I ask the question, “Why is the universe so special?” Now scientists don’t like things to be special; we like things to be general, and our natural anticipation would have been that the universe is just a common or garden specimen of what a universe might be like.

But we’ve come to understand a lot about the history of the universe. We know that our universe started 13.7 billion years ago, and it started extremely simple, just an almost uniformly expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could possibly think about. But a world that started so simple has of course become rich and complex. With you and me, in fact, the most remarkable and complex consequences are its history, at least of which we are aware. The human brain is far and away the most complicated physical system we have ever encountered anywhere in our exploration of the universe.

That fact itself might suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history rather than just one thing after another. But we’ve also come to understand many of the processes by which this rich fruitfulness has come to birth. As we’ve come to understand these, we’ve come to see that though these processes are of course evolving processes, they took long periods of time – the universe was 10 billion years old before any form of life appeared in it, at least as far as we know anyway – and life of our complexity only appeared yesterday.

Nevertheless, the universe is pregnant with life, pregnant with the possibility of life, essentially from the beginning onwards. By which I mean the given laws of nature had to take a very specific, very finely tuned form, if the universe was to have so fruitful a history.

That’s a very remarkable discovery, and let me give you some examples of why we believe that. If you’re going to have a fruitful universe, one of the first things you have to get right is that you have to have the right stars in the universe. The stars are going to have a very important role to play. First of all, you must have some stars that are going to be very long lived, live for billions of years, steadily burning, steadily producing energy which will enable the development of life on one of the encircling planets. We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way very well, and it depends on a delicate balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. The seats on which you are sitting are held together by electromagnetism and in fact you are held together by electromagnetism.

If you alter that balance a little bit in one direction the stars will begin to burn intensely, furiously, just pouring out energy and they will only live a few million years rather than a few billion years. If you move it a little bit in the other direction they will burn so slowly they will be brown stars and they will not produce enough energy to fuel the development of life. So you have to have a very delicate finely tuned balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetic forces in a fruitful universe.

Remember, science takes the laws of nature, takes the given strengths of gravity, the given strength of electromagnetism, uses that to explain processes in the world, how things happen, but it doesn’t explain where those laws of nature come from. They are just brute facts as far as science is concerned.

And the stars have another absolutely indispensible role to play. The stars are the place where the heavier elements essential for life are made in the interior nuclear furnaces. There are many elements that are necessary for life, of which carbon is perhaps the most essential. Carbon is the basis of the long chain molecules, which are the biochemical basis of life. The early universe only makes the simplest elements; it makes hydrogen and helium and it makes no carbon at all. Carbon only begins to be made when the universe, which started uniform, begins to condense and become lumpy and grainy with stars and galaxies. As the stars condense they heat up, nuclear processes begin again in their interiors. And it’s those nuclear processes in the stars that make carbon and the heavier elements. Every atom of carbon in your body was once inside a star. We are people of stardust made in the ashes of dead stars.

And that’s a very beautiful process that takes place in that sort of way. And one of the great triumphs of astrophysics and the second half of the 20th century was to unravel that process. One of the people who did some of the most important work on that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. And they were trying to figure out how to make carbon. They got helium, and if you can make three helium nuclei stick together that will produce carbon, but when you have something as small as a nucleus it is impossible to get three to stick together at one time, they’re just too small.

Ok, so let’s do it step by step. Stick two together gives you berylium. Helium 4 gives you beryllium-8, hope it stays around for a bit, another helium comes along, attaches itself, and bingo, you’ve got carbon-12. That’s the obvious thing to think about but it doesn’t work in the obvious way, and the reason it doesn’t work in the obvious way is that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable. It doesn’t oblige you by staying around long enough to catch that third helium, at least in an ordinary, straightforward way.

But Fred realized that it would be just possible for this to happen if there was a very large enhancement effect, in the trade we call it resonance, occurring in carbon at just the right energy, it has to be the right energy, which would enable that attachment process to catch that third helium much much more quickly that you might have thought, in fact so quickly that some of them would get caught before the beryllium-8 disappeared. It was a very good idea, and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself and he went off to just check in the nuclear data tables of this particular resonance’s energy levels, and it wasn’t in the tables, but he knew it must be there, he’s carbon based life like you and me.

