Excerpts from By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress, 2004)

(Note: These excerpts do not include the charts, timelines, definition boxes, or sidebars. There are 78 pages of references.)

Page2 The Beginning: Why, the Very Idea of a Beginning Is Radical!

Before the 18th century, most people believed that the universe and time began when God created it. But from the 18th century until the mid-20th century, many scientists doubted that the universe had a beginning. The idea of a beginning to the universe was considered a religious belief. Typically, scientists accepted an eternal universe, of never-ending binding and unbinding of atoms over an infinity of space and time. Listen carefully to the scripts of some old science fiction movies, and you will still hear the echoes from the eternal void.

Then, in 1927, an obscure Belgian priest and cosmologist, Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), an early follower of Einstein, proposed that the universe popped into existence between 10 and 20 billion years ago, beginning with a single point.

Lemaître’s theory was revolutionary. It overturned a century and a half of science. Initially, many scientists did not like the theory much, and some, like Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), said so. His comment was: “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning to the present order is repugnant to me. I should like to find a genuine loophole.” To most scientists of the day, it sounded too much like religion. Thus, Lemaître, a priest, was in the unusual position of trying to focus attention on the science that supported his idea, while many atheists were more concerned with the religious implications. This odd turnabout continues to the present day, as we will see.

Page 4 Why “Modern” Culture Is on the Way Out

It may not be apparent at first glance, but the concept of the universe as an endless lottery of meaningless events shaped the “modern” culture of our society, from about the 1850s on. Modern culture, better known as “modernism,” was the culture of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. We humans were believed to be just an accident, living on a mediocre planet, circling a suburban star, in an irrelevantly repetitious universe. For culture, that means, among other things, “no God,” “no meaning,” “no purpose,” and “no rules!” Not surprisingly, we have heard all these themes sounded every day form every source. They have driven the key questions that dominate modern society, such as

■ “Can we find meaning in a world without God?” (God’s absence is taken for granted because there is no need for a creator in an eternal universe.)

■ “How can a human life be important?” (If we just happen to exist, then we aren’t important.)

■ “What kind of morality should we have, if any, if God does not exist?” (A random universe can offer no moral guidance, and it is presumptuous to assume that we can really decide between right and wrong, or determine truth.)

Henri Fréderic Amiel expressed this modern view clearly when he wrote, in 1868:

The universe is but a kaleidoscope which turns within the mind of the so-called thinking being, who is himself a curiosity without a cause, an accident conscious of the great accident around him, and who amuses himself with it so long as the phenomenon of his vision lasts.

And, picking up the theme well over a century later, in 1986, zoologist Richard Dawkins wrote:

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Yet, even as art, literature, and science were churning out endless riffs based on these propositions, a critical change was taking hold in science.

Page 10 What’s Intelligent Design (ID) Theory?

ID theory started to take shape in the 1970s, as an outcome of information theory. Faced with the enormous complexity of living things—for example, the fact that complete instructions for creating DNA would be as long as the DNA code itself—ID theorists argue that it makes more sense to assume that the information is a language. In other words, it is a product of design. This is the complete opposite of Darwinism.

Reintroducing design would, of course, change the way many problems in science are perceived. The ID scientist does not try to figure out how things happened by chance, but rather looks for intentional patterns that suggest general laws of development. The laws that prevail in one situation may shed light on another.

Darwinists view ID as heresy because they are committed to a “no design model” and would prefer to continue looking for solutions to the mystery of life via law and chance.

Isn’t This Just Religion Versus No Religion All Over Again?

No. All parties to the debates have a religious stance of some type. Many atheists who are Darwinists actively promote a “no-God religion,” which they think is better suited to the times we live in than traditional religions. Many other Darwinists are religious people, sometimes devout Christians. One example is the American biochemist Ken Miller, a practicing Roman Catholic who is the author of Finding Darwin’s God. During my research, I also ran across a number of atheists or agnostics who are non-Darwinists or post-Darwinists.

