
·
Unconsciousness
produces consciousness
·
Non-reason
produces reason” (p. 277)
Such
propositions, he concluded, require a great deal of “blind faith” in the
Darwinian hypothesis, taxing reason far beyond that required by Christian
theism. Indeed, we may very well be
entering an era of scientific breakthroughs that restore the powerful union of
faith and reason evident in great scientists of the past such as Sir Isaac
Newton.
Strobel’s strengths lie in his
journalistic skills: he interviews some
of the finest thinkers in the Intelligent Design community (including a few,
such as J. P. Moreland, I’ve not mentioned), helps them clearly explain their
positions in ways ordinary readers can comprehend, and adds personal touches to
enhance the discussions. His own story
provides an interesting context to the presentation, but he never makes himself
its centerpiece. One closes the book
with a profound appreciation for the brilliance of the men interviewed,
supplemented by dozens of quotations from the world’s elite scientists, and a
conviction that one is fully warranted when affirming faith in the Creator.