So he rang up some friends in the States, a father and son team who were good experimentalists and he said, “Look, you missed something. There’s a resonance and energy level in carbon that you haven’t spotted, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. I know exactly where this energy has got to be. You go look for it.” And they said, “No, no, we don’t want to do that, we have more interesting things to do.” But Fred was very determined and he bullied them into looking for it and they found it.

Now that’s a wonderful achievement, to predict an energy level in carbon on the basis of how it might have been made in the stars is a fantastic scientific achievement. But it’s more than that. Fred had a lifetime conviction of atheism, realized of course that if the laws of physics had been just a little bit different that resonance wouldn’t have been there, and the possibility of carbon-based life is too significant for it just to be a happy accident in his view, so he says in a Yorkshire accent that is beyond my power to imitate, he said that the universe is a put-up job. Fred didn’t like the word God, and so he said some Intelligent, capital “I” Intelligence, must have monkied with the laws of nature to make carbon production possible. What that could possibly be I don’t know, but the more sensible thing to say is that creation is ordained, that the laws of nature would be such, as to enable the fruitfulness of carbon-based life.

We’ll come back to evaluating that possibility in a minute, but before we do, let me give you two other examples of how specific, how special, our universe has to be for us to be able to be here today to think about. We live in a universe that is immensely big, beyond our powers to imagine really. There are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy in the Milky Way, of which our sun is just a common or garden specimen, and there are about a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable universe, of which our Milky Way is a pretty common or garden specimen. So we live in a world that is unimaginably vast, and sometimes we might feel upset by that and think, “What could be the significance of us who are simply inhabitants of a speck of cosmic dust, as you might say, in this vast, vast universe?”

Nevertheless, if all those stars were not there, we would not be here to be upset at the thought of them. Because there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts, and a universe that is significantly smaller than our universe would not have been able to last the 14 billion years, which is the necessary time to produce beings of our complexity. So that’s another condition of the world that has to be right for human beings, or something like human beings, to be a possibility.

One final example, which is the finest tuning of all: quantum theory suggests that there should be an energy attached to space itself. In quantum theory the vacuum, so called empty space, is not just a void. There are things called vacuum fluctuations which occur in a continual sort of seething mass of things coming into being and going out of being all the time. So while there is nothing there that doesn’t mean there is nothing happening. That may sound strange and paradoxical but believe me that’s what quantum theory implies. And of course these happenings, these fluctuations, generate a certain amount of energy, we call it “zero point energy”, and that energy is spread out over the whole of space. So we expect there to be energy associated with space.

And just recently the astronomers have discovered something called dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe, which is just such an energy associated with space. Well that’s very good, you might say. However, when we estimate, just from thinking about quantum theory, how much energy there should be in space it turns out to be a fantastically large amount, and when we see the amount of energy there actually is per volume in space, it turns out to be very, very small in relation to that expected size. In fact, it turns out to be smaller by a factor of 10^-120. That means by a factor of 1 over 1 followed by 120 zeros. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to see that’s a fantastically small number. So some fantastic cancellation has taken place to turn that big number into the tiny number that we actually observe, and if it hadn’t taken place we wouldn’t be here to observe it because significantly higher energy would simply have blown the whole show apart too fast for anything interesting to happen. That’s the finest tuning that we know in the universe: one part in 10¹²⁰.

So we live in a world that is very remarkably finely tuned, and we have to consider that. And all scientists would agree about what I have been telling you; this is non-contentious. Where the contention comes in is what we might make of that, what is the further significance of it.

In the conclusion to Dr. Polkinghorne’s lecture, he looks at two explanations for the "fine-tuning" principle -- the multiverse theory and the existence of a divine intelligence -- and explains why natural theology alone is not sufficient to make the case for a God who interacts and cares for his creation. To make the case for theism, he argues, we need revelation, God's self-disclosure. This is manifest in various ways, including that which we experience personally, including ethics and aesthetics.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures and features physicist Ard Louis.

In today's video, Oxford physicist Ard Louis discusses the famous debate between renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould believed (and wrote in his book Wonderful Life) that if the "tape" of evolution were rerun, the chance that anything like human intelligence would emerge is essentially zero. In other words, humanity is here through random accident. Gould pointed to the work of Morris and fellow scientists in their research of the Burgess Shale as evidence for this view.