In the end, the conflict that this book describes is between those who think that Darwinism can survive the collapse of modernism—a collapse that has already taken out Marx and Freud—and those who think that, on the contrary, design belongs as much in biology as in cosmology.

Page 21 Our Dreary Little Suburb?

In the meantime, another related change was taking place in the way scientists viewed the universe. In the 20th century, it was fashionable to view it as blind, pitiless, and indifferent, and to describe earth as a mediocre planet in a suburban galaxy, far from the center of things. This was one of the most popular themes in art and literature of the period. As cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said:

We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred billion galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.

This was also a key theme of Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996). In this book, Sagan muses on the idea that the universe is favorable to us, saying:

You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species over all that time—with us excitedly chattering, “The Universe is created for us! We’re at the center! Everything pays homage to us!”—and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots.

Sagan’s alien is, of course, really Sagan himself, an atheist giving his own view. In the next paragraph, he says that his judgment is too harsh. Indeed, it is. But not just because the judgment isn’t polite. Sagan is in fact simply wrong. There is good reason to think that the cosmos is fine-tuned to allow for our existence. Ironically, Fred Hoyle, also an atheist, was one of the first people to say that Sagan’s mediocrity theme is just coffee-house nonsense (see Chapter 3). Later in this chapter, we will look at some of the many reasons why, in reality, we inhabit a favored universe—and a rare earth.

Page 38 Methodological and Metaphysical Naturalism

In Chapter 1, we noted an odd fact. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins are permitted to make a public case for atheism out of Darwinism, but the science community becomes very uncomfortable when anyone makes a public case for theism based on the anthropic coincidences. Why is that?

The most widely used way of thinking in science today is called methodological naturalism. The scientist assumes that an intelligent designer—most would say God—plays no role. For example, faced with the fine-tuning of the universe that seems to enable our existence, Tegmark assumes that his model of four levels of infinite universes, where every possible thing happens, is a more reasonable explanation than an intelligent designer, precisely because his model leaves an intelligent designer out of the picture. The hailstorm of universes does not recommend itself on any other important ground.

Many people argue that methodological naturalism is necessary because scientists who followed it have made valuable discoveries. That is true, but it is also true that scientists who did not follow it—Isaac Newton, who assumed that God was the designer, for example—have also made valuable discoveries.

Scientists like ways of thinking that produce simple models. However, today’s God-free model of the universe is not simple at all, in the way that Lucretius’s eternal universe and Hoyle’s Steady State universe were simple. For one thing, far too many universes, of which we can know nothing, are needed to get away from God. This complexity does not trouble Tegmark, who says: “Perhaps we will gradually get used to the weird ways of our cosmos and find its strangeness to be part of its charm.”

Well, charm is a matter of taste. There is nothing to choose between infinite, unresearchable universes and the assumption that this universe is fine-tuned for life because God intended it to be so. Tegmark’s interpretations of quantum mechanics amount to an act of faith. Every faith imposes some costs on the believer.

Page 53 “Life is mainly information”

When we ask about the origin of life, what question are we trying to answer?

Darwin was a materialist; that is, he saw life as made up only of material bodies. He wanted to know how such a body could form, with input only from the laws of nature acting on chance events.

In reality, life is mainly information. Our physical lives are not the sum of the chemicals that make up our bodies; they are also the staggering amount of information that governs the operation of the billions of molecular machines that manage all the chemicals. When we die, the chemicals are all still there, but the system of information that holds them together is lost.

Perhaps the question we should ask is not how does life form by chance, but what is the source of all the information that life requires? Answering this question won’t be easy, because information is not measured in the same type of units as matter or energy. It is a real quantity but not a material one.

Page 65 Did Most Religious People Oppose Darwinism?

Through most of the history of Western culture, science and religion were not in conflict. In the 17th century, when Newton published his laws of gravity, both science and religion participated in a common project called “natural philosophy.” Only later, in the 18th century, did some atheistic philosophers see an advantage in pitting one against the other. However, theirs was not the common opinion, and many members of the clergy were enthusiastic amateur scientists. By the late 19th century, however, some academics created a great deal of publicity for a supposed warfare between science and religion. Their works have affected modern education. A popular version of Darwinism suited it admirably.

