CASE FOR A GOD-- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,

 Journalist  Investigates  scientific  Evidence that points toward God

CHAPTER 1

White-Coated Scientists versus Black-Robed Preachers

The deadline was looming for the "Green Streak," the afternoon edition of the Chicago Tribune, and the frenzied atmosphere in the newsroom was carbonated with activity. Teletypes clattered behind Plexiglas partitions. Copy boys darted from desk to desk. Reporters hunched over their typewriters in intense concentration. Editors barked into telephones. On the wall, a huge clock counted down the minutes.

A copy boy hustled into the cavernous room and tossed three copies of the Chicago Daily News, hot off the presses, onto the middle of the city desk. Assistant city editors lunged at them and hungrily scanned the front page to see if the competition had beaten them on anything. One of them let out a grunt. In one motion, he ripped out an article and then pivoted, waving it in the face of a reporter who had made the mistake of hovering too closely.

"Recover this!" he demanded. Without looking at it, the reporter grabbed the scrap and headed for his desk to quickly make some phone calls so he could produce a similar story.

Reporters at City Hall, the Criminal Courts Building, the State of Illinois Building, and Police Headquarters were phoning assistant city-editors to "dope" their stories. Once the reporters had provided a quick capsule of the situation, the assistants would cover their phone with a hand and ask their boss, the city editor, for a decision on how the article should be handled.

"The cops were chasing a car and it hit a bus," one of them called over to the city editor. "Five injured, none seriously."

"School bus?"

"City bus."

The city editor frowned. "Gimme a four-head," came the order—code for a three-paragraph story.

"Four head," the assistant repeated into the phone. He pushed a button to connect the reporter to a rewrite man, who would take down details on a typewriter and then craft the item in a matter of minutes.

The year was 1974. I was a rookie, just three months out of the University of Missouri's school of journalism. I had worked on smaller newspapers since I was fourteen, but this was the big leagues. I was already addicted to the adrenaline. On that particular day, though, I felt more like a spectator than a participant. I strolled over to the city desk and unceremoniously dropped my story into the "in" basket. It was a meager offering—a one-paragraph "brief" about two pipe bombs exploding in the south suburbs. The item was destined for section three, page ten, in a journalistic trash heap called "metropolitan briefs." However, my fortunes were about to change.

Standing outside his glass-walled office, the assistant managing editor caught my attention. "C'mere," he called.

I walked over. "What's up?"

"Look at this," he said as he handed me a piece of wire copy. He didn't wait for me to read it before he started filling me in.

"Crazy stuff in West Virginia," he said. "People getting, shot at, schools getting bombed—all because some hillbillies are mad about the textbooks being used in the schools."

"You're kidding," I said. "Good story."

My eyes scanned the brief Associated Press report. I quickly noticed that pastors were denouncing textbooks as being "anti-God" and that rallies were being held in churches. My stereotypes clicked in.

"Christians, huh?" I said. "So much for loving their neighbors. And not being judgmental."

He motioned for me to follow him over to a safe along the wall. He twirled the dial and opened it, reaching in to grab two packets of twenty-dollar bills.

"Get out to West Virginia and check it out," he said as he handed me the six hundred dollars of expense money. "Give me a story for the bulldog." He was referring to the first edition of next Sundays paper. That didn't give me much time. It was already noon on Monday.

I started to walk away, but the editor grabbed my arm. "Look—be careful," he said.

I was oblivious. "What do you mean?"

He gestured toward the AP story I was clutching. "These hillbillies hate reporters," he said. "They've already beaten up two of them. Things are volatile. Be smart."

I couldn't tell if the emotional surge I felt was fear or exhilaration. In the end, it didn't really matter. I knew I had to do whatever it would take to get the story. But the irony wasn't lost on me: these people were followers of the guy who said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," and yet I was being warned to keep on guard to avoid getting roughed up.

"Christians..." I muttered under my breath. Hadn't they heard, as one skeptic famously put it, that modern science had already dissolved Christianity in a vat of nitric acid?1

Is Darwin Responsible?

From the gleaming office buildings in downtown Charleston to the dreary backwood hamlets in surrounding Kanawha County, the situation was tense when I arrived the next day and began poking around for a story. Many parents were keeping their kids out of school; coal miners had walked off the job in wildcat strikes, threatening to cripple the local economy; empty school buses were being shot at; firebombs had been lobbed at some vacant classrooms; picketers were marching with signs saying, "Even Hillbillies Have Constitutional Rights." Violence had left two people seriously injured. Intimidation and threats were rampant.

The wire services could handle the day-to-day breaking developments in the crisis; I planned to write an overview article that explained the dynamics of the controversy. "Working from my hotel room, I called for appointments with key figures in the conflict and then drove in my rental car from homes to restaurants to schools to offices in order to interview them. I quickly found that just mentioning the word "textbook" to anybody in these parts would, instantly release a flood of vehement opinion as thick as the lush trees that carpet the Appalachian hillsides.

"The books bought for our school children would teach them to lose their love of God, to honor draft dodgers and revolutionaries, and to lose their respect for their parents," insisted the intense, dark-haired wife of a Baptist minister as I interviewed her on the front porch of her house. As a recently elected school board member, she was leading the charge against the textbooks.

A community activist was just as opinionated in the other direction. "For the first time," she told me, "these textbooks reflect real Americanism, and I think it's exciting. Americanism, to me, is listening to all kinds of voices, not just white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants."

The school superintendent, who had resigned at the height of the controversy, only shook his head in disdain when I asked him what he thought. "People around here are going flaky," he sighed. "Both poles are wrong."

Meanwhile, ninety-six thousand copies of three hundred different textbooks had been temporarily removed from classrooms and stored in cardboard cartons at a warehouse west of Charleston. They included Scott Foresman Co.'s Galaxy series; McDougal, Littel Co.'s Man series; Allyn & Bacon Inc's Breakthrough series; and such classics as The Lord of the Flies, Of Human Bondage, Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, and Plato's Republic.

What were people so angry about? Many said they were outraged at the "situational ethics" propounded in some of the books. One textbook included the story of a child cheating a merchant out of a penny. Students were asked, "Most people think that cheating is wrong. Do you think there is ever a time when it might be right? Tell when it is. Tell why you think it is right." Parents seized on this as undermining the Christian values they were attempting to inculcate into their children.