However, Morris himself disagrees, pointing to what is called evolutionary convergence. As Morris notes, there are numerous examples of identical features evolving multiple times throughout the history of life independently. Morris believes that if the tape of life were replayed, we would see something like humans emerge. A Christian might say, it looks like we were planned.

Some Christians might find Simon Conway Morris' viewpoint, with its implicit teleology, more attractive. Others, perhaps motivated by a high view of providence, may find Gould's emphasis on contingency equally congenial to their faith. What do you think?

Narrator—Elements of design are all around us: …our homes, our cars, our art. If you have paid any attention to the science and faith conversation taking place in our churches in the last twenty or so years, you have probably heard about a movement called Intelligent Design, or ID for short. Intelligent Design is the proposition that certain features of creation are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by an undirected process. It is an idea that has become very popular among Christian lay people. Here is what the main proponents of ID say about their work.

William Dembski—“There are features of biological systems that cannot be understood and explained apart from intelligence or purpose.”

Stephen Meyer—“What critics of intelligent design typically do…in other words they don’t have a better explanation to offer, and say is, ‘Well the design hypothesis for the origin of information, is simply not a scientific hypothesis.’”

Lee Strobel—“The negative evidence against Darwinists and Darwinian evolution, convinced me that purely naturalistic processes cannot reasonably account for the creation and the development and the diversity of life.”

Narrator—All of us who love God and believe in His mastery over the universe, experience those moments when we are in awe of His creation. We believe God creates and that He is intelligent, so in that sense all Christians could be said to agree with the idea of an intelligent designer. But is ID a legitimate scientific alternative to evolutionary biology? We asked a diverse group of leading scientists their perspectives on the work of the ID community.

Ian Hutchinson—“What we tend to mean when we are talking about Intelligent Design movement, capital I, capital D, is a view that says not only did God design and create the universe, but we can scientifically detect the fact that the world is designed—And that is the crucial move. I mean I personally don’t find the arguments that have been put forward to support that position, particularly intellectually convincing. They, in my view, just simply have not come up with compelling evidence.”

Darrel Falk—“And so along come these people, who for wonderful reasons, you know, reasons that I hold as well, and that is the existence of a God who works in creation, and they are just interpreting through that lens: ‘I am going to be able to detect God’s work in here. Using scientific tools, I am going to be able to detect God’s work!’

It is just pretty (hesitates)… sloppy… What happens is that all that they’re finding—for the most part—they’re just finding gaps in the scientific process. Then when those gaps get filled in, everybody is embarrassed because they have invested so much money, they have invested so much personal ideology, reputation, even (hesitates)… ego. And along comes somebody who says, ‘Well, we filled that gap in.’ …It is pretty hard to say, ‘I guess I was wrong.’”

Sean Carroll—“Intelligent Design when it has been examined by the scientific community, when Intelligent Design has put forward scientific arguments... in the realm of this peer review… this intense critical process I am telling you about---then their arguments have been found to be completely empty. Intelligent Design hasn’t been able to get out of the batter’s box because its first swings have been completely empty, they are complete whiffs. So for…you know…PR reasons, or… political reasons, or whatever it might be, they keep talking….But they have no traction in this scientific game.”

David Ussery—“The Intelligent Design movement is still doing it—they deny it—but essentially if you look, their arguments are… ‘We can’t explain this, therefore, God did it!’ Many people think if we can explain it with the laws of chemistry and physics, God is not involved. And we only need to invoke God when we cannot explain things. …. Just because we can explain it, doesn’t mean God is not there.”

So while there are serious problems with Intelligent Design as science, many Christian scholars are just as concerned with the theological implications raised by these ideas.

Thomas Jay Oord—“For me, I take God’s love as the central signpost, central attribute of who God is, and I worry that a God who has the capacity to force agents and organisms to do certain things, then is acting in unloving ways, if love doesn’t force, if love is persuasive, if love calls, if love works in cooperation, then in any instance in which God would be forcing, even non-humans, I worry that is not a very loving thing to do. And so there are theological reasons why I am a little bit suspicious of particular claims by the Intelligent Design community.”