Page 90 Darwinism Becomes a Religion

For many 20th-century philosophers and scientists, Darwin’s theory became far more than a description of the method by which life forms change over time. It became more like a Church of Darwin, as well as a source of folk beliefs. It is, in fact, the creation story of atheism, and it is often defended in the same way as a religious truth.

For example, prominent philosopher of science Daniel Dennett has come to believe that evolution is not only a good idea but the best idea anyone ever had. Can this be right? After all, we have experienced the benefits of many good ideas in recent millennia—the wheel, human rights and the scientific method come quickly to mind—so why is Darwin’s idea supposed to be the single best? Here is Dennett’s explanation:

In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea.

Why is it a dangerous idea? Evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma provides some insight into that:

By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialist theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism—of much of science, in short—that has since been the stage of most Western thought.

Scientists who believe all this are following a modernist religion, and they are often very hostile to traditional religions. For example, James Watson and Francis Crick, co-discoverers of the double helix structure of our DNA in 1953, took the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of their discovery to lash out at them.

Page 103 “more Darwinist than Darwin”

Richard Dawkins, a zoologist, author, and lecturer, is probably the British media’s favorite scientist, a Carl Sagan equivalent who is good for pithy sound bites. In 1995, a chair was created for him at Oxford University, as Professor of Public Understanding of Science, endowed by American Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi. More than that, the elegant Oxbridge don is a cultural icon. As one of his editors explains:

If you’re an intelligent reader, and you read certain literary novels that everybody has to read, along with seeing Tarantino movies, then reading Richard Dawkins has become part of your cultural baggage.”

He is also the best-known promoter of “ultra-Darwinism”—more Darwinist than Darwin.

Page 110 Gould’s “much bigger sin”

No doubt some colleagues were envious of his success with the public. Some were put off by the fact that his ideas were influenced by Marxism. And certainly, he scored no points with Richard Dawkins when he described Dawkins’s selfish gene theory as “a hyper-Darwinian idea that I regard as a logically flawed and basically foolish caricature of Darwin’s genuinely radical intent.”

A much bigger sin was his vocal criticism of evolutionary psychology, which most of his colleagues supported. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain the whole of human life, even disbelief in Darwinism, as a category of Darwinism. Even an insider cannot expect to get away unscathed, after deliberately undermining a project as ambitious as that.

However, the biggest problem Gould presented was probably this: He made it legitimate to criticize Darwin, or anyway, to criticize Darwinism. He argued that those who forbid any criticism are guilty of “Darwinian fundamentalism,” of pushing their line “with almost theological fervor.” The mud sticks, too. Reading Darwinist literature, one cannot help noticing the way in which each writer stresses his or her own orthodoxy and total fidelity to Darwin, much like bishops discussing the encyclicals of a pope.

Page 139 John Baumgardner: Young Earth and High Tech

Geophysicist John Baumgardner has been hailed by U.S. News and World Report (1997) as a world-class expert in the design of computer models for planetary catastrophes. He has worked as a technical staff member at Los Alamos (New Mexico) National Laboratory since 1984.

Baumgardner went to graduate school specifically to get professional credentials in order to study the impact of the worldwide flood of Noah, which he believes is responsible for present-day landforms and fossils. As part of his PhD research, he developed Terra, a three-D computer model of earth’s interior, funded by NASA. NASA wanted models for catastrophic events, in order to study both earth and other planets. Venus, for example, is thought to have been recently resurfaced in some sort of catastrophe.

Like Wise, Baumgardner is upfront about his religious convictions, telling the media: “I would say my primary goal in my scientific career is a defense of God’s Word.” His views have never been a problem at Los Alamos, where he is part of Megaviews Forum, a group of mostly Christian scientists. Some of these scientists are young earthers, and he says that there are also young earthers at NASA.

