According to Merriam Webster, the term “intelligent design” has been used since at least 1847, in reference to “the theory that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by a designing intelligence.” That’s a decent definition, also consistent with those offered by today’s proponents of intelligent design (ID). For example, the leading ID think tank, The Discovery Institute (Seattle), has this:

Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

And in the opening sentence of a book he edited with philosopher Michael Ruse, ID theorist William Dembski said, “Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that in order to explain life it is necessary to suppose the action of an unevolved intelligence.” (Debating Design, p. 3)

On the other hand, while a recent contest on a prominent intelligent design (ID) website uncovered several other early uses of the term, it is important to note that it does not always mean exactly the same thing in each reference. The term itself has an interesting history, and while ID authors obviously did not invent the term “intelligent design,” they have given it specific content in recent years. Indeed, they have even removed content in some cases: a point I will return to later is that, though it seems the only viable candidate for such an “unevolved intelligence” is God, ID proponents sometimes seem to do cartwheels to avoid saying as much. When a term has such a complicated past, there simply is no substitute for looking at specific references in their own contexts as we move to seeing how ID plays out today as one of the 5 ways of relating science and the Bible.

Interestingly, many Protestant “modernist” scientists and theologians from William Jennings Bryan’s day (see my previous column) unhesitatingly endorsed the idea that a designing intelligence lay behind nature. At least one such person, Nobel prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, even used the very term “intelligent design” in an address he gave at a Unitarian church in 1940: “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.” (Quoting his pamphlet from 1940, The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge, p. 13. For more about this aspect of Compton’s views, click here.) However, Compton regarded design as a philosophical and theological inference from science, not an explanation within science to be invoked when other explanations fail. He also accepted the common ancestry of humans and other organisms. This is a significant difference from the ID movement today, which offers ID as a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution and (at least in many cases) seeks to undermine public confidence in common ancestry (even though ID per se is not actually opposed to it).

If any ID proponents are sympathetic to the type of religious modernism that Compton and his friends embraced, I cannot tell you who they are. In a curious, ironic twist, ID is often used by conservative Christian apologists partly to defend a cluster of traditional theological and hermeneutical positions that none of the modernists would have defended. A further irony: the intellectual descendants of the modernists—those scientists and theologians who occupy the left wing of the modern “dialogue” of science and religion—exhibit a studied avoidance of the term “design,” disconnecting them on that score from the modernists of the 1920s.

Many other contemporary writers, including some evangelical TEs, are also reluctant to use the word “design,” precisely because in their view it has been co-opted by ID proponents and they do not want readers to misunderstand their position(s). They may agree with ID proponents that certain features of the universe reflect divine design, but because they do not see design as a scientific explanation they employ other language. (Likewise, the YECs have co-opted the word “creationism” to mean just one specific understanding of God’s creative activity, leading most advocates of other views either to provide their own definitions of the word or else to avoid using it altogether. Politics dogs this conversation at every turn.)

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Intelligent Design

With that bit of historical context for the term “Intelligent Design,” let’s now look at the first of the Core Tenets of this perspective in its current state, and as it is most often used by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement.

(1) The Bible is NOT to be mentioned (at least for now); ditto for “God” and “theology” as far as possible.

This is a deliberate strategy, adopted for political reasons to keep arguments at the level of philosophy and science. Here, “political” refers to the American political system, with its constitutional disestablishment of religion, not to partisan politics. Since the 1980s, federal courts have consistently ruled that “creationism” (which was specifically of the YEC variety in the relevant cases) is sectarian religion, not science, and therefore it cannot be taught in public school science classes. Anxious to avoid a similar fate, proponents of ID always want to ensure that they are not perceived as advocates of “creationism.” The less they mention God and the Bible, the reasoning goes, the less likely they are to fall afoul of those decisions.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pertaining to the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press.
Source: http://www.rochester.edu/college/psc/images/Courses/Spring2008/FirstAmendment.png

Phillip Johnson, the former law professor who effectively began the ID movement some twenty years ago, has put it bluntly: “To put things on a more rational basis, the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion.” He quickly adds, “This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact.” (“The Wedge: Breaking the Modernist Monopoly on Science,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/August 1999, p. 22.)

If God and the Bible are really to be left out for the time being, then why am I discussing ID in a series on “Science and the Bible”? It’s a fair question. I simply don’t see any way meaningfully to avoid talking about ID apart from the culture wars in which it is embedded (I’ll say more about this in a subsequent column), and the Bible is never far from the surface when the battle being fought involves origins. Conservative Christians sense that ID really is about God—Dembski’s “unevolved intelligence”. As Dembski himself has said, “no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life”, and there aren’t a lot of candidates for that job. Many Christians also identify strongly with the ways in which ID seeks to confront the secular establishment, in an explicitly-stated effort to combat what Johnson calls “the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions.” (“The Wedge,” p. 23.) They see it as a way of getting traditional theistic perspectives and Christian values back into the academy, once “design” has become an acceptable academic talking point—and it isn’t very far from there to conversations about “science and the Bible.” If this were not so, then why would so much ID literature be published by Christian presses? Indeed, when I tell church audiences with a straight face that ID purports not to be about the Bible at all, I’m usually met with considerable skepticism.

When I’m back in about two weeks, we’ll look at further Core Tenets of ID—the ones that have even less to do with the Bible, explicitly, and more to do with the way we approach the study of the natural world.

Asa Gray

If Thomas Huxley earned the title of "Darwin's bulldog," then Asa Gray should be remembered as "Darwin's dove." Whereas Huxley enjoyed a good fight in his defense of Darwin's theory, Gray sought to mediate and bring sides together around a common understanding of "good science." As Darwin's strongest and most vocal scientific ally in the United States, Gray recognized the scientific importance of Darwin's efforts for the growing professionalism of biological researchers.

But as an orthodox Christian, a Presbyterian firmly devoted to the faith expressed in the Nicene Creed, Gray saw in Darwin's theory both evidence for his philosophical commitment to natural theology and support for his opposition to the idealism advocated by Louis Agassiz and the Naturphilosophen in both Europe and America. Indeed, Agassiz's advocacy of Platonic forms as a basis of biological understanding (e.g., "A species is a thought of the creator")¹ would be a major source of American opposition to Darwin's theory.

Professor of botany at Harvard during most of the middle half of the nineteenth century, Gray was one of the few members of the scientific community to whom Darwin revealed his theory before the publication of On the Origin of Species, and, from what I can tell, the only American. Gray and Darwin met briefly in January 1839 during one of Gray's visits to England. Later, during the 1850s, Darwin wrote Gray on several occasions requesting information--a practice that Darwin frequently employed. In 1854, Darwin's friend and confidant, Joseph Hooker, showed Darwin Gray's review of Hooker's Flora of New Zealand, in which Gray had argued strongly against Louis Agassiz's idealism and had raised questions from his own work on the stability of species. Gray was not yet ready to deny their permanence, but hybrids and other observations were beginning to trouble him.

The next year Gray wrote a lucid and penetrating positive evaluation of Alphonse De Candolle's two-volume Géographie botanique raisonnée, a pioneering work dealing with plant geography and distribution from a statistical perspective. Hooker had sneeringly dismissed the work. In A. Hunter Dupree's authoritative biography of Gray, he describes Gray's puzzlement at Hooker's response in these terms:

Although in the long view Gray's evaluation of the epoch-making nature of De Candolle's book was more justified than Hooker's sneers, [Gray was confused by his response, for] Hooker seemed to be talking with a more comprehensive theory definitely in mind, some reason for taking his position, which he did not divulge and which his friend [Gray] did not possess.²

Darwin, however, saw in both Gray's review of Hooker's book and in his comments on De Candolle's tome that Gray was troubled by some of the same empirical data that had been bothering him. In April 1855, Darwin wrote Gray to urge that Gray update his Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States first published in 1848, and especially to address the issue of the range of Alpine plants in the United States. Specifically, he said: "Now I would say it is your duty to generalise as far as you safely can from your as yet completed work."³

Behind this request was Darwin's desire to test his impression that Gray could make a good ally. Gray passed the test, and finally, in July 1857, Darwin let Gray in on his theory of the transmutation of species. Gray was never an uncritical supporter, and there are many evidences in the correspondence between these two scientists that Gray was willing to challenge Darwin and disagree with some of his conclusions. Nevertheless, Gray saw the importance of Darwin's work and the ways in which it provided answers to the troublesome issues that he had confronted in his own botanical efforts.

Gray responds to Darwin's theory

After considerable interchange--one might even say debate--among Gray, Darwin, and Hooker, Gray wrote to Hooker in October 1859 (one month before the publication of On the Origin of Species) saying that he had absolutely no problem with cognate species arising by variation. He did, however, raise a concern that would be the source of much future discussion. He wondered about Darwin's "carry[ing] out this view to its ultimate and legitimate results,--how [do] you connect the philosophy of religion with the philosophy of your science." He added: "I should feel uneasy if I could not connect them into a consistent whole--i.e., fundamental principles of science should not be in conflict."⁴

When Origins was published, Gray wrote a clear, positive, yet critical review in The American Journal of Science. Aware of mounting religious opposition, he ended his review by arguing that whereas one could use Darwin's theory in support of an atheistic view of Nature, one could use any scientific theory in that way. He wrote: "The theory of gravitation and ... the nebular hypothesis assume a universal and ultimate physical cause, from which the effects in nature must necessarily have resulted."⁵ He did not see the physicists and astronomers who adopted Newton's theories as atheists or pantheists, though Leibniz earlier had raised such reservations. And a similar situation existed with the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin, Gray continued: "merely takes up a particular, proximate cause, or set of such causes, from which, it is argued, the present diversity of species has or may have contingently resulted. The author does not say necessarily resulted."⁶

This far Gray could go with Darwin. But there was a point at which he parted company, and that was the fortuitous randomness of the process that Darwin's theory seemed to imply.

In part 2, Dr. Miles describes Darwin's struggle with the problem of natural evil and design in nature.

Notes

1. Cited in A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 151. 2. Ibid., 236.
3. Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903), 252.
4. Dupree, Asa Gray, 266.
5. Asa Gray, "The Origin of Species" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 44.
6. Ibid.

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.