Denis Alexander—“And I think it is a misunderstanding of the understanding of what creation actually means in the Bible, on one side, that creation in a traditional Christian understanding means simply a God who is creator and who brings into being everything else that exists. So everything that exists, whatever it might be, is existing by the will and through the purpose and plan of God.

So we as scientists, what we can do, is to actually describe what God has brought into being. That is very much the old Augustinian view of creation-theology that he mapped out in his great commentary on Genesis, which was published the early part of this century. This goes way back; it is not some new understanding of creation, this is traditional theology. So I think we need to restore a traditional creation-theology to this discussion. Once you accept a traditional Christian understanding of creation, then all we discover as scientists…all we describe is part of that whole narrative of God’s created order. Augustine said that nature is what God does, and so if we are investigating nature, we can only investigate what God does.”

Narrator—Intelligent Design has been embraced by many in the church because they have been led to believe that serious science leaves no room for God, and so serious Christians must turn their backs on the discoveries of modern science. ….But that’s simply not the case.

The God of the Bible upholds His natural laws and His Spirit pervades the entire universe in ways that are beyond our comprehension. There is room for science and faith in the lives of committed believers as we fearlessly pursue truth together.

Epilogue (by Darrel Falk)

As indicated in this film clip, many scientists feel that the ID movement is an attempt to locate gaps in our scientific knowledge and then to presume those gaps can only be filled by intervention of an external intelligence. It is important to note that ID leaders do not view their work this way. For example, William Dembski recently wrote:

But in fact, ID is not an interventionist theory. ID is, in the first instance, concerned with the detectability of design. But detecting the activity of a designing intelligence says nothing, without further investigation and evidence, about how the designing intelligence acted, whether by discrete interventions or by continuous infusions of information or by front-loading of all the necessary information….In detecting design we can say where design is.

Our task is to help the Church understand that we are unaware of any single instance where the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement have scientifically demonstrated supernatural activity. Nor are we aware of a single instance of where they have done “further investigation and [provided] evidence about how the designing intelligence acted, whether by discrete interventions or by continuous infusion of information, or by front-loading of all the necessary information.” It still seems to us that what they do is to go into that realm just beyond the horizon of what we know about God’s natural world and assert that they have demonstrated that God’s supernatural activity is required there.

Have I been too frank by calling this sort of science “sloppy?” Should I try to find a gentler word when speaking about the quality of the work of my Christian brothers? Should not Christians always be known for their spirit of grace? True, we Christians must always be known by our love. Without that we are just a resounding gong and a clanging cymbal. Still, what about these words from Paul:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

I have been a professor for many years and perhaps the hardest thing I ever have done is to sit down with a student as I review a term paper that I know is not up to the standards of what I am convinced that person is capable of producing. If their work is sloppy, and I know they can do better, then the loving thing to do is to tell them as kindly and gently as I can.

As Christians, we can do better science than this. Let’s stop claiming we have detected design, when all that we’ve really done is to point out interesting research questions that exist at the horizon where our knowledge is incomplete.

God spoke life into existence. It is all his. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” How can one detect design when it has all been designed? What is our negative control? What I do know is that as I look out on creation I see the majesty of God, and as I explore the inner working of a cell, I am in awe as I observe a marvelous symphony. It is all God’s.

In the wisdom that comes from God, let’s join together—all of us—in celebration and worship, as we sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in our hearts and with the assurance that this is our Father’s World.

Today we debut the second video in our “Distinctions” series, a collection of short videos that look to clarify some of the important scientific questions at the heart of the science and faith dialogue. Today’s video looks at the idea of genetic information, and whether it can offer us “proof” of an intelligent designer.

Over the past two decades, the intelligent design movement has been working diligently to offer a parallel version of modern science, one that can scientifically show God at work in creation. In a way, it is similar to Christian music and Christian art, creating an evangelical version of science. But is their goal an admirable one?