Both Baumgardner and Wise have benefited from a gradually growing acceptance that catastrophes can explain changes in the planet’s history. For example, it is now widely believed that an asteroid impact, rather than natural selection, killed off the dinosaurs.

Because they believe what they do, creationists like Baumgardner and Wise research ideas that no one else would research, and sometimes produce valuable information. In many enterprises, starting from a non-mainstream position can have that effect.

Page 162 “clearly there is a need for new directions”

Essentially, any science that appears to deny the power of a life-changing experience is itself likely to be denied outright. The conservative Christians of the United States respond not by banishing science but by seeking a different science, one that can accommodate what they know from experience to be true. The conflict between the fundamentalist and the metaphysical naturalist on a subject like this cannot be settled by judgments in law courts or statements from mainstream science bodies. It is hard to see how it can be settled at all.

Michael Ruse, for example, compares Darwinism to young earth (scientific) creationism, and says that

even if Scientific Creationism were totally successful in making its case as science, it would not yield a scientific explanation of origins. Rather, at most, it could prove that science shows that there can be no scientific explanation of origins. The Creationists believe the world started miraculously. But miracles lie outside of science, which by definition deals only with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law. Hence, Creationism can aspire only to a Pyrrhic victory: that the evidence of nature and the methodology of science show that no natural laws explain the ultimate past.

In other words, it wouldn’t matter to Ruse if Baumgardner and the RATE group turn out to be right about the age of the earth. What they are doing cannot be science in principle, even if it is correct.

So where are we? A science that cannot accommodate evolution denies evidence that most scientists are convinced is both real and vital. But a science that cannot accommodate the power of the Bible to change lives denies the experience of many millions of people. It may be too much to hope for an answer to this dilemma. But there is clearly a need for new directions.

Page 172 Design and Information Theory

The modern case for design is based on information theory. Information theory provides a tool for distinguishing between mere order, which can occur without design, and complex order, which probably cannot.

Life differs from non-life by the vast amounts of information it embodies. Every cell, for example, is full of tiny machines made of molecules, performing a variety of complex tasks. The molecules of life contrast sharply with the regular, simple, and repetitive patterns seen in non-living substances such as salt crystals. How does all this information organize and develop itself?

A complex form of information that we experience in our daily lives, such as a book, is created by an intelligence—ours. Rather than search for a means by which complex information would somehow organize itself by chance, Thaxton, Bradley, and their colleagues decided to assume that the information was not organized by chance, but by a designing intelligence. Apart from that, they would follow the evidence wherever it led.

Page 182 Are Christian Evolutionists Just “Soulful Atheists”?

Johnson was really the first ID advocate to address the central role that the philosophy of naturalism plays in the favor granted to Darwinism by the establishment, despite its meager showing on actual evidence, and the central role that Darwinism plays in return in propping up naturalism. As a result, he angered not only atheistic scientists, but also the many Christian scientists who have made their peace with naturalistic evolution, and have no use for intelligent design concepts.

Calling these Christian Darwinists “theistic naturalists,” Johnson challenged them to show how their position differs from soulful atheism, adding:

I do not think that the mind can serve two masters, and I am confident that whenever the attempt is made, naturalism in the end will be the true master and theism will have to abide by its dictates. If the blind watchmaker thesis is true, then naturalism deserves to rule, but I am addressing those who think the thesis is false, or at least are willing to consider the possibility that it may be false.

He also came to Michael Behe’s defense:

Behe says at one point that he is not a creationist, at least if that term means someone who is concerned about supporting the creation account in the Bible. He also does not challenge evolution, if that term means “common ancestry.” Then why isn’t Behe classified as a theistic evolutionist? He would be if that term meant a theorist who does not rely on the Bible or other religious authority, and accepts gradual development of organisms over long periods of time, but who sees the need for some guiding (i.e., designing) intelligence.

But, says Johnson, that is not what theistic evolutionism really means ...