Design arguments have been around forever and expressed in various ways. Most of them fall into what we call natural theology, which is the process of inferring something about the existence and nature of God by the inspection of nature. The story of creation in Genesis launches the discussion in the Judeo-Christian tradition when it speaks of God ordering nature and driving back chaos. On the fourth day “God created the sun, moon, and the stars to give light to the earth and to govern and separate the day and the night. These would also serve as signs to mark seasons, days, and years.” All this suggests design and purpose. Job speaks of God making “water drops evaporate” so the clouds can “shower abundantly on mankind.” (Job 36:27-28 HCSB). The psalmist expresses awe at the grandeur of the night sky but remarkably does not comment on the grandeur of his own existence:

When I observe Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, . . . what is man that You remember him? (Psalm 8:3-4 HCSB)

In the New Testament, Paul speaks of the created order testifying clearly to the reality of God, arguing that, “the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20 KJV). Biblical scholars have interpreted this to mean that an open-minded seeker can infer the existence of God by studying the creation. As theologians reflected on the nature of the creation these arguments were repeated and refined. Augustine in the fourth century, Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Luther and Calvin at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century—all were understandably convinced that the world had a grand design that was readily discernable. After all, nobody had any other explanation for why birds were adapted to fly, fish to swim and constellations to mark the seasons.

By the time we get to Isaac Newton in the latter part of the seventeenth century, we have the first carefully constructed scientific arguments. Newton, as we learned in high school, explained how gravity from the sun keeps the planets in their orbits. This explanation replaced previous medieval explanations that included the possibility that the planets moved because angels pushed on them. (It also replaced Galileo’s explanation that they moved because of a “circular inertia,” which turned out to be as much a fantasy as the pushing angels.) But Newton’s theory didn’t explain why the planets all go around the sun in the same direction and in almost the same plane. In fact Newton could not imagine any natural process that could produce such elegant design, so he argued that God must be the explanation.

About two centuries later the most famous design argument was developed by William Paley whose Natural Theology Darwin read voraciously as a young scientist. “Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground,” asked Paley, “and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. . . . [W]hen we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. . . . [T]he inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.” Paley goes on to compare the watch to an eye, arguing that if a watch implies a watchmaker, then an eye implies an eye-maker. The eye-maker, of course, can only be God.

Newton’s argument about the planets and Paley’s about the watch have the same logical form: We find something in nature that appears too ingeniously arranged to have been produced by known natural processes, so we infer that a Designer from outside the natural order—God— must be the source of the design. Their arguments differ, however, on the question of purpose. It was not clear to Newton or anyone of his day exactly why the planets needed to be going about in the orderly way they were observed. If the order was indeed provided by God, no explanation for it could be discerned other than the creation of order for the sake of order. In contrast, the designs that Paley highlighted were clearly purposeful. Our eye is remarkably designed for a purpose other than to elicit awe at its complexity. We see with our eyes. We don’t do anything with Neptune’s nice orbit, other than admire it.

Red Flags

Arguments that the universe is designed are complicated. We certainly live in a remarkable universe with many features that inspire awe. Many of those features connect in astonishing ways to the habitability of the universe. The psalmist’s wonder at the heavens has only grown stronger as we have learned more about those heavens. The universe certainly does not become ever more boring and bland as we come to understand it better.

But we also live in a world with earthquakes, plagues and tsunamis. Our sun will burn out at some point, incinerating the earth in the process. The prospects of securing our future by colonizing other planets seem remote. The long-term prognosis of the universe, by the cold logical lights of science, is not good. Its temperature will continuously drop as it expands for billions of years. Eventually there won’t be enough heat left for any form of life, and finally there won’t even be enough heat for atoms and molecules to interact. This sterile icy blackness is frightening to contemplate. No matter what we do as a species, we and our cultural achievements are destined to perish.

No simple overriding explanation that makes sense of everything comes into view as we learn more about the universe. And experience with past arguments raises red caution flags. For example, Newton’s design argument about the planets was an argument from ignorance that now bears the label “god of the gaps.” There was a gap in Newton’s explanation for the planets. He could explain why their orbits were elliptical and what kept them in their orbits. But he could not explain the uniformity of their orbits, so he invoked God as the explanation to plug this gap—hence the label for such arguments—god of the gaps.

A century after Newton, French physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace dispelled the mystery of the structure of the solar system. He showed that a better understanding of gravity and how solar systems originated could explain the things that Newton attributed to the direct action of God. Laplace’s work did not refute the existence of God, of course. But it did dismantle Newton’s argument that the planetary orbits must have been set up by God, thus eliminating an argument that some had been using to argue for God’s existence.

In a similar way, Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for the design that Paley marveled at in the eye. Scholars of Paley’s generation knew nothing of natural selection, mutations or genetics, so they could not imagine how nature might craft something so remarkable as an eye. Paley’s argument, like Newton’s, turns out to be another god of the gaps explanation that disappears with further scientific insights into the way the world works.

So this is the first red flag to note—design arguments are all-too-often based on gaps in our knowledge and will disappear when those gaps are filled.

The second red flag concerns the apparent purpose of any design. “Design” can point in many directions or no direction at all. The science museum in Boston has a grand contraption that does nothing except move balls around to no end. The only possible purpose is to impress a visitor with the juxtaposition of complex design and lack of purpose. There is likewise no significance to the patterns of the stars that we call constellations. The “design” of the Big Dipper is simply interesting. The fine-tuning of the universe for life, on the other hand, encourages us to wonder if life may be important in some way. But it does not specify which life forms are relevant and why. And we must note that some features of our world exhibiting a high level of design—like the AIDS virus or the poison of the rattlesnake—seem to have the purpose to destroy human life. If rattlesnakes could reflect on their existence, they could marvel at the carbon resonance that makes that existence possible.

A third red flag we must note is bad design. If marvelous design in the universe motivates reflection on the possibility that God created the world what do we do about the counterarguments? Consider asteroids. A gigantic asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and so disrupted the ecosystems and the atmosphere of the earth that the dinosaurs went extinct. Absolutely nothing prevents the same thing from happening again. We are protected today largely by the vastness of space and the structure of our solar system with large outer planets that “vacuum up” a lot of stuff that could hit the earth. These various protections make collisions of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs unlikely. But they offer no guarantees. If the Goldilocks features of our universe are intended to make it habitable, then why does the universe also have anti-Goldilocks features?

Many such issues complicate the process of figuring out why the universe is the way it is. And as we have learned somewhat reluctantly in the last few centuries, the great explanatory power of science disappears entirely when questions of purpose enter the conversation. Science is quite extraordinary at telling us how the world is but quite unable to tell us why the world is like that. Science illuminates the remarkable features of our universe that make life possible, but it goes silent when we ask whether any particular life form is the reason why the universe is the way it is. That deeply religious question has to be explored somewhere else.

These challenges caution us against naively selecting—cherry-picking we call it—a few Goldilocks features of the universe, assuming the friendly design work is for our benefit, and jumping to the conclusion that everything points simply and unambiguously in the direction of God as Creator.

Since this post, and those that will follow it, depend on an accurate representation of the argument for irreducible complexity (IC), I will take some time to clarify exactly how Michael Behe, the biochemist and Intelligent Design (ID) proponent who has most extensively developed the IC argument, uses the term. For Behe, the argument for IC is a critique of gradual evolutionary processes, of the kind that Darwin saw as necessary for his theory to hold. When Behe introduces and defines IC in his book Darwin’s Black Box, he has a key quote from Darwin on gradualism explicitly in view:

Darwin knew that his theory of gradual evolution by natural selection carried a heavy burden: "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."

It is safe to say the most of the scientific skepticism about Darwinism in the past century has centered on this requirement… critics of Darwin have suspected that his criterion of failure had been met. But how can we be confident? What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications”?

Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39)

The definition of an IC system is thus straightforward: it is a matched group of components, where all the components are necessary for the function of the system. The necessity of each component can be demonstrated by attempting to remove it – if the system no longer works if even one component is removed, it is by definition IC. Since an IC system requires all the components to be present for its function, it is not possible for the system, in its current state, to have been produced directly from a non-functional precursor. If one grants this premise, it leaves two options: that the IC system was derived indirectly, from a system that is not IC, or that the system was assembled by fiat and thus represents the actions of a designer. Behe’s criterion for distinguishing between these choices is based on evaluating the probabilities of these competing options:

Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can not definitively rule out the possibility of an indirect, circuitous route. As the complexity of an interacting system increases, though, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously. And as the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 40)

As we will examine in an upcoming post, Behe attempts to determine the precise limit of what evolutionary processes can (and cannot) achieve in a second book, The Edge of Evolution. For our present purposes, however, it is enough to note that the strength of the argument from IC depends on the perceived implausibility of the opposing explanation – that of an indirect evolutionary route that produces an IC system from a non-IC precursor system.

Building IC, one step at a time?

The presence of IC systems in biology as Behe has defined them is not contentious: there are many biological systems that cease to function when parts are removed. Indeed, the success of classical genetics in “dissecting” which genes are needed for certain functions largely rests on the ability to see some effect on function when a gene is removed from a system by mutation. What scientists dispute, however, is Behe’s claim that identifying IC systems is a hallmark of design. The evolutionary model for building IC is quite simple, and Behe has set it out as an option: an indirect route where non-essential parts are added to a system, and then over time the system comes to depend on those parts. We can diagram this model as follows:

The key to the model is that new parts can be added to a system, and that these parts are not essential when they are added. The resulting system is thus not IC, since it has parts that are not essential to its function, even if the new parts are advantageous in some way. If the new component is taken away at this stage, the system merely reverts to the precursor system. The second part of the model is that these intermediate, non-IC systems then may become IC if small changes make the new parts essential.

The addition of new, non-essential parts can be accomplished in several ways, such as a change in an existing protein that allows it to bind to a “precursor system”. More extreme would be the generation of a new protein that then adds to a precursor system as a non-essential component. Brand new genes, by definition, cannot be essential when they arise, since they arise in an organism that, up to that point, had no need of them. Looking to see if new genes then later become essential would be very good experimental support for the evolutionary model for how IC systems arise.

In practice, it takes a lot of scientific effort to tease out changes to an existing protein that allow it to become part of an intermediate system and then progress to an IC system, though we have examined one such example in a previous post. Looking for brand new genes, however, is much easier – and some recent work in several fruit fly species (Drosophila) has done just that.

The Young and the Restless

So, how to go about finding genes that are new? We have already discussed, in the context of duplicating an entire genome, how duplication of genes may lead to the two copies picking up new functions over time. While duplication may happen rarely at a whole-genome scale, small-scale duplication of small numbers of genes happens quite frequently as an error during cell division. At the time of the duplication, the two copies are the same, and therefore functionally equivalent. Over time, however, the two copies may become different and acquire distinct functions.

One way to look for genes that have arisen due to a recent duplication event is to compare the genomes of closely related species and look for genes that are present in one species but not another, or in a subset of related species. Duplicated genes will show up in a nested hierarchy, much like how pseudogenes appear in the same nested pattern, as we have discussed previously here.

The complete genome sequences for a number of fruit fly species are available, so researchers used this method of comparison to look for new genes that mostly arose “recently” (over the last 35 million years) within flies. Since the speciation times for the various fly species are known to a good approximation, the time of the various duplication events can be estimated as well.