"We're trying to get our kids to do the right thing," the parent of an elementary student told me in obvious frustration. "Then these books come along and say that sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing. We just don't believe in that! The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments."

But there was also an undercurrent of something else: an inchoate fear of the future, of change, of new ideas, of cultural transformation. I could sense a simmering frustration in people over how modernity was eroding the foundation of their faith. "Many of the protesters," wrote the Charleston Gazette, "are demonstrating against a changing world."

This underlying concern was crystallized for me in a conversation with a local businessman over hamburgers at a Charleston diner. When I asked him why he was so enraged over the textbooks, he reached into his pocket and took out a newspaper clipping about the textbook imbroglio.

"Listen to what Dynamics of Language tells our kids," he said as he quoted an excerpt from the textbook: "Read the theory of divine origin and the story of the Tower of Babel as told in Genesis. Be prepared to explain one or more ways these stories could be interpreted."

He tossed the well-worn clipping on the table in disgust. "The theory of divine origin!" he declared. "The Word of God is not a theory. Take God out of creation and what's left? Evolution? Scientists want to teach our kids that divine origin is just a theory that stupid people believe but that evolution is a scientific fact. Well, it's not. And that's at the bottom of this."

I cocked my head. "Are you saying Charles Darwin is responsible for all of this?"

"Let me put it this way," he said. "If Darwin's right, we're just sophisticated monkeys. The Bible is wrong. There is no God. And without God, there's no right or wrong. We can just make up our morals as we go. The basis for all we believe is destroyed. And that's why this country is headed to hell in a handbasket. Is Darwin responsible? I'll say this: people have to choose between science and faith, between evolution and the Bible, between the Ten Commandments and make-'em-up-as-you-go ethics. We've made our choice-—-and we're not budging."

He took a swig of beer. "Have you seen the teachers manual?" he asked. I shook my head. "It says students should compare the Bible story of Daniel in the Lions' Den to that myth about a lion. You know which one I'm talking about?"

"Androcles and the Lion?" I asked, referring to the Aesop fable about an escaped slave who removed a thorn from the paw of a lion he encountered in the woods. Later, the recaptured slave was to be eaten by a lion for the entertainment of the crowd at the Roman Coliseum, but it turned out to be the same lion he had befriended. Instead of eating him, the lion gently licked his hand, which impressed the emperor so much that the slave was set free.

"Yeah, that's the one," the businessman said as he wagged a french fry at me. "What does it tell our kids when they're supposed to compare that to the Bible? That the Bible is just a bunch of fairy tales? That it's all a myth? That you can interpret the Bible any way you darn well please, even if it rips the guts out of what it really says? We've got to put our foot down. I'm not going to let a bunch of eggheads destroy the faith of my children."

I felt like I was finally getting down to the root of the controversy. I scribbled down his words as well as I could. Part of me, though, wanted to debate him. Didn't he know that evolution is a proven fact? Didn't he realize that in an age of science and technology that it's simply irrational to believe the ancient myths about God creating the world and shaping human beings in his own image? Did he really want his children clinging desperately to religious pap that is so clearly disproved by modern cosmology, astronomy, zoology, comparative anatomy, geology, paleontology, biology, genetics, and anthropology?

I was tempted to say, "Hey, what is the difference between Daniel in the Lions Den and Androcles and the Lion? They're both fairy tales!" But I wasn't there to get into an argument. I was there to report the story—and what a bizarre story it was!

In the last part of the twentieth century, in an era when we had split the atom and put people on the moon and found fossils that prove evolution beyond all doubt, a bunch of religious zealots were tying a county into knots because they couldn't let go of religious folklore. It simply defied all reason.

I thought for a moment. "One more question," I said. "Do you ever have any doubts?"

He waved his hand as if to draw my attention to the universe. "Look at the world," he said. "God's fingerprints are all over it. I'm absolutely sure of that. How else do you explain nature and human beings? And God has told us how to live. If we ignore him-—well, then the whole world's in for a whole lot of trouble."

I reached for the check. "Thanks for your opinions," I told him.

Standing Trial in West Virginia

All of this was good stuff for my story, but I needed more. The leaders I had interviewed had all denounced the violence as being the unfortunate actions of a few hotheads. But to tell the whole story, I needed to see the underbelly of the controversy. I wanted to tap into the rage of those who chose violence over debate. My opportunity quickly came.

A rally, I heard, was being planned for Friday night over in the isolated, heavily wooded community of Campbells Creek. Angry parents were expected to gather and vote on whether to continue to keep their kids out of school. Tempers were at a boiling point, and the word was that reporters were not welcome. It seemed that folks were incensed over the way some big newspapers had caricatured them as know-nothing hillbillies, so this was intended to be a private gathering of the faithful, where they could freely speak their minds.

This was my chance. I decided to infiltrate the rally to get an unvarnished look at what was really going on. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

I rendezvoused with Charlie, a top-notch photojournalist dispatched by the Tribune to capture the textbook war on film. We decided that we would sneak into the rural school where hundreds of agitated protesters were expected to pack the bleachers. I'd scribble my notes surreptitiously; Charlie would see whether he could snap a few discreet photos. We figured if we could just blend into the crowd, we'd get away with it.

We figured wrong.

Our shiny new rental car stood in sharp contrast with the dusty pick-up trucks and well-used cars that were hastily left at all angles on the gravel parking lot. We tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as we walked nonchalantly beside the stragglers who were streaming toward the gymnasium. Charlie kept his Nikons hidden beneath his waist-length denim jacket, but there was no way he could conceal his long black hair.

At first, I thought we'd gotten away with it. "We flowed with the crowd through a side door of the gym. Inside, the noise was deafening. Two large bleachers were packed with animated and agitated people who all seemed to be talking at once. Someone was setting up a small speaker on the floor of the gym. Charlie and I were milling around with people who were standing by the door, unable to find a seat. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to us.

A beefy man in a white short-sleeve shirt and dark, narrow tie, took the handheld microphone and blew into it to see if it was working. "Let me have your attention," he shouted over the din. "Lets get started."