So far, the efforts of the Intelligent Design movement have not been well received by the general scientific community. In this video, biologist Sean Carroll, currently Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, focuses on one of the reasons for this rejection: the misdirected emphasis of the ID movement. Says Carroll:

To put it sort of in the simplest terms, it’s not the genes you have; it’s how you use them. And so these genes, which are involved in building bodies, you can sort of think of them like a carpenter’s toolkit. That while everyone may have a hammer and a nailgun and a whole set of wrenches… how you use them over time determines what structure you build, whether you build a hope chest or a whole house. So the genetic switches determine the use of those tools. And it’s the genetic switches that are evolving that are giving us the great diversity of, for example, the animal kingdom.

However not all objections to Intelligent Design are scientific. There are also philosophical obstacles. As Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes:

I think if you strive too hard for scientific proofs of God, you’re in danger of accidentally endorsing the scientistic position, of elevating science to be the supreme arbiter of what is intellectually convincing, because you are essentially giving them the deciding control over what is and is not to be believed.

He continues by saying, “I think ultimately you can’t know God in an abstract way. You have to get to know him.”

As believers, we might prefer Christian music or art, but that does not mean there needs to be an alternative set of scientific Christian facts. We agree with the Intelligent Design movement that there is a Mind who has created, established, and sustains the universe, despite the inability of the ID movement to “catch God” under a microscope or in a laboratory. God is at work in his creation, and science is not a challenge to that sovereignty.

As part of the H. Orton Wiley Lecture series in Theology on the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne inspired students and faculty alike in thinking about the interaction between science and the Christian faith. The first lecture, entitled, Natural Theology, was delivered on November 15th, 2010. The entire MP3 is available for download here.

Below, we provide a transcript of the portion that extends from 10:06 to 16:10. This portion describes a very interesting and, we think, extremely helpful way of thinking about intelligent design. Many think that the Intelligent Design Movement is largely an attempt to revive the two hundred year old arguments of William Paley. Polkinghorne however, describes a new natural theology, one quite different than that of Paley. He points us to a deeper approach to the interface of science and the Christian faith than that associated with the intelligent design movement.

We provide a written transcript of the talk to make it easier to mull over Dr. Polkinghorne’s ideas while you listen.

“William Paley… wrote a book, a famous book, called Natural Theology. Paley’s form of natural theology was an uninhibited appeal to the inspection of the world. He produced the argument from design in a familiar form pointing to the atlas of living beings, surviving and functioning in their environment, pointing to such things as the amazingly complex optical system of the mammalian eye and so on. The existence of these things were manifest demonstrations of the existence of the divine designer who brought them into being. It must have seemed a very persuasive argument.

Indeed many people perceived it that way but of course the rug was pulled from beneath that argument in 1859 when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in which Darwin was able to show how the patient shifting and accumulation of small differences between one generation and the next over very long periods of time could bring into existence the appearance of design without requiring the direct intervention of a divine designer. The key thing that enabled Darwin to have that insight was the realization of deep time and that living things had existed on the earth over vast periods of time and that there was the possibility of slow change in the characteristics of living beings. And that perfused Darwin’s demolition of Paley, essentially producing a disillusionment with natural theology in many theological circles. But we are living in a time when there has been a revival of natural theology. It is not only a revived natural theology …but it is also a revised natural theology. It is revised in two very important ways.

First of all it is more modest in the claims that it makes. It does not claim to talk in terms of proofs of God’s existence, but it talks about insight which suggests the existence of a divine creator…The claim is that theism enables one to understand more than atheism. So the new natural theology doesn’t appeal to truth, but it appeals to what you might call best explanation; that to see the world as a divine creation makes it more intelligible than the opposite deduction: that the world is just a brute fact with no further explanation.

It is also revised because it is not trying to rival science on its own ground. With hindsight we can see that the old-style-natural-theologians like William Paley were actually making a mistake about the relationship between science and religion. They were trying to use religion to answer scientific questions…

Science doesn’t require augmentation from theology or any other discipline in its own proper domain. So the new natural theology doesn’t set itself up as a rival to scientific explanation as the best explanation, but as a complement, as a complementary relationship to scientific explanation —to place that understanding in a broader and deeper context of intelligibility…

So the new natural theology is not part of a war between science and religion, but is a part of a peaceful co-existence of mutual help and exchange of gifts between science and religion.