Putting the argument for IC to the test

Using this method, researchers identified 195 recent, “young” genes that arose through duplication events. (Note: this finding, in and of itself, is problematic for the ID argument that significant amounts of new information cannot arise through evolutionary mechanisms). More problematic for the argument from IC, however, is that just less than one third of these new genes are now essential for development in the species that carry them. This fraction is approximately the same for “old” genes – about one third are essential for development.

The implications are easily grasped: many new genes have arisen through duplication, and a sizeable fraction are now part of IC systems. When they arose, they could not have been essential, but now they are emphatically so. As such, they must have been added to previous systems, and become IC over time. Moreover, this effect is not a rare, one-off event, but rather has been repeated time and again in recent evolutionary history.

In the next post in this series, we’ll delve into some of the details about how these new genes arose, and what sort of functions they have.

For further reading:

Behe, M.J. Darwin’s Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Free Press, New York, 1996.

Behe, M.J. The Edge of Evolution: the Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Free Press, New York, 2007.

Chen, S., Zhang, Y, and Long, M (2010). New genes in Drosophila quickly become essential. Science 330; 1682-1685.

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?

BioLogos has dealt fairly extensively with what we thought was the basic premise of Signature in the Cell. I had read the book carefully and I know Dennis did as well before we responded. I sincerely thought that the heart of Meyer’s argument is summarized in the following three quotes from the book:

1. “So the discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source. It follows that the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is that it too had an intelligent source. Intelligent design best explains the DNA enigma” (p. 347, emphasis added).

2. “Since, as argued in Chapters 8 through 15, intelligence is the only known cause of large amounts of specified information, the presence of such information in the cell points decisively back to the action of a designing intelligence” (p. 382, emphasis added).

3. “Because we know intelligent agents can (and do) produce complex and functionally specified sequences of symbols and arrangements of matter, intelligent agency qualifies as an adequate causal explanation for the origin of this effect. Since, in addition, materialistic theories have proven universally inadequate for explaining the origin of such information, intelligent design now stands as the only entity with the causal power known to produce this feature of living systems.” (p. 386, emphasis added).

So we at BioLogos have always thought that if mainstream science demonstrated an increase in “complex specified information” (CSI) without needing to invoke supernatural intervention, Meyer’s assertion that “intelligence is the only known source of such information in the cell” will have been refuted at the scientific level. It sure seemed to me that this is what he said in the above quotes.

With that in mind, we’ve put a great deal of effort into showing a number of cases in the lab and in nature where scientific data have provided very strong evidence for increased CSI which is entirely consistent with how we scientists would define “natural explanations.” All this time, starting with my first essay almost two years ago, we sincerely thought we were engaging Meyer’s book on Meyer’s terms.

But now, in his PSCF article, Meyer states that arguments based on examples of increased CSI don’t count if they occur after life began on Earth.

“Signature in the Cell argues, first that no purely undirected physical or chemical process—whether those based upon chance, law-like necessity, or the combination of the two—has provided an adequate causal explanation for the ultimate origin of the functionally specified biological information. In making that claim, I specifically stipulate that I am talking about undirected physical and chemical processes, not processes (such as random genetic mutation and natural selection) that commence only once life has begun. Clearly material processes that only commence once life has begun cannot be invoked to explain the origin of information necessary to produce life in the first place) (pp. 173-174, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Sept. 2011, emphasis added).

Since I had read the book very carefully, and have gone over it many times since, I was amazed that I could have missed this stipulation. Again, he says: “I specifically stipulate that I am [not] talking about … processes (such as random genetic mutation and natural selection) that commence only once life has begun.”

Did he really specifically stipulate that? Have we been barking up the wrong tree all this time? While we knew the main focus of Meyer's book was the origin of life (not mechanisms of evolution), his argument clearly stated, we thought, that no large increase in CSI (Complex Specified Information) had ever been demonstrated without the need to invoke intelligence. Period.

I went back through my well-marked up copy of the book again, re-examining each section in which he wrote about increased CSI. Despite my best efforts, I could not find the stipulation he mentions in the PSCF article. Still, thinking I had missed it, I spent $15 for an electronic version of the book—one that would allow me to identify every time the word “mutation,” or natural selection” appeared—anything that would help me find his stipulation. I couldn’t find it.

Actually I thought Meyer was pretty clear and highly specific in his book. Consider this scientific challenge on page 429:

If, for example, someone successfully demonstrated that "large amounts of functionally specified information do arise from purely chemical and physical antecedents," then my design hypothesis, with its strong claim to be the best (clearly superior) explanation of such phenomena, would fail.

Find a case where a large amount of CSI has accumulated without needing to invoke intelligence, and his argument, Meyer said, fails. This is a strong statement, clearly worded, and there is no hint of Meyer’s stipulation that it doesn’t count if life has already begun. In Dennis Venema's BioLogos blog series, he showed many cases where there were large increases in CSI (whole genome duplication, for example) without needing to invoke that supernatural intervention was necessary to create it. Chromosomes, the cell division machinery, and nucleotides are “purely chemical and physical antecedents.” The information content in the genome, Venema showed, quadrupled early in vertebrate history through material processes that we know and understand well. Did this not meet the scientific criteria that Meyer specifically called for?

I don’t know how misunderstandings like this happen. I believe that Stephen Meyer, who I consider to be a friend and colleague, thinks the stipulation exists in his book and that he worded it clearly. I assume he thinks it was implied in some overarching statement that I have not been able to find. I also think he believes he was clear. Unfortunately, clear he was not. I’ve looked thoroughly and I have not been able to find his stipulation.

In post after post, we have set out to demonstrate the scientific case we thought Meyer called for. Then in the end, it sure seems to us, that the rules changed, even though Steve feels they were written in his book all the way along.

Still, let’s move on. Let’s play by the new rule and let’s define it carefully.

So here’s the rule as I now understand it: If large increases in CSI can be demonstrated without the need to invoke an external intelligence, “then [Meyer’s] design hypothesis with its strong claim to be the best (clearly superior) explanation of such phenomena, would fail.”

Having stated the rule, we have to make two exceptions (Meyer himself made Exception #1 clear in Chapter 13; Exception #2 is the new stipulation we've been discussing):

Exception 1. We can’t count large increases in CSI which develop as a result of computer programs because minds designthe program parameters.

Exception 2. We can’t count large increases in CSI which develop in the history of life, because DNA was necessary to set those processes in motion.

So what can we count? Until he clarified the existence of Exception #2, I thought any general increases in CSI would count. However, it is now very hard for me to imagine any increase in information that would not be categorized within either Exception 1 or Exception 2². The only thing left that doesn’t fit into one of these two exceptions is the origin of life itself. The point of the book, I thought, was to bring other examples of increased CSI to bear on this very question.

With Meyer’s exceptions and the inability to bring general CSI increases to bear on the origin of life question, we also no longer have “positive³ experiments [which] provide causal adequacy of intelligent design” (p. 335, emphasis added).

So what are we left with? Are we not simply left with the question of whether the origin of life experiments show that information-rich molecules will arise in a test tube from chemicals off the shelf? Dr. Meyer, I think, says no, for reasons that are no longer clear to me other than that he’s given up on the science. I, on the other hand say, “Wait a while. Let the science play itself out before a scientifically based decision is made.” To be frank though, I am a little concerned that even if the right mix of materials is found to produce molecules that can spontaneously assemble in a manner that gives rise to complex specified information, Dr. Meyer or those who follow him will say, “Sorry, you can’t count that because it took a mind to create the conditions and it took a mind to mix them together in a test tube.” And with that we’ll have a new stipulation which most likely was in some manner implied in Signature in the Cell to begin with.⁴

The interesting thing about this is that Steve Meyer and I are probably really in almost the same exact position when it comes to our core beliefs. Obviously as fellow Christians, we both believe that there is a Mind behind the process. We both think that the history of life with its constant increase in complex specified information is a product of the activity of God. We both stand amazed at the majesty of creation and our love for the Creator who is personally involved not only in our own individual lives but those of our families and faith communities as well. We differ primarily in one regard. Steve thinks he has shown through scientific analysis that this Mind we both believe in must have been present and supernaturally active in the creation of information. I think the Mind (God) was present, but I can’t put the existence of God into a scientific experiment to demonstrate God's activity. Furthermore, unlike Steve, I have no pre-conceived ideas about whether God's,supernatural activity was necessary for creation of information. God, as I see it, may have chosen to create information bearing molecules indirectly through God’s natural activity in a manner that is analogous to the development of a baby or the growth of a tree from a seed.

In the end, our difference is simple, he thinks that the test tubes won’t ever deliver information rich molecules and I think it is too early to say. He has declared the matter more or less settled on the basis of scientific analysis. I consider the matter fully unsettled. But the most important thing of all has been settled and on this we both agree. This Mind we speak of is God’s Mind--God's Holy Spirit. That Spirit not only fills all of creation, but more specifically that Spirit fills us with his Presence and envelopes us in his love. This is cause for celebration and, with "sandals off," we each bow our heads in humble worship. Truly, we--all of us--are standing on holy ground.

Notes

1. Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith 62:276
2. Note to Steve: Does not the human brain count within Exception #2? After all, it arose in the history of life and its development depends upon DNA. If so, you might need an exception to the exception.
3. The term “positive” is used 21 times in the book. It is clearly important to the author that the evidence for intelligence associated with the origin of DNA be viewed not as absence of contrary evidence, but rather a piece of convincingly positive evidence that hinges upon the fact that CSI in general, can’t be built without a mind.
4. I’m really not trying to be facetious here. I really do think that’s what would happen. I can almost draft the stipulation now.

Early years

I grew up in northern British Columbia, Canada, in a small town called Terrace, where I spent a lot of time in the woods with my father and brother hunting and fishing. Little did I know how spoiled we were –Terrace and its environs are a world-class destination for outdoor pursuits, especially fishing. As a hunter, my father was always interested in patterns in nature: what animals fed on, where they moved at certain times, and so on. Even as a child I can remember being similarly interested in how nature worked. Often, while dad fished, I was the one brandishing a net, bucket at the ready, to see what critters I could scoop up and examine. While my peers at school wanted to be astronauts and firemen, I dreamed of being a scientist some day.

My local church setting was pretty much a wash when it came to science. Science was not held up as a potential vocation, but neither was it denigrated as suspect. Creation science did not seem to be a priority, but rather global missions. As such, science–faith issues were seldom, if ever, discussed in the church I grew up in. I can vaguely recall one dust-up over eschatology, which was perhaps the first time I realized that not all Christians agree on everything when it comes to interpreting the Bible. I cannot, however, recall any similar discussion about the means by which God created.