People began to settle down. But as they did, I got the uncomfortable feeling that a lot of eyes were starting to bore in on us. "Wait a minute," the guy at the microphone said. "We've got some intruders here!" With that, he turned and glared at Charlie and me. People around us pivoted to confront the two of us. The room fell silent.

"C'mon out here!" the man demanded, gesturing for both of us to come onto the gym floor. "Who are you? You're not welcome here!"

With that, the crowd erupted into catcalls and jeers. Unsure what to do, Charlie and I stepped hesitantly toward the man with the microphone. It seemed like all of the anger in the room was suddenly focused on the two of us.

My first thought was that I didn't like becoming part of the story. My second thought was that this mob was going to throw us out of the place—-and we were going to get roughed up along the way. My third thought was that nothing in journalism school had prepared me for this.

"What should we do with these two boys?" the man asked, baiting the crowd. Now the folks were really riled! I felt like I was being put on trial. When I used to hear the phrase my knees were shaking, I thought it was just a figure of speech. But my knees were shaking!

"Lets get rid of them!" he declared.

The door was blocked. There was nowhere to run. But just as some men were surging forward to grab us, a part-time truck driver, part-time preacher stepped up and wrested away the microphone. He raised his hand to stop them.

"Hold on!" he shouted. "Just a minute! Settle down!" Obviously, he was someone the crowd respected. The noise subsided. "Now listen to me," he continued. "I've seen this reporter around town the last few days, interviewing both sides of this thing. I think he wants to tell the story like it is. I think he wants to be fair. I say we give him a chance. I say we let him stay!"

The crowd was uncertain. There was some grumbling. The preacher turned toward me. "You're gonna be fair, aren't you?" he asked.

I nodded as reassuringly as I could.

The preacher turned to the crowd. "How else are we going to get our story out?" he asked. "Let's welcome these fellas and trust they're gonna do the right thing!"

That seemed to convince them. The mood quickly shifted. In fact, some people started applauding. Instead of throwing us out, someone ushered us to seats in the front row of the bleachers. Charlie took out his cameras and began snapping pictures. I took out my notebook and pen.

"We'll Win - One Way or the Other"

The preacher took control of the meeting. He turned to the crowd and held aloft a book tided Facts about VD. "This is gonna turn your stomachs, but this is the kind of book your children are reading!" he shouted in his Mayberry accent. There were gasps. "Get those books out of the schools!" someone shouted. "Get 'em out!" several others echoed as if they were saying "amen" at a revival meeting.

The preacher began to pace back and forth, perspiration rings expanding on his white shirt, as he waved the book. "Y'all have got to force yourselves to look at these books so you can really understand what the issue is all about!" he declared: "Your children may be reading these books. This is not the way to teach our kids about sex—divorced from morality, divorced from God. And that's why we've got to continue keeping our kids out of school for another week to boycott these filthy, un-American, anti-religious books."

That catapulted the crowd into a clapping frenzy. Money poured into the Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets being passed around for donations to fight the battle.

The rally continued in that vein for another half an hour or so. At one point, the preachers words were reminiscent of the business-mans comments earlier in the week. "We're not evolved from slime," he declared defiantly. "We're created in the image of God Almighty. And he's given us the best textbook in the world to tell us how to live!" The folks roared their approval.

"The only victory we'll accept is a total victory," he declared. "We'll win-—-one way or the other."

When he raised the issue of whether the school boycott should be continued through the coming week, the resounding response was yes. The goal of the rally accomplished, he issued a quick "God bless y'all," and the meeting was over.

Now I had all the color I needed for my story. I hustled back to my hotel and banged out a piece for Sunday's paper, which appeared on the front page under the headline, "Textbook Battle Rages in Bible Belt County." I followed that with an in-depth article that also ran on the front page the next day. 2

Settling back into my seat as I flew back to Chicago, I reflected on the experience and concluded that I had fulfilled my promise to the preacher: I had been fair to both sides. My articles were balanced and responsible. But, frankly, it had been difficult.

Inside that gymnasium Friday night, I felt like I had stared unadorned Christianity in the face-—-and saw it for the dinosaur it was. Why couldn't these people get their heads out of the sand and admit the obvious: science had put their God out of a job! White-coated scientists of the modern world had trumped the black-robed priests of medieval times. Darwin's theory of evolution-—no, the absolute fact of evolution—-meant that there is no universal morality decreed by a deity, only culturally conditioned values that vary from place to place and situation to situation.

I knew intuitively what prominent evolutionary biologist and historian William Provine of Cornell University would spell out explicitly in a debate years later. If Darwinism is true, he said, then there are five inescapable conclusions:

there's no evidence for God 

there's no life after death 

there's no absolute foundation for right and wrong 

there's no ultimate meaning for life 

people don't really have free will 3.

To me, the controversy in West Virginia was a symbolic last gasp of an archaic belief system hurtling toward oblivion. As more and more young people are taught the ironclad evidence for evolution, as they understand the impossibility of miracles, as they see how science is on the path to ultimately explaining everything in the universe, then belief in an invisible God, in angels and demons, in a long-ago rabbi who walked on water and multiplied fish and bread and returned from the dead, will fade into a fringe superstition confined only to dreary backwoods hamlets like Campbell's Creek, West Virginia.

As far as I was concerned, that day couldn't come soon enough.

………………..

TO  BE  CONTINUED

CASE FOR GOD

Lee  Strobell

CHAPTER 2

The Images of Evolution

The problem is to get [people] to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.

Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin ¹

Science ... has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating and that the means of creation must not have included any role for God.

Evolution critic Phillip E. Johnson²

Rewind history to 1966. The big hit on the radio was Paul MaCartney crooning "Michelle." On a television show called Spy, Bill Cosby was becoming the first African-American to share the lead in a dramatic series. Bread was nineteen cents a loaf; a new Ford Fairlane cost $1,600.

As a fourteen-year-old freshman at Prospect High School in northwest suburban Chicago, I was sitting in a third-floor science classroom overlooking the asphalt parking lot, second row from the window, third seat from the front, when I first heard the liberating information that propelled me toward a life of atheism.

I already liked this introductory biology class. It fit well with my logical way of looking at the world, an approach that was already tugging me toward the evidence-oriented fields of journalism and law. I was incurably curious, always after answers, constantly trying to figure out how things worked.