So if the new natural theology isn’t answering scientific questions what sorts of questions is it answering?.... In particular it is answering what you might call meta-questions. Meta-questions arise in a particular context, and their very character takes you beyond the context of their origin. So the questions that natural theology addresses today are questions that arise out of our experience of doing science but which are not in themselves scientific questions. Science essentially only answers questions of how… They are not scientific questions but they arise out of scientific experience. They are meaningful and necessary to ask and we seek to find answers to them, but if we are do so we will have to look elsewhere—beyond the science. The claim of natural theology is that a theistic belief affords the most natural persuasive explanation of our state of affairs.”

Intro: This video is the final entry in a six-part series from Focus.org, entitled "God: new evidence." We strongly encourage our readers to explore the entire series.

A Deeper Story?

The claim that our universe is “fine-tuned” comes from the fact that certain physical constants in our universe are found to have precisely the right values to allow for the existence of life. If any one of these constants were changed to the slightest degree, life would not be possible.

Many believing scientists have taken hold of the fine-tuning argument as a “pointer” to the existence of a creator, while others argue that this phenomenon can be explained by the multiverse theory, in which there exist innumerable other universes. Such a high number of universes would increase the chances that one universe would happen to take on the values needed to develop life.

In this video, five notable scientists (John Polkinghorne, David Wilkinson, Rodney Holder, Peter Williams and Graham Swinerd) offer their perspective on the strengths and limitations of the fine-tuning argument as a pointer to God.

Each speaker emphasizes the importance of recognizing the limitations of the fine-tuning argument, and also the importance of seeing it in context. John Polkinghorne notes that fine-tuning is a useful tool—in particular, because “[it] puts the question of God on the agenda”. However, he also notes that it gives us limited insight into the nature of God. Rodney Holder agrees that fine-tuning is limited in what it tells us. Holder finds the argument persuasive, but not foolproof. “God doesn’t force us to believe in him”, says Holder, and the fine-tuning argument “doesn’t get you to the personal God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ.”

Along similar lines, Wilkinson shares that while the fine-tuning and intelligibility of the universe serve as pointers to a “deeper story” about the universe, the details of that story come from his faith as a Christian. “At the heart of my Christian faith is the conviction and the experience that God has revealed himself, supremely, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And I know what the deeper story is about, because I’ve seen it in Jesus.”

For more videos like this, visit Focus.org.

In his post on Monday, Karl Giberson writes that, “My primary concern about ID is that it promotes the idea that nature has gaps in it that God must intervene to fill.” Similarly, in this short video, physicist Ard Louis echoes these same doubts about Intelligent Design, noting that his primary resistance to the movement is based on theological grounds as opposed to scientific. That is, he suggests that accepting Intelligent Design is a bit like acknowledging that God “[couldn’t] get the world right the first time around”.

To illustrate this point, Louis recounts a famous exchange between Newton and his rival Leibniz that occurred when Newton was working out his theory of gravity. Newton found that in the solar system, planets are unstable. He tried to explain this aspect in his theory by suggesting that God occasionally reforms the planets to stabilize them. Leibniz dismissed this claim as nonsense and that in fact argued that this line of thinking was demeaning to God because it discounted God’s power. Moreover, Leibniz said, God doesn’t do miracles for wants of nature—he does miracles for wants of grace. This means that God doesn’t make miracles just to “fix” things in the past. Further, as Louis points out, these “correctives” are not mentioned in the scriptures, thus it makes many of ID’s claims seem theologically unlikely.

I am asked all the time to explain, in a nutshell, why irreducible complexity is not a valid argument in favor of intelligent design. Indeed I have addressed this issue in Part I and Part II of this series. However, I have never heard anyone put it in a more cogent form than Oxford biophysicist Ard Louis in this video. If you are like me though, you’re going to have to listen extremely closely and probably play it two or three times in order to fully grasp the depth of the point he is making. Here is what I think he’s saying. Tell me if I’m right.

Dr. Louis begins by pointing out the complexity of the bacterial flagellum—it consists of many different protein components that must assemble in a specific configuration, a process which takes about twenty minutes. As the components assemble, they might try out many different arrangements until at long last the correct one is identified, producing a fully mature bacterial flagellum.

The problem is that there are a “zillion” different possible combinations and configurations of the components and only one works. Trying them all out and arriving at the single correct one in just twenty minutes would be impossible. Yet, the flagellum assembles. It works. And it works in twenty minutes.