High school

Despite evolution being almost a complete non-issue in my local church, I seemed to acquire a generic, evangelical, anti-evolutionary position by default. Certainly I knew of no Christians who accepted it, and I can still recall the feeling of dread I would get even at hearing the word evolution spoken aloud. That word, in my mind, was effectively synonymous with atheism. Fortunately, even in high school biology class evolution seemed to be a complete non-issue too, for as far as I can recall evolution was not a subject I was exposed to in high school. In fact, in high school I found biology to be intensely boring – it seemed to me to be mere regurgitation of information. Chemistry and physics seemed much more interesting, and I suspect now the reason for the appeal they held for me then was that they were taught from their underlying principles: atomic theory, Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. What was missing was the theoretical underpinnings of biology: a way to organize the laundry list of information into a context. It would be a long time before I realized that evolution was the theoretical underpinning that was missing from my biology experience. Given my dread of the topic, had this been pressed on me in high school I may have never pursued a career in biology.

As a high school student I had left behind my childhood desire to be a scientist. After all, I knew no scientists, and had no notion of how one might become one. In my small-town, northern Canadian setting, a medical doctor was about as close as one came to a scientific career that I was aware of. Accordingly, I set my sights on medicine, and off I went to the University of British Columbia in the fall of 1992. Biology seemed a natural choice for an aspiring doctor, so that was what I chose.

One church incident that I do recall with great clarity happened just before I left for university. There were several recent grads in the congregation: some were headed to Bible College, and others, such as myself, were off to “secular” universities. Our congregation had a time of prayer for all of us, but the contrast was stark: prayers of thanksgiving and blessing for those bible-school bound, but for those of us heading into the lion’s den, prayers of supplication that we not lose our faith in the process. I can remember steeling myself for the upcoming battle, where professors tried to snare me with their atheistic teachings and peers likewise pressured me to give up my faith. One battle I knew was coming was the evolution one: certainly, as a biology student, this would be one of the challenges I would have to face.

University 101

To my delight, I found that university was not going to require me to hold my breath spiritually for four years. Soon I was involved with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and enjoying the friendship of many other Christian students. Biology, however, remained boring and laundry-list like. My grades in chemistry and physics were still higher than those within my declared major of biology. The one bright spot was that evolution barely seemed to rate a mention except in passing. Certainly no compelling evidence for evolution was ever mentioned – professors seemed too intent on teaching the details of their fields to provide a wider evolutionary context. Even the introductory survey courses seemed more intent on a mere description of biodiversity rather than any detailed understanding of how that diversity arose. I did note that there was a 400-level evolution course, but thankfully it was an optional elective. Avoiding the evolution issue was easier than I had thought: I simply skipped taking that elective.

At the start of my third year, with my grades still marginal for medical school, I somehow decided to upgrade into a biology “honors” student. This meant two things: working on an undergraduate research thesis with a faculty member, and attending an “honors seminar” class with other students in the same program.

Experiencing my first taste of research was electrifying: here at last was genuine science! Not long after, my upper-level classes seemed a lot more interesting and relevant, and also much easier. My grades improved dramatically, and medical school looked to be a live option once more – except for the fact that my childhood interest in science had blossomed again.

Standing against evolution

The undergraduate thesis seminar class included an assignment that required students to familiarize themselves with the research of one of the professors in the department. As the list of potential faculty and their research interests was read, one caught my attention: the work of Dolph Schluter on experimental evolution. I decided to take the opportunity to score a few hits on the so-called “theory” by signing up for this topic. What followed can only be described now as a painful memory: full of ignorance and confidence, I trotted out every long-refuted, anti-evolutionary argument in the book (in fact, if memory serves, my “research” was nothing beyond skimming one anti-evolutionary book for its arguments). I remember that the class was quite engaged by the presentation, and there was some vigorous back-and-forth with some of the students who knew the science better than I because of their research work. I can only imagine what the thesis class faculty supervisor was thinking at the time. The worst part was that Dolph himself arrived early for his own presentation to the class, which was to follow my own. As such, he was able to hear a good portion of my nonsense.

Fortunately for me, Dolph had no interest in what would have been a very easy dressing-down. Rather, he restrained himself to a few words to the rest of the class on their lack of knowledge. Personally, I thought I had scored a victory for the faith, against the evils of evolution.

In the next post in this series, I’ll describe my introduction to, and enthusiastic embrace of, the Intelligent Design Movement.

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.

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. 1 Peter 3:15 (NIV)

Probably no other modern Christian thinker fulfills this admonition better than C. S. Lewis as he engaged in what may be called intellectual evangelism, pre-evangelism, natural theology, or apologetics. Consider a well-known passage in Lewis:

If all the world were Christian it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now—not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground—would be to throw down our weapons [and have] no defense against … intellectual attacks … Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work … against the cool intellect on the other side …¹

Lewis is saying here that Christian faith has intellectual content that can effectively engage the best information from all fields of knowledge as well as opposing points of view. This article explores how Lewis relates historic, orthodox belief—or, “mere Christianity”—to the debate between Evolution and intelligent design, and then shows how he incorporates these subjects into his Trinitarian vision of reality.

Early in the twentieth century, some religious groups objected to Evolution because it contradicts a literal interpretation of Genesis. The “creation science” movement was formed to provide scientific support for this position, which included commitment to a young earth (approximately 6,000–10,000 years old), the fixity of biological species, and the direct creation of Adam. The Creation Museum near Cincinnati, Ohio, energetically marketed in parts of the Christian community, represents a relatively recent expression of this approach. In the late 1990s, the “intelligent design” (ID) movement emerged, still rejecting evolutionary principles and purporting to have a hot, new scientific argument for God.

What is Evolution, scientifically speaking? All too briefly, cosmic evolution refers to the process of development of the universe—beginning with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and, through many stages, producing all of the chemical elements, all of the galaxies, planets, and other constituents of the cosmos. Biological evolution refers to the origin and development of life on this planet, through many forms and species, including the appearance of human beings on one branch of the Tree of Life with common genetic ties to chimpanzees and other primates. All of the natural sciences converge and tell this story, from astronomy to geology, from paleontology to biology.

Lewis on Intelligent Design

Lewis stands within the long Christian tradition of natural theology: the enterprise of giving reasons for the existence of an Ultimate Being or God, reasons that are based on some feature of the world rather than on special revelation.² The classic approaches may be summarized as follows:

• Cosmological Argument: God as the cause of the existence of the universe
• Moral Argument: God as the source of moral law and our consciousness of it
• Teleological Argument: God as the cause of rational, lawful, end-directed order in the universe.

Obviously, the teleological argument is about a Transcendent Intelligence that accounts for the rational order of nature—and supreme intelligence is obviously a characteristic of the theistic deity. Historically, labels such as “argument from design” and “design argument” have also been used to refer to some versions of teleological argument. The various arguments for an Intelligence beyond nature should be seen as forming a “family” of teleological or design-type arguments. In the past several decades, a new approach, drawing from science and articulated in elaborate mathematical detail, has been added to the family:

• The Fine-Tuning Argument: God as the source of the surprising precision and interrelation of nature’s physical constants, from the beginning state of the universe onward, which makes the universe exactly suited for life, including intelligent life. (The anthropic principle involved here is that the universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life.)³

Clearly, natural theology as a whole includes a number of different kinds of arguments for an Ultimate Being. The cosmological argument keys on the power of the Ultimate Being while the moral argument focuses on its moral nature. Additionally, several arguments fall within the family of design-type arguments. Whereas the intelligence of the Ultimate Being is implicit in the cosmological and moral arguments, it is the explicit conclusion of design-type arguments.

As a classicist, Lewis knew about such traditional lines of reasoning pointing to an Intelligence behind nature. He also added some reasoning of his own, arguing in Miracles that, in order for human thought to be rational, it must be free: we must be able to form beliefs by a logical process that is not completely determined by physical processes in the brain. However, a naturalistic worldview, observes Lewis, assumes that matter and its operations are the foundation of all phenomena, including what we call rational thought. It is at this very point that he says Naturalism is self-defeating: it undercuts rational thought by subsuming it under physical causation and therefore removes any basis for regarding human thought as rational, and for regarding the naturalist’s belief in Naturalism as rational.⁴ Lewis further argues that finite rationality is best explained by something outside of nature which must be more like a Mind than anything else. This is Lewis’s “argument from reason”—not technically a design-type argument but a closely related consideration pertaining to a Transcendent Intelligence.

Lewis also advanced a fascinating “argument from desire”: it begins with the idea that every natural human desire (such as hunger and thirst) corresponds to some real object which satisfies that desire (food, water). But human beings also have a deep natural longing which cannot be satisfied by finite and temporal things, no matter how good or beautiful, and can only be satisfied by something Infinite. This poignant human longing—which Lewis calls by the German word Sehnsucht—is best understood as the deep desire for enduring joy, which, of course, the temporal realm does not contain. The conclusion, then, is that there must be an Ultimate Being, which people call God, whose existence alone can satisfy this longing. I cannot pursue the nuances of this argument here, but certainly the satisfaction of this natural desire of rational creatures would require a rational Being. So, the idea of a Transcendent Intelligence is implicit in this interesting piece of reasoning.

Additionally, all readers and interpreters of Lewis know how effectively he employed his own version of the moral argument. From the arsenal of traditional natural theology, he seemed to prefer this argument, which launches the discussion in Mere Christianity and permeates Abolition of Man.⁵ And a Supreme Being as a Source of Moral Law would necessarily be rational in nature. A fair summary of Lewis, then, on the possibility of arguing for an Intelligence beyond nature is that he embraced several lines of reasoning in which this theme is either implicit or explicit. Interestingly, however, none of these lines of reasoning are really design-type arguments—and we shall explore the reasons for this in my next post.

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, “On Learning in Wartime” in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper (1949; revised, New York: HarperOne, 1980), 47–63.

2. See Peterson et al., Reason and Religious Belief: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8 and 90–122. It should be noted that the Reformed objection to natural theology (advanced by Alvin Plantinga and others) argues both that some assumptions underlying the argument strategy of natural theology are too strong and that there are conditions under which a person is rationally warranted in believing in God without providing an argument for God’s existence. But this simply means that we must refine our understanding of the project of natural theology and its arguments, not that there is no viable conception of natural theology. For further discussion of this approach, see Reason and Religious Belief, 123–4. To consult key primary sources on natural theology as well as the Reformed objection, consult the companion volume: Peterson et al., eds., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Parts 5 and 6.

3. See Peterson, Reason and Religious Belief, 206–8. See also Peterson, Philosophy of Religion, 222–30. Owen Gingerich, “What is the ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe, and how does it serve as a ‘pointer to God’?”