As a youngster, my parents once gave me an electric train for Christmas. A short time later my dad discovered me in the garage, repeatedly hurling the locomotive against the concrete floor in a futile attempt to crack it open. I didn't understand why he was so upset. All I was doing, I meekly explained, was trying to figure out what made it work.

That's why I liked science. Here the teacher actually encouraged me to cut open a frog to find out how it functioned. Science gave me an excuse to ask all the "why" questions that plagued me, to try genetic experiments by breeding fruit flies, and to peer inside plants to learn about how they reproduced. To me, science represented the empirical, the trustworthy, the hard facts, the experimentally proven. I tended to dismiss everything else as being mere opinion, conjecture, superstition —and mindless faith.

I would have resonated with what philosopher J. P. Moreland wrote years later, when he said that for many people the term scientific meant something was "good, rational, and modern," whereas something not scientific was old-fashioned and not worth the belief of thinking people. 3

My trust in science had been shaped by growing up in post-Sputnik America, where science and technology had been exalted as holding the keys to the survival of our country. The Eisenhower administration had exhorted young people to pursue careers in science so America could catch up with—and surpass-—our enemy, the Soviets, who had stunned the world in 1957 by launching the world's first artificial satellite into an elliptical orbit around Earth.

Later, as our nation began unraveling in the 1960s, when social conventions were being turned upside down, when relativism and situational ethics were starting to create a quicksand of morality, when one tradition after another was being upended, I saw science as remaining steady—a foundation, an anchor, always rock-solid in its methodology while at the same time constantly moving forward in a reflection of the American can-do spirit.

Put a man on the moon? Nobody doubted we would do it. New technology, from transistors to Teflon, kept making life in America better and better. Could a cure for cancer be far off?

It was no accident that my admiration for scientific thinking was developing at the same time that my confidence in God was waning. In Sunday school and confirmation classes during my junior high school years, my "why" questions weren't always welcomed. While many of the other students seemed to automatically accept the truth of the Bible, I needed reasons for trusting it. But more often than not, my quest for answers was rebuffed. Instead, I was required to read, memorize, and regurgitate Bible verses and the writings of Martin Luther and other seemingly irrelevant theologians from the distant past.

Who cared what these long-dead zealots believed? I had no use for the "soft" issues of faith and spirituality; rather, I was gravitating toward the "hard" facts of science. As Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education observed, "You can't put an omnipotent deity in a test tube." 4 If there wasn't any scientific or rational evidence for believing in such an entity, then I wasn't interested.

That's when, on that pivotal day in biology class in 1966, I began to learn about scientific discoveries that, to borrow the words of British zoologist Richard Dawkins, "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." 5

The Images of Evolution

I tend to be a visual thinker. Images stick in my mind for long periods of time. When I think back to those days as a high school student, what I learned in the classroom and through my eager consumption of outside books can be summed up in a series of pictures.

IMAGE #1: The Tubes, Flasks, and Electrodes of the Stanley Miller Experiment

This was the most powerful picture of all—the laboratory apparatus that Stanley Miller, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, used in 1953 to artificially produce the building blocks of life. By reproducing the atmosphere of the primitive earth and then shooting electric sparks through it to simulate lightning, Miller managed to produce a red goo containing amino acids.

The moment I first learned of Millers success, my mind flashed to the logical implication: if the origin of life can be explained solely through natural processes, then God was out of a job! After all, there was no need for a deity if living organisms could emerge by themselves out of the primordial soup and then develop naturally over the eons into more and more complex creatures-—-a scenario that was illustrated by the next image of evolution.

IMAGE #2: Darwin's "Tree of Life"

The first time I read Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, I was struck that there was only one illustration: a sketch in which he depicted the development of life as a tree, starting with an ancient ancestor at the bottom and then blossoming upward into limbs, branches, and twigs as life evolved with increasing diversity and complexity.

As a recent textbook explained, Darwinism teaches that all life forms are "related through descent from some unknown prototype that lived in the remote past."

It seemed obvious to me that there's such a phenomenon as micro-evolution, or variation within different kinds of animals. I could see this illustrated in my own neighborhood, where we had dozens of different varieties of dogs. But I was captivated by the more ambitious claim of macroevolution—that natural selection acting on random variation can explain how primitive cells morphed over long periods of time into every species of creatures, including human beings. In other words, fish were transformed into amphibians, amphibians into reptiles, and reptiles into birds and mammals, with humans having the same ancestor as apes.

So while Miller seemed to establish that life could have arisen spontaneously in the chemical oceans of long-ago Earth, Darwin's theory accounted for how so many millions of species of organisms could slowly and gradually develop over huge expanses of time. Then came further confirmation of our common ancestry, illustrated by the next image.

IMAGE #3: Ernst Haeckel's Drawings of Embryos

German biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose sketches of embryos could be found in virtually every evolution book I studied, provided even more evidence for all of life having the same ancient progenitor. By juxtaposing drawings of an embryonic fish, salamander, tortoise, chick, hog, calf, rabbit, and human, Haeckel graphically established that they all appeared strikingly similar in their earliest stages of development. It was only later that they became distinctly different.

As my eyes scanned the top row of Haeckel's drawings, representing the early stage of embryonic development, I was stunned by how these vertebrates—which would eventually grow to become so radically different from each other-—-were virtually indistinguishable.

Who could tell them apart? The human embryo could just as easily have been any one of the others. Obviously, Darwin was right when he said "we ought to frankly admit" universal common ancestry. And certainly the inexorable progression toward ever-increasing complexity could be seen in the next image.

IMAGE #4: The Missing Link

The fossil is so astounding that one paleontologist called it "a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself." 7 It's the most famous fossil in the world: the archaeop-teryx, or "ancient wing," a creature dating back 150 million years. With the wings, feathers, and wishbone of a bird, but with a lizard-like tail and claws on its wings, it was hailed as the missing link between reptiles and modern birds.

One look at a picture of that fossil chased away any misgivings about whether the fossil record supported Darwin's theory. Here was a half-bird, half-reptile—-I needed to look no further to believe that paleontology backed up Darwin. Indeed, the archaeopteryx, having been discovered in Germany immediately after The Origin of Species was published, "helped enormously to establish the credibility of Darwinism and to discredit skeptics," Johnson said. 8

These images were just the beginning of my education in evolution. By the time I had completed my study of the topic, I was thoroughly convinced that Darwin had explained away any need for God. And that's a phenomenon I have seen over and over again.