Page 184 Behe Changes the Focus of the Debate

Most past arguments about evolution have depended on data from long extinct organisms. Sometimes the data that survive apparently support Darwinism (the whale series, for example) and sometimes they don’t (the Cambrian explosion). No one knows what difference the lost evidence would make.

In contrast, as a biochemist, Behe argues from existing organisms. If we are talking about existing organisms, then either we have all the information or we can get it through present-day research. Increasingly, academic contentions focus on biochemistry or artificial life computer programs, not on the vagaries of what has been preserved from the ruins of half a billion years of prehistory.

The reason Behe called his book Darwin’s Black Box is that, in Darwin’s day, as the anecdote about Huxley’s “half-alive” creature shows, cells were a black box, an object whose inner workings are unknown. No one had much idea what went on inside a cell until biochemistry came into its own after World War II.

Page 185 Intelligent Design vs. Methodological Naturalism

As we have already seen, the fact that some features of life forms may be irreducibly complex does not necessarily mean that a miracle was required to produce them. It means that design is a real feature of the universe, one that cannot be duplicated by the effects of natural law and chance. Design may well be frontloaded into the universe, so that no miracles are necessary—the concept of intelligent design includes that possibility.

Page 206 Following the Evidence

In response to all these issues, the battle cry for intelligent design has become “follow the evidence wherever it leads!” The background to this slogan is, of course, the fact that the science establishment generally follows the evidence that supports Darwinism because Darwinism upholds a widely held philosophy of methodological or metaphysical naturalism. Many simply do not “see” any other evidence. They can’t, because their methodological naturalism (MN) glasses filter it out.

In the end, intelligent design will stand or fall on whether it provides new insights in science. All of the objections above are the objections of an old system against a new one. Of course, many other objections to intelligent design theory have been put forward. Objections of a religious character are addressed in Chapter 15. Some further scientific objections will be addressed in Chapter 16, which discusses the current state of ID research.

Page 227 “Becoming a Disciplined Science”

In October 2002, information theorist Bill Dembski, who has replaced Phillip Johnson as the point man for intelligent design, delivered a blunt talk to the RAPID Conference (Research and Progress in Intelligent Design) at Biola University in La Mirada, California. In “Becoming a Disciplined Science: Prospects, Pitfalls, and a Reality Check for ID,” he demanded that the participants take a good hard look in the mirror—and he warned that it wouldn’t be pretty.

He began by quoting a well-known intelligent design sympathizer—who had begun to lose interest—as saying:

Too much stuff from the ID camp is repetitive, imprecise and immodest in its claims, and otherwise very unsatisfactory. The “debate” is mostly going around in circles. The real work needs to go forward. There is a tremendous ferment right now in the “evo/devo” field, for instance. Some bright postdocs sympathetic to ID (and yes, I know how hard a time they would have institutionally at many places) should plunge right into the thick of that. Maybe they are at this very moment: I hope so!

If impassioned and widely publicized school board hearings are any indicator, ID has been a victim of its own success with a broad public. Many people wanted to be liberated—and to liberate their local science curricula—from the suffocating spirit of Darwinism. They chose the forum that they could at least try to deal with: huge, contentious meetings. These well-meaning people impede the progress of the science they love by making ID disproportionately well known to the public, in relation to its actual accomplishments. They give more ammunition to its institutional enemies than to its advocates.

However, in Dembski’s view, the problem with the seekers after liberation is not that they pursue school board politics. The problem is that they treat intelligent design as a tool. They do not ask if it is true. In his view, everything depends on whether it is true:

Page 237 Afterword

While writing this book, I tried to listen to everyone, a habit learned over three decades of journalism. Usually, I do not know what to think when starting the research for a story. This one was no exception. However, after two years, I have formed some opinions.

...

I am probably best described as a post-Darwinian. I believe that evolution happened but that Darwinism is an inadequate explanation. The reason is simple: Darwin did not anticipate the complexity of the problems, so his theory, in whatever rebrand it now appears, is not likely the solution.