4. This argument is made in “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism” in Lewis, Miracles (1947; reprint, San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1960), chap. 3. More recently, Alvin Plantinga has offered his own argument, quite reminiscent of Lewis’s, that Naturalism is self-defeating: Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against Naturalism is that the conjunction of biological evolutionary theory and philosophical naturalism makes the probability low that we have reliable cognitive faculties that can produce warranted beliefs. On the other hand, there is no such low probability on the conjunction of biological evolution and Theism. Plantinga first proposed the argument in Warrant and Proper Function but improves it in his Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 228–9. For a helpful discussion of this approach, see James Beilby, ed., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). For a book-length debate which involves this argument, see Daniel Dennett and Alvin Plantinga, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011).

5. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book I; The Abolition of Man (1947; reprint, New York: HarperOne, 1974).

First, I wholeheartedly believe that God planned and created the world. I am persuaded that the Creator has left clear “fingerprints” of His creativity for all to see as shown especially in Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and Behe’s The Edge of Evolution.…To me Meyer’s points seem pretty convincing therefore I am having a hard time with this.

Second, as I see it, many people believe in evolution because they are led to believe that “science assures them it is so,” but they tend to rest in that belief, even when counter-evidence is presented, because they feel they’ve been liberated from moral accountability to God, and don’t want to give up that liberty.

The two points seem wise in their simplicity. The first, in essence, is that the science of evolutionary biology is flawed. When done correctly, as it is by leaders of the Intelligent Design Movement, he believes science unambiguously demonstrates the existence of an external intelligence. The second, in essence, is that apostates seek an excuse to do as they please with no accountability. Belief in evolution provides that justification and so it is protected by those who want to live life on their terms and not God’s.

On the surface this makes perfect sense. Clearly the letter writer is a wise person who is very good at getting to the heart of an argument. But is he right, and if he is not, are there consequences?

It is true that Stephen Meyer’s points in Signature in the Cell are written in a manner that make them “seem pretty convincing.” However, we have devoted much space here to demonstrate that his science is fundamentally flawed. We, like Steve and Michael Behe, are followers of Jesus, so we must not take criticizing our brothers lightly, especially when it is carried out in the public sphere. However, the scientists who are doing the work they describe consider their depiction of the research scientifically naïve and we, with full respect for each of them as persons, are convinced of this too. Christians are mistaken if they build their faith around the science of a tiny group of scientific rebels who specialize in telling them what they long to hear. Christians need not try to overturn the scientific applecart. Many believers find much fulfillment in examining its contents and rejoicing in the beauty it reveals. A Christian world-view is what makes the apples sparkle, and it certainly does not require that we turn the cart upside down.

With regard to the second point our letter-writer makes, as I see it he is correct in one respect, but wrong in another. It is true that “belief in evolution” is used by some to prop up their desire to live life their way and not God’s. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, they are looking for an excuse to become—as the serpent put it to Eve—“like God,” and to be masters of their own fate. The perception that evolution is incompatible with Christianity does provide many with what seems to be the perfect excuse. They do indeed use that excuse to prop up their non-Christian lifestyle. However, the crutch they use to support their rejection of the Christian life is not belief in evolution itself, but rather that Christianity and evolution are incompatible. That is the crutch. Our letter-writer chooses to focus on disproving evolutionary theory and he thinks by doing so he is removing the crutch. We in the BioLogos community choose to remove the crutch itself. Evangelical Christianity and evolution are compatible and by demonstrating this, the crutch is removed.

Still the letter-writer and I agree on one important matter. The perception that evolution is inconsistent with Christian theology is a crutch used by many to justify their rebellion against God. Where does this crutch come from, however? Who manufactures this crutch? If the crutch is simply the proposition that evolution and real Christianity are incompatible, where did that idea come from? Did it not come from us? Many Christians have been telling non-believers that belief in evolution is inconsistent with real Christianity. So if non-believers are looking for an excuse to justify their apostate lifestyle—and they are—Christians have played right into their hand, by passing them the crutch they are seeking. If evolution is true, they hear many Christians say, theology falls apart. If evolution is true, they hear many Christians say, the Bible is untrustworthy. Many evangelical Christians have poured their financial resources into the construction of organizations dedicated to building crutches for non-believers. I think that selling the principle that if evolution is true Christianity fails, is profoundly harmful. Heaven forbid that we Christians should be creating the very crutch that non-believers long to have, but I think that is precisely what we are doing. All of science makes it abundantly clear that evolution has taken place. People everywhere are looking for crutches that will allow them to follow in Eve’s footsteps. And what do we Christians do? We pass them a crutch. Unwittingly, it is almost as though we give them license to conclude: “If evolution is true, God’s Word is a lie, and I am free to do anything I want.” God help us!

So providing the crutch for non-believers to lean on is a well-intentioned strategic error that has no benefit and likely does much harm. However, I am even more concerned about something else related to our construction of these crutches. We teach our Christian young people about the importance of the crutch. We spend years giving them all the details of why a meaningful Christian life stands or falls on this crutch. Real Christianity, we tell our young people, hinges on the perception that evolution is incompatible with Christianity. Young people learn every intimate detail of why this crutch is so essential to their walk with God. The next thing we know is that Christian young people are leaning on the crutch too—just like the apostates. Meaningful Christianity stands or falls—we tell them—on the falseness of evolution.

Then we send them off to university.

There they watch as their professors show them that all that they have been told about evolution is a caricature of what is really known. Step by step, they are shown why almost all biology scholars have concluded that evolution has occurred. With that, the very crutch that had been used to prop up their Christian faith as teenagers (the perception that real Christianity and evolution are incompatible), becomes the exact tool that Satan needs as he comes along with his words first posed in the story of the Garden: “You don’t need God.” “You can live life your way. “ “Do whatever feels good.” “Did God really say…?” “ Is there really a God who holds you accountable anyway?”

With that, the crutch they learned to lean on as young people now becomes a prop for a different life. It holds up their new unbelief as they embark upon the life of the prodigal son or prodigal daughter. All we can do is hope and pray that they come back into the loving arms of the waiting Father having thrown away the prop that we, heaven forbid, constructed according to our own well-reasoned, good-intentioned, but-oh-so-unfortunate and oh-so-misguided ways.

I pray for the day when all Christians will throw away this crutch. I don’t mean that I’m praying they will come to accept that God created through evolution. Most people are not scientists and they are too busy doing other important things to explore the science. What I do pray for, though, is that we will stop portraying that belief in evolution is not consistent with biblical Christianity. This proposition is exactly what gives atheists the excuse they are looking for, and this far-too-human proposition ought not be propping up young people’s walk with God.

We don’t need props based on one view of how to interpret Genesis 1-3. What we need is Jesus. In Christ alone, our hope is found. He is our light, our strength, our song. He alone is our Cornerstone and the Solid Rock on which we stand. He holds us firm through fiercest doubt sand ferocious storms. Let’s throw away the crutches and let’s stop making new ones.

My Christian brother ended his letter with these words, “I think it will be hard to sustain that evolution and creation are compatible.” This is a personal statement and I appreciate the careful attention he has given to this matter. Still, I hope and pray that his view on this subject will be less prevalent, so that non-believers will no longer use it as their excuse for living life their way and not God’s. And I hope and pray that children and young people won’t be made to feel that the choice is between his view and a life of apostasy.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

In Christ alone, we put our hope. The question of whether creation and evolution are compatible is another matter altogether. Regardless of how we each personally feel about that matter, let’s pray that it not be used as a crutch to support apostasy, or that which is deemed necessary to the vitality of a young person’s walk with Jesus.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user dmitri66

Along the same lines, the practice of natural science blesses the human community through the discovery of such natural symbols, though they may be unrecognized at first. The careful consideration of the natural world does not make God’s presence irrefutable, but it does continually give us new conceptual tools we can use to understand our relationship to Him and to each other. The careful, thorough, and even unromantic investigation of the created world is not an act of hubris, then, but a sometimes-unwitting answer to God’s call to seek Him in all our ways.

One such natural symbol capturing the imagination of people across the age and faith spectra wasn’t a discovery in the sense of being uncovered by scientific skill, but was an accident dredged up in a fisherman’s net off the coast of South Africa in 1938. Previously known from Devonian to Cretaceous-era fossils and assumed to have been extinct, a fresh-caught coelacanth was quickly recognized as something unusual, and later identified by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. Further searching and more accidental finds have established that there are several populations of this ancient fish living around the Indian Ocean, and numerous books, magazine articles, and displays of preserved specimens have fueled fascination with the fish among many budding naturalists, myself and my own sons included.

Part of the coelacanth’s charm is that it gives us a look at physical features (its maneuverable lobed fins, especially) that paleontologists posit were important steps in life’s colonization of the land from the sea. Other, more recent fossil finds have done more to “fill in the blanks” of that story, but when divers swimming with the fish describe its distinctive and unique “cross-step” swimming style as being like the alternating left-right gate of terrestrial, four-footed creatures, one gets a sense of seeing theory and very ancient biological history come to life.¹

But what is remarkable about the coelacanth and can be a parable for our faith is not its gift-from-a-time-machine novelty, but its sheer longevity and persistence. When the coelacanth is called a “living fossil,” there is often a barely-suppressed implication that it should have died out long ago, superseded as it has been by more advanced creatures. It seems to upset expectations that nature’s arrow flies in one direction, mercilessly weeding out the old in favor of the new. It is “primitive” after all, surpassed by all the myriad creatures that now roam both the sea and the land, and that seem to us so much more efficient and fitted to their environmental niches, or (as with the shark, or the Asian carp, or the rat) for seemingly all of the niches they can reach. Yet at least one branch of this once-widespread order lives on: slowly, methodically, usually out of sight, but never actually driven to extinction despite what must have been the best efforts of the fearsome creatures that roamed the seas in the time we thought was its own.

If the study of the development of life on earth has taught us anything, it is that the natural world is resilient and creative, but in important ways also conservative. The creation does not stand still and is constantly in a state of becoming, but it does not move inexorably in a “forward” direction or determine that what it has done in the past is inferior or obsolete simply on account of having been stepping stones to further developments later. In this, a careful understanding of the natural world is consistent with a genuinely Christian ethic. For while we moderns tend to think in terms of obsolescence and progress, of winners and losers, Christians worship a God who has told us and shown us that He cares for the “losers” every bit as much as he cares for the “winners.” His values are not defined by progress but by fulfillment, and that done via His presence rather than natural processes.