I've lost count of the number of spiritual skeptics who have told me that their seeds of doubt were planted in high school or college when they studied Darwinism. "When I read in 2002 about an Eagle Scout being booted from his troop for refusing to pledge reverence to God, I wasn't surprised to find out he "has been an atheist since studying evolution in the ninth grade." 9

As Oxford evolutionist Dawkins said: "The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from an agnostic position and towards atheism." 10

Darwin versus God

Not everyone, however, believes that Darwinian evolutionary theory and God are incompatible. There are some scientists and theologians who see no conflict between believing in the doctrines of Darwin and the doctrines of Christianity.

Nobel-winning biologist Christian de Duve insisted there's "no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by science,"11 while biology professor Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University declared that evolution "is not anti-God."12 Philosopher Michael Ruse, himself an ardent naturalist, answered the question, "Can a Darwinian be a Christian?" by declaring, "Absolutely!" In his view, "No sound argument has been mounted showing that Darwinism implies atheism." 13

Biologist Jean Pond, who formerly taught at Whitworth College, proudly describes herself as "a scientist, an evolutionist, a great admirer of Charles Darwin, and a Christian." 14 She elaborated by saying: "Believing that evolution occurred-—-that humans and all other living things are related as part of creation's giant family tree, that it is possible that the first cell arose by the natural processes of chemical evolution—-neither requires nor even promotes an atheistic worldview." 15

Personally, however, I couldn't understand how the Darwinism I was taught left any meaningful role for God. I was told that the evolutionary process was by definition undirected to me, that automatically ruled out a supernatural deity who was pulling the strings behind the scene.

One recent textbook was very clear about this: "By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life processes superfluous."16 Other textbooks affirm that evolution is "random and undirected" and "without either plan or purpose" and that "Darwin gave biology a sound scientific basis by attributing the diversity of life to natural causes rather than supernatural creation."17

If this is how scientists define Darwinism, then it seemed to me that God has been given his walking papers. To try to somehow salvage an obscure role for him appears pointless, which Cornells William Provine readily concedes: "A widespread theological view now exists saying that God started off the world, props it up and works through laws of nature, very subtly, so subtly that its action is undetectable," he said. "But that kind of God is effectively no different to my mind than atheism."18

Certainly Christians would say that God is not a hidden and unin-volved deity who thoroughly conceals his activity, but rather that he has intervened in the world so much that the Bible says his qualities "have been clearly seen .... from what has been made."19 Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seatde, put it this way:

Many evolutionary biologists admit that science cannot categorically exclude the possibility that some kind of deity still might exist. Nor can they deny the possibility of a divine designer who so masks his creative activity in apparently natural processes as to escape scientific detection. Yet for most scientific materialists such an undetectable entity hardly seems worthy of consideration. 20

Even so, Meyer stressed that "contemporary Darwinism does not envision a God-guided process of evolutionary change." 21 He cites a famous observation by the late evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson that Darwinism teaches "man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." 22 The ramifications are unmistakable, according to Meyer: "To say that God guides an inherentry unguided natural process, or that God designed a natural mechanism as a substitute for his design, is clearly contradictory." 23

Nancy Pearcey, who has written extensively on science and faith, insists that "you can have God or natural selection, but not both." 24 She pointed out that Darwin himself recognized that the presence of an omnipotent deity would actually undermine his theory. "If we admit God into the process, Darwin argued, then God would ensure that only 'the right variations occurred ... and natural selection would be superfluous.'" 25

Law professor Phillip Johnson, author of the breakthrough critique of evolution Darwin On Trial, agrees that "the whole point of Darwinism is to show that there is no need for a supernatural creator, because nature can do the creating by itself." 26

In fact, many of the evolutionists who have felt the sting of Johnson's criticism nevertheless find themselves in agreement with him on this particular matter. For example, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr emphasized that "the real core of Darwinism" is natural selection, which "permits the explanation of adaption ... by natural means, instead of by divine intervention." 27 

Another leading evolutionist, Francisco Ayala, who was ordained a Dominican priest prior to his science career and yet refused in a recent interview to confirm whether he still believes in God, 28 said Darwin's "greatest accomplishment" was to show that "living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent." 29

When an attorney asked the outspoken Provine whether there is "an intellectually honest Christian evolutionist position ... or do we simply have to check our brains at the church house door," Provine's answer was straightforward: "You indeed have to check your brains."30 Apparently to him, the term "Christian evolutionist" is oxymoronic.

Pulitzer Prize—winning sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson was adamant on this issue. "If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection," he said, "genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species." 31 No ambiguity there.

Characteristically, Time magazine summed up the matter succinctly:

"Charles Darwin didn't want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did." 32

Darwin's Universal Acid

I wasn't aware of these kinds of observations when I was a student. I just knew intuitively that the theories of Darwin gave me an intellectual basis to reject the mythology of Christianity that my parents had tried to foist on me through my younger years.

At one point, I remember reading the World Book Encyclopedia that my parents had given me as a birthday present to answer the "why" questions with which I was always tormenting them. Reading selectively from the entry on evolution served to reinforce my sense that Christianity and Darwinism are incompatible.

"In the Bible, God is held to be the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Ultimate End of all things," the encyclopedia said. "Many Christians believe that it is impossible to reconcile this conviction with the idea that evolutionary development has been brought about by natural forces present in organic life." 33

Everything fell into place for me. My assessment was that you didn't need a Creator if life can emerge unassisted from the primordial slime of the primitive earth, and you don't need God to create human beings in his image if we are merely the product of the impersonal forces of natural selection. In short, you don't need the Bible if you've got The Origin of Species. I was experiencing on a personal level what philosopher Daniel Dennett has observed: Darwinism is a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview." 34

My worldview was being revolutionized, all right, yet in my youthful optimism I wasn't ready to examine some of the disheartening implications of my new philosophy. I conveniently ignored the grim picture painted by British atheist Bertrand Russell, who wrote about how science had presented us with a world that was "purposeless" and "void of meaning." 35 He said:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction ... that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried—-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. 36

Rather than facing this "unyielding despair" that's implicit in a world without God, I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God's moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs.

The sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s was starting to dawn, and I was liberated to indulge as much as I wanted, without having to look over my shoulder at God's disapproving gaze. As a journalist, I was unshackled to compete without always having to abide by those pesky rules of ethics and morality. I would let nothing, and certainly nobody, stand between me and my ambitions.

Who cared if scientific materialism taught that there is nothing other than matter and therefore no person could possibly survive the grave? I was too young to trifle with the implications of that; instead, I pursued the kind of immortality I could attain by leaving my mark as a successful journalist, whose investigations and articles would spur new legislation and social reform. As for the finality of death—-well, I had plenty of time to ponder that later. There was too much living to do in the meantime.

So the seeds of my atheism were sown as a youngster when religious authorities seemed unwilling or unable to help me get answers to my questions about God. My disbelief flowered after discovering that Darwinism displaces the need for a deity. And my atheism came to full bloom when I studied Jesus in college and was told that no science-minded person could possibly believe what the New Testament says about him.

According to members of the left-wing Jesus Seminar, the same impulse that had given rise to experimental science, "which sought to put all knowledge to the test of close and repeated observation," also prompted their efforts to finally distinguish "the factual from the fictional" in Jesus' life. They concluded that in "this scientific age," modern thinkers can no longer believe that Jesus did or said much of what the Bible claims. As they put it:

The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileos telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismanded the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens. 37

By the time I was halfway through college, my atheistic attitudes were so entrenched that I was becoming more and more impatient toward people of mindless faith, like those protesters I would later encounter in "West Virginia." I couldn't fathom their stubborn reluctance to subject their outmoded beliefs to that "universal acid" of modern scientific thought. 

I felt smugly arrogant toward them. Let them remain slaves to their wishful thinking about a heavenly home and to the straightjacket morality of their imaginary God. As for me, I would dispassionately follow the conclusions of the scientists and historians whose logical and consistent research has reduced the world to material processes only.

The Investigation Begins

If I had stopped asking questions, that's where I would have remained. But with my background in journalism and law, the demanding of answers was woven into my nature. So five years after my adventure in "West Virginia, when my wife Leslie announced that she had decided to become a follower of Jesus, it was understandable that the first words I uttered would be in the form of an inquiry.

It wasn't asked politely. Instead, it was spewed in a venomous and accusatory tone: "What has gotten into you?" I simply couldn't comprehend how such a rational person could buy into an irrational religious concoction of wishful thinking, make-believe, mythology, and legend.

In the ensuing months, however, as Leslie's character began to change, as her values underwent a transformation, as she became a more loving and caring and authentic person, I began asking the same question, only this time in a softer and more sincere tone of genuine wonderment: "What has gotten into you?" Something-—or, as she would claim, Someone—was undeniably changing her for the better.

Clearly, I needed to investigate what was going on. And so I began asking more questions—a lot of them-—about faith, God, and the Bible. I was determined to go wherever the answers would take me — even though, frankly, I wasn't quite prepared back then for where I would ultimately end up.

This multifaceted spiritual investigation lasted nearly two years. In my previous book, The Case for Christ, which retraced and expanded upon this journey, I discussed the answers I received from thirteen leading experts about the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. 38 In my subsequent book, The Case for Faith, I pursued answers to the "Big Eight" questions about Christianity—the kind of issues that began troubling me even as a youngster but that nobody had been willing to answer. 39

In those earlier books, however, I barely touched upon another important dimension to my investigation. Because science had played such an instrumental role in propelling me toward atheism, I also devoted a lot of time to posing questions about what the latest research says about God. With an open mind, I began asking:

* Are science and faith doomed to always be at war? Was I right to think that a science-minded individual must necessarily eschew religious beliefs? Or is there a fundamentally different way to view the relationship between the spiritual and the scientific?

Does the latest scientific evidence tend to point toward or away from the existence of God?

Are those images of evolution that spurred me to atheism still valid in light of the most recent discoveries in science?

When I first began exploring these issues in the early 1980s, I found that there was a sufficient amount of evidence to guide me to a confident conclusion. Much has changed since then, however. Science is always pressing relentlessly forward, and a lot more data and many more discoveries have been poured into the reservoir of scientific knowledge during the past twenty years.

All of which has prompted me to ask a new question: does this deeper and richer pool of contemporary scientific research contradict or affirm the conclusions I reached so many years ago? Put another way, in which direction—-toward Darwin or God—-is the current arrow of science now pointing?

"Science," said two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, "is the search for the truth." 40 And that's what I decided to embark upon—a new journey of discovery that would both broaden and update the original investigation I conducted into science more than two decades ago.

My approach would be to cross-examine authorities in various scientific disciplines about the most current findings in their fields. In selecting these experts, I sought doctorate-level professors who have unquestioned expertise, are able to communicate in accessible language, and who refuse to limit themselves only to the politically correct world of naturalism or materialism. After all, it wouldn't make sense to rule out any hypothesis at the outset. I wanted the freedom to pursue all possibilities.

I would stand in the shoes of the skeptic, reading all sides of each topic and posing the toughest objections that have been raised. More importantly, I would ask the experts the kind of questions that personally plagued me when I was an atheist. In fact, perhaps these are the very same issues that have proven to be sticking points in your own spiritual journey. Maybe you too have wondered whether belief in a supernatural God is consistent with what science has uncovered about the natural world.

If so, I hope you'll join me in my investigation. Strip away your preconceptions as much as possible and keep an open mind as you eavesdrop on my conversations with these fascinating scientists and science-trained philosophers. At the end you can decide for yourself whether their answers and explanations stand up to scrutiny.

Let me caution you, though, that getting beyond our prejudices can be difficult. At least, it was for me. I once had a lot of motivation to stay on the atheistic path. I didn't want there to be a God who would hold me responsible for my immoral lifestyle. As the legal-affairs editor at the most powerful newspaper in the Midwest, I was used to pushing people around, not humbly submitting myself to some invisible spiritual authority.