Dr. Louis goes on: If you were to come across a fully assembled flagellum with all of its protein components attached in the one and only way which works, what might you conclude? Remember there are zillions of ways in which those proteins could assemble, but in the search process, only one works. Given the state of our knowledge until recently, you might well conclude that there was a “guiding hand” or a “vital force” that had facilitated the assembly process enabling it to find the correct combination in only minutes. Yet none of us, I assume, believe that there is a guiding hand acting on the cell, causing the proteins inside it to follow the correct search process to make the flagellum. The basic elements of the process are understood, Louis says. They can be explained both mathematically and biologically. We do not need to invoke a guiding hand inside each of the trillions of bacterial cells that are in our body. Their parts, including their flagella, are assembled by processes that we have come to understand over the past half century. No vital force. No guiding hand.

Louis then goes on to explore another aspect of the assembly of the bacterial flagellum: the evolutionary history by which it arose to become the complex structure it is today. That search process took place not in twenty minutes, but over millions of years—probably hundreds of millions. We don’t have the intermediates for this evolutionary history. All we have is the final product. Today, there are people who look at that structure in all of its complexity and say, “There must have been a guiding hand, a vital force to design and build something so complex. Even with hundreds of millions of years of searching in design-space, no natural process could build something this complex.” So, just as some were incredulous that a flagellum could self-assemble in a cell before our current state of knowledge developed, leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are now incredulous in a new way. For what they consider to be scientific reasons, they believe it is nearly certain that the structure must have come fully formed through an intelligence and not have become increasingly more complex through gradual, natural processes.

Louis, a deeply committed Christian, says in essence, “Given our incomplete knowledge about these processes, how do they know that?” True, showing how the flagellum could have been produced by natural processes is a hard problem—we don’t, after all, have the intermediates. However, is it not too early to say that scientists are never going to discover a natural way in which this could come about? Surely we cannot calculate probabilities of this, when we know so little about the process. Is it not premature to come across a finished product and say there must have been a guiding hand when we know so little about the history of its development over hundreds of millions of years?

Again, I emphasize that Dr. Ard Louis is a deeply committed Christian, a person who sees the Bible as the Word of God. He is not arguing against the existence of a Creator. It is science he is discussing, not theology. There are no scientific reasons to say that a guiding hand was needed in evolutionary history to assemble what we now see as a marvelously complex structure. There are also no sound theological reasons to assert that God could not have used natural processes to carry out God’s creation command. God could have used natural processes! We believe that God is Creator of life, that God “spoke” life into existence, and that God’s Presence sustains the created world in its current state.

Think back to Louis’s initial premise about what happens in twenty minutes. There are no scientific or theological reasons to insist on the presence of a guiding hand which manipulates the process so that the proteins attach in all the right ways to build the flagellum of a bacterial cell. By the same token, there are no scientific or theological reasons for assuming that a manipulating hand is needed step by step to build better and better flagella in evolutionary time. Instead, we are simply left with this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.(John 1:1-3)

That is enough for me.

In this video clip, Oxford University biophysicist, Ard Louis posits that one of the reasons Christians are hostile to evolution is that they latch onto a particular definition, which puts it in conflict with their theological convictions.

Louis begins by explaining the three primary ways in which evolution is generally defined:

First, evolution may be defined as a process that takes things from a level of simplicity to a level of complexity—e.g. from a basic cell level to the level of complexity apparent in the human existence. It is a process that we could simply define as “natural history” (0:27).

Second, Louis notes that evolution can also be described as a mechanism within the evolutionary process, there are mutations and selections that together generate complexity (0:41).

Finally, he points to evolution as a worldview (0:41) perhaps best epitomized by paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson’s suggestion that “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

Louis goes on to say that for many Christians, the nuanced definition of evolution becomes subsumed under the “evolution as worldview” ideology, which is nothing more than a set of theological statements put on top of evolution (that Christians are right to reject).

He continues with a critique of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, which appears to be attacking the second definition of evolution—i.e. “evolution as a mechanism”. Louis describes ID as a movement without apologetic traction as it lacks a valid scientific counterargument (1:37) and as something that pulls us away from the Bible as it lacks a scriptural basis (1:44).