The coelacanth gives us an image of a kind of natural faithfulness, then— something to remind us of the perseverance of our faith and of the church in an age that has declared religion obsolete or dangerous. The fish we see in the waters of the Indian Ocean are not, in fact, exactly the same fish we find in the fossils, and each population is distinctive and adapted to its particular home; yet it is unmistakably in continuity with its primordial kin. And though we marvel at its ancestors’ place as a precursor of so many other now-dissimilar creatures, we can also have a deep respect for the way its answers to life’s central problems are still elegant and effective. Like the coelacanth, faith in the biblical God has been buried at one time or another, declared extinct (or at least on its way there), and frequently cited as (at best) a primitive forbear of all the improved ideas that have come after; but faith, too, is not only a persistent part of the human experience, but also an elegant, true one, as well.

The coelacanth is an imperfect and partial symbol, for sure. It is even claimed that the coelacanth is a different kind of marker of God, that its existence in the present disproves the old age of the earth and casts serious doubt on the fossil record itself. But as an icon of sorts, the coelacanth is neither as rich nor as beautiful if it’s only a few thousand years old and taken to be evidence against the long span of geologic and biological time. Its prehistoric lineage reminds us that what is ancient may also be present and timeless; it is the very fact of its “long obedience in the same direction” (with apologies to Eugene Peterson) that makes it a symbol, a parable, a guidepost for its fellow creatures.

With our more robust brains we may understand “obedience” to be much more than simply living—being who we were created to be. But perhaps the coelacanth can remind us that obedience is never less than that, either. Perhaps it can remind us that the essence of our creatureliness is neither our progressive advancement on one hand, nor a determination to resist all change on the other hand, but the essential fact that we were crafted by the Lord’s hand and remain there by His grace, His mercy and His love.

The fired porcelain coelacanth pictured above was made in 2007 by Mark’s son Callaway Sprinkle when he was 10 years old and thoroughly entranced with the fish and its story. While the visible side was inspired by the coloration of the Comoran Island population, the reverse features the brown colors of the Indonesian coelacanths.

Notes

1. Carolyn Butler, “Ancient Swimmers.” National Geographic 219:3 (March 2011), p. 93.

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.

The Bible begins with a resounding declaration that the universe is the creation of the one almighty God, who had only to say so and it came into being: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth... And God said... and it was so.’ Ignoring the question of the timescale and possible mechanisms of creation, we find that this theme runs through the whole Bible and is developed in various ways so as to fill out its significance. Perhaps it is most famously exemplified in the New Testament by the prologue of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.’

The biblical writers are united in their insistence that the cosmos reveals the reality and power of the Creator God. Romans 1:19-23 sets this out as clearly as any biblical passage. Here it is stated that all people are under God’s wrath when they have turned away from: ‘what may be known about God (and) is plain to them... For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.’ This surely means that people can perceive, however vaguely, that there must be an all-powerful divine being behind the material world. This knowledge is accessible to all people irrespective of their cultural or educational background, and no knowledge of science is required to make such knowledge available; it comes by simple observation and personal experience of the wonders of the world around us.

Most of the sermons in the New Testament are addressed to Jews, or to those more generally who accepted Old Testament teachings, so that the truth that this is a world created by God is taken almost for granted in this context. Strikingly, in the only two recorded sermons to audiences that did not have this background, at Lystra and Athens (Acts 14:14-18; 17:22-31), Paul does stress the fact that this is a world created by God and that his listeners should respond to that fact, acknowledging that the creator God is not to be compared with lesser ‘deities’, and therefore they should seek to find him.

The Old Testament repeatedly states as fact that this universe is created by God, but is at pains to stress that it is the God, Jahweh, and not any of the other so-called gods, who is responsible both for its creation and its continuing functioning. In the Old Testament there is no real attempt to argue for the fact that this is a created world, rather it is treated as almost self-evident: certainly a truth that everyone is made aware of from observation. Psalm 19 expresses it like this:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Ps. 19:1-3)

The biblical claim is that all people in all cultures and at all times have some awareness of the fact that God is behind the universe, based on their own personal observation.

Creation and Providence

It is important to realize that the idea of creation and the continual control of the world – what we often call providence – merge into one another in biblical thought. So Paul, in his speech at Lystra, says that: ‘The living God who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them... has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons’(Acts 14:15,17). This title ‘the living God’ is often used by the biblical writers to stress that God is active in the world. Similarly, when Paul was speaking at Athens, he said that: ‘The God who made the world and every- thing in it...gives all men life and breath and everything else’ (Acts 17:24,25).

When we are called to acknowledge God as ‘our Creator’ we are being called not only to acknowledge that without him we and the universe would not exist, but also that he has brought us into being as we now are, even though (as we now know) it is the result of a long series of genetic and environmental processes. To the biblical writers the processes of ‘nature’ that science is exploring today are as much the work of God as the existence of the world itself. It is he who sends the seasons, as he has promised, so that when he is thanked for the harvest it is not just for the fact that there is the cycle of life that gives a crop, but that in his goodness this has happened once more. God is the Great Provider; hence the word providence.

There is a huge difference between the concept of God as merely the great designer and the biblical idea of the living God. As Calvin expressed the point: ‘without proceeding to his Providence we cannot understand the full force of what is meant by God being the Creator’. God creatively maintains the world so as to provide for living things. ‘He sustains all things’; as Hebrews 1:3 expresses it. If he did not, it would all dissolve into chaos and disappear. As Jesus himself said: ‘He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ (Matt. 5:45, note the present tense).

So the fact that the land can be fruitful and that it is in fact so are two aspects of the same care of God for his world that make it a place fit for life. ‘For this is what the Lord says – he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited’(Isa. 45:18). God is presented as the One who has deliberately brought into being and maintains a world that can support life. So the state of the world is evidence not only for the existence and power of God but also for his kindness and care for his creation.

Design

Does this include an argument for design? Clearly if it is God who has created and rules ‘nature’, deliberately for the good of living things, including humanity, then his design is implied in the way that things are organized. But this is a very different stance from those arguments for design which seek to show that some of the particular findings of science point to a Great Designer. Instead the biblical writers see the existence, and the generosity of God to humanity, in the whole panoply of the created order and its ongoing processes.

“Basically every gene, every new protein fold… there is nothing of significance that we can show [that] can be had in that gradualistic way. It’s all a mirage. None of it happens that way.”

The importance of this line of argumentation for the IDM can be seen clearly in Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell (published in 2009). In this book, Meyer claims that an intelligent agent is responsible for the information we observe in DNA because, in his words, natural mechanisms “will not suffice” to explain it:

Since the case for intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of biological information necessary to build novel forms of life depends, in part, upon the claim that functional (information-rich) genes and proteins cannot be explained by random mutation and natural selection, this design hypothesis implies that selection and mutation will not suffice to produce genetic information … (p. 495)

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this argument for Meyer in Signature, and for the IDM as a whole. In the conclusion to a pivotal chapter entitled “The Best Explanation” Meyer presents the following summary of his case:

Since the intelligent-design hypothesis meets both the causal-adequacy and causal-existence criteria of a best explanation, and since no other competing explanation meets these conditions as well –or at all–it follows that the design hypothesis provides the best, most causally adequate explanation of the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life on earth. Indeed, our uniform experience affirms that specified information … always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind, and not a strictly material process. So the discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source. It follows that the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is that it too had an intelligent source. (p. 347)

Put more simply, Meyer claims that if we see specified information, we infer design, since we know of no mechanism that can produce specified information through an unintelligent, natural process. As a logical argument, Meyer’s position only works if (and this is a big if) – his premises are correct.

The issue is that Meyer’s case is open to refutation by counterexample, and even one counterexample would suffice. If any natural mechanism can be shown to produce “functional, information-rich genes and proteins”, then intelligent design is no longer the best explanation for the origin of information we observe in DNA, by Meyer’s own stated criteria. His entire (500+ page) argument would simply unravel.

The obvious problem for Meyer’s case is that biologists are well aware of a natural mechanism that does add functional, specified information to DNA sequences (and in some cases, creates new genes de novo): natural selection acting on genetic variation produced through random mutation. Not only are biologists aware of some examples of natural selection adding functional information to DNA, this effect has been observed time and again, and in some cases it has documented in exquisite detail. When I reviewed Signature for the American Scientific Affiliation journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (PSCF) what struck me, repeatedly, was that Meyer made no mention of the evidence for natural selection as a mechanism to increase biological information. I fully expected him to dispute the evidence, certainly – but the surprise for me was that he simply denied it to be sufficient without addressing any evidence. The closest Meyer comes in addressing natural selection in Signature is in a section discussing evolutionary algorithms used to simulate evolution. As I said in my review:

Meyer’s denial of random mutation and natural selection as an information generator notwithstanding, in a discussion about evolutionary computer simulations, Meyer makes the following claim:

If computer simulations demonstrate anything, they subtly demonstrate the need for an intelligent agent to elect some options and exclude others- that is, to create information.

Employing this argument, Meyer claims that any mechanism that prefers one variant over another creates information. As such, the ample experimental evidence for natural selection as a mechanism to favor certain variants over others certainly qualifies as such a generator. Meyer, however, makes no mention of the evidence for natural selection in the book.(pp. 278-279)

In the PSCF review I went on to point out a few examples of known instances in biology where random mutation and natural selection have indeed led to substantial increases in biological information, but the limitations of space in that format precluded me from exploring those examples in more detail, or from presenting that information at a level readily accessible to non-specialists. In this series of posts I will attempt to remedy that shortcoming by exploring several examples in depth. The question of how new specified information arises in DNA, far from being an “enigma”, is one of great interest to biologists. While the IDM avoids this evidence to present a flawed argument for design, responding to this flawed argument provides an excellent opportunity to discuss some particularly elegant experiments in this area.

Of course, it should be noted that describing how specified information can arise through natural means does not in any way imply God’s absence from the process. After all, natural processes are equally a manifestation of God’s activity as what one would call supernatural events. So-called “natural” laws are what Christians understand to be a description of the ongoing, regular and repeatable activity of God. As such, the dichotomy presented in ID writings of “naturalism” versus theism is a false one: is not God the Author of nature, after all?

In the next post in this series, we will examine an ongoing experiment over twenty years in the making: the Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) on E. Coli conducted in the laboratory of Richard Lenski at Michigan State University.

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.”

The theory of Intelligent Design has gained a great deal of credibility in the evangelical world since it first became widely known in the early 1990s; much of that credibility has been based on the belief that a solid theoretical foundation has been laid for Intelligent Design in William Dembski’s 1998 book, The Design Inference. This article challenges that belief by questioning some of Dembski’s assumptions, pointing out some limitations of his analysis, and arguing that a design inference is necessarily a faith-based rather than a scientific inference.

The Design Inference begins with two broadly accessible chapters that introduce the main ideas behind Dembski’s method for inferring design. These are followed by four technical chapters that provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for the method. The book is not a contribution to either mathematics or science per se; rather it is an attempt to extend scientific methodology in a new direction.