I was trained not only to ask questions, however, but to go wherever the answers would take me. And I trust you have the same attitude. I hope you'll be willing to challenge what you may have been taught in a classroom some time back—information that might have been eclipsed by more recent discoveries.

Scientists themselves will tell you that this is entirely appropriate. "All scientific knowledge," said no less an authority than the National Academy of Sciences, "is, in principle, subject to change as new evidence becomes available." 41

What does this new evidence show? Be prepared to be amazed-— even dazzled-—by the starling new narrative that science has been busy writing over the past few decades.

"The Old Story of Science is scientific materialism," wrote theoretical physicist George Stanciu and science philosopher Robert Augros. "It holds that only matter exists and that all things are explicable in terms of matter alone." 42 But, they said, in recent years "science has undergone a series of dramatic revolutions" that have "transformed the modern conception of man and his place in the world." 43

This astounding "New Story of Science" —-with its surprising plot twists and intriguing characters-—unfolds in the coming pages, starting with an interview that rewrites the books that first led me into atheism.

………………..

TO  BE  CONTINUED

THE  CASE  FOR  GOD  #3

CHAPTER 3

Doubts about Darwinism

No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact.

Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr 1

Scientists who utterly reject evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities.... Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science.

Larry Hatfield in Science Digest 2

There were one hundred of them—biologists, chemists, zoologists, physicists, anthropologists, molecular and cell biologists, bioengineers, organic chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, and other scientists. Their doctorates came from such prestigious universities as Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, Rutgers, Chicago, Princeton, Purdue, Duke, Michigan, Syracuse, Temple, and Berkeley. They included professors from Yale Graduate School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tulane, Rice, Emory, George Mason, Lehigh, and the Universities of California, Washington, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.

Among them was the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry and scientists at the Plasma Physics Lab at Princeton, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.

And they wanted the world to know one thing: they are skeptical.

After spokespersons for the Public Broadcasting Systems seven-part television series Evolution asserted that "all known scientific evidence supports [Darwinian] evolution" as does "virtually every reputable scientist in the world," these professors, laboratory researchers, and other scientists published a two-page advertisement in a national magazine under the banner: "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism."

Their statement was direct and defiant. "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life," they said. "Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." 3

These were not narrow-minded fundamentalists, backwoods West Virginia protesters, or rabid-religious fanatics—-just respected, world-class scientists like Nobel nominee Henry F. Schaefer, the third most-cited chemist in the world; James Tour of Rice University's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology; and Fred Figworth, professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale Graduate School.

Together, despite the specter of professional persecution, they broached the politically incorrect opinion that the emperor of evolution has no clothes.

As a high school and university student studying evolution, I was never told that there were credible scientists who harbored significant skepticism toward Darwinian theory. I had been under the impression that it was only know-nothing pastors who objected to evolution on the grounds that it contradicted the Bibles claims. I wasn't aware that, according to historian Peter Bowler, substantive scientific critiques of natural selection started so early that by 1900 "its opponents were convinced it would never recover." 4

Viewers of the popular 2001 PBS series weren't told that, either. In fact, its one-sided depiction of evolution spurred a backlash from many scientists. A detailed, 151-page critique claimed it "failed to present accurately and fairly the scientific problems with the evidence for Darwinian evolution" and even systematically ignored "disagreements among evolutionary biologists themselves." 5

In my quest to determine if contemporary science points toward or away from God, I knew I had to first examine the claims of evolution in order to conclude once and for all whether Darwinism creates a reasonable foundation for atheism. That's because if the materialism of Darwinian evolution is a fact, then the atheistic conclusions I reached as a student might still be valid. Only after resolving this issue could I move ahead to assessing whether there is persuasive affirmative evidence for a Creator.

So I decided to return, in effect, to my days as a student by reexamining those images of evolution—-the Miller experiment, Darwin's tree of life, Haeckel's embryos, and the archaeopteryx missing link—which had convinced me that undirected and purposeless evolutionary processes accounted for the origin and complexity of life. Those symbols are hardly outdated. In fact, to this day those very same icons are still featured in many biology textbooks and are being seared into the minds of students around the country. But are they accurate in what they convey? "What do they really tell us about the trustworthiness of Darwinism?

I was thinking about this late one night while I was hunched over my computer keyboard, surfing the Internet for airline tickets. Leslie strolled into my office and peered over my shoulder.

"Where are you headed?" she asked.

"Seattle," I replied. I swiveled in my chair to face her. "There's a scientist up there who can make sense of those images of evolution that influenced me. I think I can relate to him."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," I said, "he studied evolution as a college student—and guess what happened?"

Leslie looked puzzled. "What?" she asked.

"He became an atheist."

INTERVIEW #1: Jonathan Wells, PhD, 

Science classes weren't heavily steeped in Darwinism when Jonathan Wells was a high school student in the late 1950s, but when he began studying geology at Princeton University, he found that everything was viewed through evolutionary lenses. Though he had grown up in the Presbyterian church, by the time Wells was halfway through college he considered himself to be an atheist.

"Was your atheism influenced by the Darwinian paradigm?" I asked.

"Oh, absolutely," he said. "The evolutionary story simply replaced the religious imagery I had grown up with. I didn't need the spiritual anymore-— except this vague, Gandhian, search-for-truth feeling I had." I was sitting with Wells in an office at the Discovery Institute, located on the fourth floor of an obscure office building in downtown Seattle. Wells serves as a senior fellow with the Institutes Center for Science and Culture, an organization that neatly blends his dual passions for both hard science and the issue of science's influence on the broader society. His undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley was in geology and physics, with a minor in biology. At Yale Graduate School, where he earned a doctorate in religious studies, "Wells specialized in the nineteenth-century controversies surrounding Darwin. His book, Charles Hodges Critique of Darwinism, was published in 1988 6.

In 1994, Wells received a doctorate in molecular and cell biology from Berkeley, where he focused primarily on vertebrate embryology and evolution. He later worked at Berkeley as a post-doctorate research biologist. Wells has written on the scientific and cultural aspects of evolution in such journals as Origins and Design, The Scientist, Touchstone, The American Biology Teacher, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs, while his technical articles—-with such scintillating titles as "Microtubule-mediated transport of organelles and localization of beta-catenin to the future dorsal side of Xenopus eggs"-—-have appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Development, and BioSystems.