The basic task of science is to account for natural phenomena. “Account for” typically means to provide causative explanations for phenomena and to enable prediction of other phenomena. Typically, causative explanations are mechanisms – for example, today we generally accept the sun’s gravity as a causative explanation for the phenomenon of planets in our solar system staying in their orbits. Dembski’s ambitious goal is to increase the repertoire of available causative explanations by providing a rigorous method acceptable to scientists that would allow intelligent design to be recognized as a legitimate cause.

The method is a variation on the standard method of statistical inference, which can be explained by way of an example. The Salk and Sabin polio vaccines, developed in the 1950s, had to be tested on a large number of people to determine their efficacy. 400,000 children in grades one through three took part. Participating communities were divided into test and control populations, and the testing was “double blind.” That is, some communities received the vaccine while others received a placebo, and which group a community belonged to was hidden from both the doctors as well as from the families of the children who participated. This ensured that doctors were not influenced in their diagnoses by knowledge about the vaccine.

The method proceeded by tentatively assuming that the vaccine was ineffective; that is, children in each community were assumed to be equally likely to contract polio after receiving their injection. Of course, this does not mean that exactly the same numbers of children would be infected in each community, but if the number of children who contracted polio in the vaccine group was significantly below those who contracted polio in the control group, the researchers would conclude that the vaccine was effective.

“Significantly” means that the difference was large enough to be very unlikely by chance. When the testing period was complete, the rate of polio incidence children was 28 per 100,000 in the vaccinated communities and 71 per 100,000 children in the control communities. Statisticians were able to calculate that the probability of this great a difference happening by chance was less than one in a million. Thus they concluded that the vaccine had been effective. Due to the Salk and later Sabin vaccines, polio has today been eliminated in most of the world.

Note how the procedure goes: The researchers first designed an experiment (in this case testing 400,000 children divided into vaccine and control communities). They then identified a pattern that would demonstrate that a factor other than chance was operative (in this case the pattern was that the number of children contracting polio in vaccine communities would be significantly less than in the control communities.) Then they did the experiment. Because the difference was extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance, they inferred that the vaccine was effective.

The polio researchers first designed the experiment, and then looked for the pattern after doing the experiment. The researchers thus could not have rigged the results because the pattern they sought was clearly described before doing the experiment. Dembski’s design inference, however, looks backward in time – it takes already existing patterns and seeks an explanation other than chance, namely design.

The way Dembski addresses this problem is by requiring that patterns be specified, that is, describable in a way that is independent of the process of the observations. For example, suppose someone shows you a target attached to a tree with an arrow in the bulls’ eye. If the arrow was shot first and the target placed around it, the archer’s claim of being a good shot would be invalid. But if the target were posted first and then he hit the bulls’ eye, he would be able to claim excellent marksmanship. In the second case, the specification (the target) was independent of the shot; in the first case it was not.

So to identify the presence of design, Dembski replaces the prior description of a pattern that statistical inference uses with a specified description. He still uses the presence of small probabilities in the same way. (He includes quite a lengthy discussion of “how small is small.” While interesting, it doesn’t bear on our discussion here.) He summarizes his design inference with the following “explanatory filter”:

Figure 1. Dembski’s explanatory filter. HP means “high probability.” This diamond selects phenomena that can be accounted for by “laws of nature.” IP means “intermediate probability.” These are events like flipping five heads in a row with a coin: they do not involve laws of nature, they do involve chance, but the likelihood is not as small as Dembski wants to require in order to identify design. SP means “small probability” and sp means “specified” as discussed above.

So let’s suppose we have an event and want to test it for design. We first see whether it is the result of a law of nature. If not, we test it to see if it involves an intermediate level probability; if so we attribute the event to chance. Lastly if it is of very small probability and is specified, the explanatory filter attributes it to design. If it reaches the sp/SP diamond but fails either the small probability or specification test, the filter follows the same convention as statistics and attributes it to chance due to lack of sufficient evidence to say otherwise.

The explanatory filter seems straightforward but it includes two fatal flaws, one involving the small probability requirement and the other involving the three way classification – regularity, chance, and design. We’ll examine these flaws next time.

In the 12th century, the Danish king set aside a large area of forest along the eastern coast of the island of Zealand, as a Royal Hunting grounds. The area was fenced-off a few hundred years later, and is now open to the public. Fortunately for me, I live close to the “Deer Park,” and early in the morning, before many people get out of bed, I go for a run there. I am often truly impressed by what I see in nature, such as the majestic stare of a stag looking at me, as I go by, or the noise and sight of a flock of geese flying overhead. As an individual, I have no problem saying that what we see around us can point towards transcendence – there is grandeur and beauty. When discussing the Intelligent Design movement with my oldest brother, Steve, he asked me what was wrong with the idea that we can see God in nature—that is, that the goodness and design we see around us is surely an argument pointing towards God. I told him I don't have problems with this line of thinking. Having thought about this some, I realized that this idea is very common in the Bible, and for example Jesus often seemed to point to this in parables. However, as a scientist, I am deeply skeptical of claims that one can use science to somehow ‘prove’ God exists (or to ‘prove’ there is no God, for that matter). In 1661, around the same time the Danish king fenced-off the area around the “Deer Park,” one of the first chemists, Robert Boyle, wrote a book called The Sceptical Chemist. (Hence the title of this review.) Boyle was a devout Christian as well as a very good scientist; I will come back to Boyle later.

This brings me to mention the target audience of this review. Of course anyone can read this, but it is intended mainly for educated readers who are interested in the science/religion dialogue, and in particular are interested in Intelligent Design, and either have read or want to read The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, by Michael Behe (Free Press, New York, 2007). I have heard from some of my friends and family that they find this book “convincing” from a scientific point of view. Before I go into a discussion of the book, I want to give the reader a bit more perspective about myself. I grew up in Springdale, Arkansas, and am the youngest of five children. Some (not all) of the members of my family are “young earth creationists,” that is, they think that the world is less than 10,000 years old. I first heard of Mike Behe about 25 years ago, when I was a Ph.D. student, working on showing that alternative DNA helical structures could exist inside of living cells. Behe had published a paper with Gary Felsenfeld, showing that methylation of certain DNA sequences could greatly facilitate the formation of left-handed Z-DNA, and that Z-DNA did not like to be wrapped around the nucleosome. Probably for most people, that last sentence doesn't make much sense, but for me, this was a paper that I was very fond of, as these results pointed in the direction of perhaps some sort of biological meaning. I eventually got my Ph.D. (in biochemistry/molecular biology from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine), did a post-doc at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford University, and about 12 years ago moved to Denmark, where I have been the leader of the comparative microbial genomics group at CBS (the Center for Biological Sequence analysis, a bioinformatics center in the Department of Systems Biology, at the Technical University of Denmark).

Now that I've laid down my philosophical and personal perspective I can get on with the review. I feel that this is a necessary background as, after I reviewed Darwin's Black Box more than 10 years ago, I was accused by several readers of being critical of Behe not based on the science, but because I “wanted to promote atheism,” which is certainly not the case. I will struggle to give what is written in Edge of Evolution a fair hearing - let's see how well the scientific evidence supports what is written in the book.

First, I want to start on a positive note - there are (at least) two things that I liked about the book:

1. Behe does a good job of describing the logical outcome of thinking in contemporary molecular biology. For example, IF in fact DNA is really some sort of computer code, where did this information come from, how is it maintained, and Who wrote it? IF in fact the mutational frequency of DNA is in the range of 1 change per hundred million base-pairs (that is, the DNA polymerase incorporates the “wrong” base about once ever hundred million times), then how can we explain the incredible diversity we see around us?

2. Behe is writing from the point of view of a non-materialist. Thus, he seems to think that there is more to the world than what we see around us, and this is in contrast to many other vocal atheistic scientists

I will now make my way through the text, in order of the chapters. In my opinion, the book starts well, and then begins to veer off in strange directions - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Chapter 1 - The Elements of Darwinism

I agree with Behe when he says that “Darwin's theory has to be sifted carefully, because it's actually a mixture of several, unrelated, entirely separate ideas”: random mutation, natural selection, and common descent. He then goes on to say that of the latter, “in brief, the evidence for common descent seems compelling,” but that he feels “random mutation is extremely limited.” Later in this chapter, he states “Evolution from a common ancestor, via changes in DNA, is VERY well supported. It may or may not be random.” [page 12, emphasis in the original] This will in fact be the main focus of the rest of the book - whether “random mutation” alone can generate enough diversity on which natural selection can work , in order for evolution to occur. So just to flesh this out a bit—in Behe's defense, clearly he is not a “young earth” creationist, who thinks that the world is less than 10,000 years old. He has no problem with the world being about 4.5 billion years old, and life slowly evolving from the first single-cell bacteria appearing almost as soon as fossils could form, through another 4 billion years as mostly single-celled or tiny microscopic organisms, and the very recent appearance of larger plants and animals a bit less than a half-billion years ago. This is all fine and accepted to be true—it is just the MECHANISM for how this might have happened that is being considered. Just as a minor point, one thing in this chapter that is stated as fact, isn't quite right in my opinion—“By far the most critical aspect of Darwin's multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept.” Perhaps this is true today, but certainly when Darwin published his Origin of Species, the critical novel, important and new idea, in contrast to the current thought, was that of common descent—in fact Darwin hadn't a clue about HOW diversity was generated, but the whole point of his book was to demonstrate the evidence for natural selection and change of species (common descent) over time, in contrast to the idea that each individual species had been recently created by God, a few thousand years ago. And common descent, Behe admits, is supported by “compelling evidence”—so we are in agreement here. Evolution has happened over billions of years, and there is “compelling evidence” for evolution by common descent.

In my next post we will examine where Behe and I part company.

Can it be mere anthropomorphic fallacy, then, to call it a “whippoorwill,” because that is what it seems to say? Is it only imaginative fancy to describe the barred owl’s call as asking, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” Poet Robert Frost’s sonnet “Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same,” suggests that the way we seek and find meaning in the world’s tunes is the legacy of our first parents in the Garden, the imprinting onto the world of the intense and intimate relationships that we were created to share with each other, despite our common fall. While a longing for that first unbroken state is apparent in the poem, it also holds out the promise that the world remains not just sensible or rational, but meaningful on account of our human presence in it and our willingness to listen carefully to it.

As we enter the season of Advent, awaiting and recalling the one whose imprint was on the world from its beginnings, and who comes to redeem the world’s and all our songs, let us make a common prayer that we will all have ears to hear His voice in and through the world and each other.

“Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same”

by Robert Frost

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

from The Poetry of Robert Frost: the Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. by Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1979. pp. 338-339.

In his critique of Darwinian theory, The Edge of Evolution, Michael Behe claims that while random mutation and natural selection do result in genetic change, they cannot account for all of life’s diversity. The book begins with an affirmation of Darwin’s accomplishments and an assertion that all of life does in fact share a common ancestor. After these claims are made, however, it goes on to state that evolutionary theory cannot explain very much of the detail we see in ourselves and in the life forms around us. The author states that “the great process of science has shown that life is enormously elegant and intricate, especially at its molecular foundation” (p. 6). He then compares Darwinian evolution to a “long, blind-folded stroll outdoors” trying to find “the peak of a distant evolutionary mountain” (p. 6-7). Using specific examples and complex statistical calculations, Behe presents a case for a particular strain of thought called Intelligent Design. He concludes that, based on the inability of evolutionary theory to fully explain life, “the elegant, coherent, functional systems upon which life depends are the result of deliberate intelligent design” (p. 166). He asserts that at certain points in evolutionary history some sort of intelligent force stepped in and caused change to occur in a nonrandom way.

While Behe presents his ideas in an articulate and convincing manner, he relies on only a few weakly supported arguments. In fact, many of the arguments he uses are misleading and illogical. In this post, I will isolate one such misleading argument- that “complexes of just three or more different proteins are beyond the edge of evolution”- and present evidence to show that Behe may have been wrong (p. 135).

To develop the argument that protein interactions involving two or more binding sites are beyond the scope of Darwinian Evolution, Behe relies on several shaky pillars of thought. First, he rests on the claim that any significant protein interaction must involve at least five or six amino acid mutations. Next, he assumes that each of these mutations must occur at the same time rather than in a step-by-step manner. Based on these two “facts”, the author concludes that evolution of two protein-protein binding sites involves a miniscule 1 in 10⁴⁰ chance. Since fewer than 10⁴⁰ individuals have existed on earth since life began, he claims, such an interaction never could have evolved via random mutation and natural selection alone.

When I began to research the evidence beyond Behe’s text, I found that the assumptions he makes did not match up with the results of other current studies. The statistic upon which Behe relies -- that one protein interaction requires 10²⁰ generations to evolve -- may not be as solid as he would have us believe. Behe sounds convincing within the pages of his book; as the reader becomes absorbed in the text, the argument seems to make sense. When, however, this data is stacked up against the work of other scientists, the truth of the matter becomes quite apparent. A cornucopia of studies and experiments show that the evolution of protein-protein interactions through random events is, in actuality, completely plausible.

Let’s begin by taking a look at the number of amino acids involved in protein-protein interactions. In The Edge of Evolution, Behe claims that in order to get a new binding site, there must be a change in “five or six amino acids in a coherent patch in the right way” (p. 134). This means, the author continues, that “reaching the goal requires five or six coherent mutational steps” (p. 134). A cursory glance at the database of other recent protein-protein interaction studies reveals that this is not always the case. Many other research projects and experiments have shown that oftentimes two proteins may be bound together via only two or three amino acids.

One research article by Neduva and Russel discusses the topic. The authors explain that very short “linear motifs” can form significant protein-protein interactions (Neduva & Russel, 2006). These small “motifs” are “short (3-8 residue)” stretches of “multiple peptides that share a common sequence pattern” (Neduva et al, 2005). Despite their small size, they are known to participate in protein interactions. In this way, they are similar to much larger chunks of proteins, called domains, which also carry out specific functions and bind to other proteins. They are different, however, because they are much smaller and they also arise as a result of single point mutations (Neduva et al, 2005).

Because they are so small, linear motifs have very few amino acids that are actually necessary for them to function. In fact, of the 3-8 amino acids that compose a given motif, generally only 2-3 are necessary for the motif’s role within the protein. Hold on a minute. This point is significant. Behe tells us that, at the very least, 5-6 amino acids are required for protein-protein binding to occur. This is the basis for his establishment of evolution’s “edge”. As we can see, however, studies of linear motifs are telling a different story. Linear motifs need only 2-3 amino acids to function. Many motifs form protein-protein binding interactions. Thus, a protein-protein binding interaction can evolve through mutations in only two or three amino acid molecules (Neduva and Russel, 2006).

Many other studies confirm this data. Linear motifs are not an obscure discovery studied by only a few mad scientists sequestered in a basement. Behe should have known about these results. Another study headed by Neduva, for example, also examined the role of short linear motifs in protein-protein interactions. This study reinforces the conclusion that only 2 or 3 amino acids are necessary to form binding interactions. This time, researchers tested direct protein binding with labeled peptides. Their intent was to find new motifs using genome-scale interaction studies. They did not conduct this study to prove that Behe was wrong, or even to show that proteins can interact via only 2 or 3 amino acids. This is, however, one of the conclusions that can be drawn. The study uncovered linear motifs in flies, yeast cells, humans and other organisms which were involved in protein-protein interactions but only consisted of a few amino acid residues. It was found that five or six amino acids were not necessary for two proteins to interact. Motifs consisting of as few as three amino acid residues could participate in protein interaction networks (Neduva et al, 2005).

Somehow, Behe failed to take note of these studies and the others like it when he wrote his book. While the mere fact that proteins need only evolve two or three amino acid associations for a new interaction to form does not in itself prove or disprove anything, it does begin to chip away at the validity of Behe’s argument.

Finally, in a study by Gruenger, protein sequences were altered and engineered in order to determine the necessary alterations required to form higher order protein complexes. In many cases, changing just one side chain of a protein resulted in a new protein-protein interaction and the development of a new multi-protein complex. Although these mutations were designed by humans, the fact that we can develop a new high-order protein complex simply by changing one side chain shows that Behe’s assumption is egregiously erroneous. One or two, rather than four or five, amino acid changes can produce a new significant protein-protein interaction (Grueninger et al, 2008).

Another of Behe’s central claims is that mutations cannot occur one by one over a long period of time, but rather must all take place at once. This idea is founded on an incomplete understanding of how random mutation and natural selection actually function. As long as each genetic mutation confers some type of survival or reproductive advantage, or at least causes no harm to the cell, changes can occur one at a time and gradually produce a significant alteration. The mutations do not have to occur simultaneously. In fact, isolated mutations occur on a relatively regular basis. According to one estimate, the rate of new mutations per generation in the human genome is about 175 (Nachman and Crowell, 2000). These individual mutations can accumulate in a stepwise, gradual process and result in a new protein-protein interaction.

Let’s take a look at one of many studies which represent a step by step mechanism of mutations. In this case, researchers were interested in how the duplication of gene sequences allows step by step mutations in proteins to occur more easily. In their paper, these researchers remind us that evolution tends to modify already existing genes rather than invent completely new ones. This shortens the process of evolution so that only a few small changes may result in new genes (gene duplication) or in new interactions. Also, when a gene duplicates, one of the copies can freely mutate without inhibiting the cell’s ability to function. It often undergoes “rewiring events” in addition to changes in gene regulation and expression. These phenomena can result in modified protein-protein interactions.

Behe did not take events such as gene duplication into consideration when he made the radical claims in his book. He states, for example, that “three or four” of the “five or six” amino acid changes necessary for a new protein interaction “might cause trouble if they occur singly” (p. 134). This statement fails to account for mutations which occur in gene duplicates rather than in solitary genes. When two copies of a given gene exist, “The genes involved have different probabilities of being retained related to how they were generated” (Robertson, David and Lovell, 2009, paragraph 1). As Behe noted in his book, when a normal gene undergoes a mutation, there is a chance that its function will be destroyed or it will cause harm to the cell. Duplicated genes are different. Mutations in duplicates are not as dangerous because there is an extra gene that codes for the same thing. If one gene copy accrues a mutation that destroys its intended function, the cell will continue to survive because it has another gene that codes for the exact same thing. In this way, the duplicated gene can accumulate mutations more easily than one would expect. (Robertson, David & Lovell, 2009). Behe’s “three or four” amino acids that “might cause trouble if they occur singly”, then, do not apply in the many cases in which duplicated genes mutate and change over time. If Behe had taken special cases like this into consideration, he might have been more careful in his radical claim that a single amino acid change only has a one in 10²⁰ chance of occurring.

Let’s look at another one final example in which Behe’s ideas about protein mutation are contradicted. This time, researchers demonstrated that mutational pathways followed by proteins are not always simple and easy to track. Their study does not agree with Behe’s claims. It shows that many protein mutation pathways aren’t linear. They are so complex, in fact, that the genetic changes could not have all occurred at the same time. The results show that genetic changes take place one step at a time. In some cases, the researchers explain, evolution backtracks itself or follows circular pathways. A mutation may, for example, occur, disappear due to a reversion mutation, and then reappear later on. In fact, as the study shows, reversion trajectories can increase the number of possible evolutionary pathways in a cell by 50%.

The important point to get from this is not that reversion mutations are weird or that they somehow prove evolutionary theory. The fact that protein mutation pathways can go backwards or take other unexpected turns before arriving at an adaptation is the significant part of this story. It shows that mutations occur one at a time and often take place in unexpected order. In the case of reversion trajectories, there is absolutely no way that all of the point mutations involved could occur simultaneously as Behe tells us they must. Rather, one mutation occurs, is selected for by natural selection, and eventually becomes part of a longer story which results in significant cellular change (DePristo, Hartl and Weinrich, 2007).

I’m sure you have heard the Latin phrase “caveat emptor”- “let the buyer beware”. Latin may be a dead language, but these words continue to rattle sporadically in and out of our conversations. Coincidentally, The Edge of Evolution presents us with an ideal opportunity to utter those ageless words. Behe’s claims are issued as truth, and presented with rhetoric and skill, but they may be subject to defect. As I have shown in this paper, two of his central claims directly defy a great deal of scientific data published by other intelligent scientists. Behe claims that mutations must occur simultaneously in order for an interaction to result. Represented in this paper, however, are several reliable studies which show that mutations actually occur one at a time. Behe also states that five or six amino acid mutations must occur to form a protein-protein complex. But, as you remember, other studies that we examined show how short linear motifs can form interactions with as few as three amino acids. “Let the reader beware”, then, of buying into the ideas that Behe has to sell. They may not be as accurate as they appear.

References

Behe, M.J. (2007). The Edge of Evolution. New York: Free Press.

DePristo, M.A., Hartl, D.L., & Weinreich, D.M. (2007). Mutational reversions during adaptive protein evolution . Molecular Biology and Evolution, 24(8).

Grueninger, D., Treiber, N., Ziegler, M.O.P., Koetter, J.W.A., Schulze, M.S., & Schulz, G.E. (2008). Designed protein-protein association. Science, 319(5860)

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