An inveterate iconoclast, Wells doesn't shy away from controversy. After a two-year stint in the Army, he became an antiwar activist at Berkeley and ended up doing jail time for refusing to go to Vietnam as a reservist. While later living a Thoreau-like existence in a remote California cabin, he became enthralled by the grandeur of creation and gained new confidence that God was behind it. His spiritual interest rejuvenated, Wells explored numerous religious alternatives, visiting gurus, preachers, and swamis. 7

I hadn't come to Seattle, however, to seek spiritual wisdom from Wells. Instead, I sought him out because of his scientific expertise— and because he authored a book whose title intrigued me the moment I first saw it... Icons of Evolution, which was published in 2000, takes a clearheaded, scientific look at the very same visual images that had convinced me of the truth of Darwinian evolution. The Miller experiment, Darwin's tree of life, Haeckel's embryos, the archaeopteryx' missing link —they were all there, along with several other symbols of evolution. The book's subtitle especially piqued my curiosity: Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution Is Wrong 8

Here was my chance to put these images-—and the broader question of Darwinisms overall reliability—to the test. I eased into a comfortable chair that squarely faced the bearded and bespectacled Wells, who was sitting behind a wooden desk. He was casually dressed in a striped, short-sleeve shirt. While soft-spoken and mild-mannered as we chatted informally before our interview, he would quickly become animated as we began delving into his hot-button topic of evolutionary theory.

I flipped through my yellow legal pad to find a fresh page and took a pen in hand. More than thirty-five years after these icons of evolution led me on a journey into naturalism and atheism, I was anxious to get the real story. 9

Investigating the Icons

Starting at the beginning, I briefly recounted for Wells how the four images of evolution had influenced my slide into atheism. In a subtle expression of empathy, he would nod almost imperceptibly as I talked, as if to reassure me that he understood what I had gone through. At the conclusion of my story, I gestured toward a copy of his book that was on the desk.

"You included all four of those symbols in your book, along with several others," I said, "and you called them 'icons of evolution.' Why did you use that term?"

Wells leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. "Because if you ask almost any scientist to describe the evidence for Darwinism, time after time they give these same examples," he said. "They're in our textbooks. They're what we teach our students. For many scientists, they are the evidence for evolution."

"What are the other icons?"

"In addition to the four that influenced you, there is the similarity of bone structures in a bat's wing, a porpoise's flipper, a horse's leg, and a human hand. This is touted as evidence of their origin in a common ancestor. Then there are the pictures in textbooks of peppered moths on tree trunks, showing how camouflage and predatory birds result in natural selection. Of course, there are Darwin's finches—the Galapagos Island birds that are also used to support natural selection. Probably the most famous icon, though, is the drawing we see parodied in so many cartoons—the march of ape-like creatures as they slowly evolve into human beings, which suggests that we're merely animals that evolved by purposeless natural causes."

I paused for a moment while I took some notes. "Before we go any further," I said, "let's get our definitions straight. "When some people say 'evolution,' they mean merely that there has been change over time. But that's not an accurate description, is it?"

"Absolutely not," "Wells replied. "If that's all there was to Darwinism, then there wouldn't be any controversy, because we all agree there has been biological change over time. Others define evolution as just being 'descent with modification.' But again, everyone agrees that all organisms within a single species are related through descent with modification. This occurs in the ordinary course of biological reproduction.

"Darwinism claims much more than that—-it's the theory that all living creatures are modified descendents of a common ancestor that lived long ago. You and I, for example, are descendants of apelike ancestors—-in fact, we share a common ancestor with fruit flies. Darwinism claims that every new species that has ever appeared can be explained by descent with modification. Neo-Darwinism claims these modifications are the result of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations."10

"If these icons are the illustrations most cited as evidence of evolution, then I can see why they're important," I said. "What did you find as you examined them one by one?"

Wells didn't hesitate. "That they're either false or misleading," he replied.

"False or misleading?" I echoed. "Wait a second—are you saying my science teacher was lying to me? That's a pretty outrageous charge!"

Wells shook his head. "No, I'm not saying that. He probably believed in the icons too. I'm sure he wasn't even aware of the way they misrepresent the evidence. But the end result is the same—much of what science teachers have been telling students is simply wrong. A lot of what you personally were told about the icons, for instance, is probably false." I considered the implications for a moment. "Okay, let me follow your logic," I said. "If these icons are cited by scientists so often because they're among the best evidence for Darwinism-—"

"—And if they're either false or misleading," he said, picking up my thought, "then what does that tell us about evolutionary theory? That's the point. The question I'm raising is whether all of this is really science — or is it actually a kind of mythology?"

That's the very question I wanted to pursue. I decided that my approach would be to ask Wells for the straight story on each of the icons that especially influenced me. I started with the one that had the biggest impact: the picture of the tubes, flasks, and electrodes of Stanley Miller's 1953 experiment in which he shot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on the primitive earth, creating amino acids—-the building blocks of life. The clear implication—that life could be created naturalistically, without the intervention of a Creator—had been largely responsible for untethering me from my need for God.

 IMAGE #1: The Miller Experiment

Obviously, the significance of Miller's experiment—which to this day is still featured in many biology textbooks—hinges on whether he used an atmosphere that accurately simulated the environment of the early earth. At the time, Miller was relying heavily on the atmospheric theories of his doctoral advisor, Nobel laureate Harold Urey.

"What's the best scientific assessment today?" I asked Wells. "Did Miller use the correct atmosphere or not?"

Wells leaned back in his chair. "Well, nobody knows for sure what the early atmosphere was like, but the consensus is that the atmosphere was not at all like the one Miller used," he began.

"Miller chose a hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor, which was consistent with what many scientists thought back then. But scientists don't believe that anymore. As a geophysicist with the Carnegie Institution said in the 1960s, 'What is the evidence for a primitive methane-ammonia atmosphere on earth? The answer is that there is no evidence for it, but much against it.'11

"By the mid-1970s, Belgian biochemist Marcel Florkin was declaring that the concept behind Miller's theory of the early atmosphere 'has been abandoned.' 12 Two of the leading origin-of-life researchers, Klaus Dose and Sidney Fox, confirmed that Miller had used the wrong gas mixture. 13 And Science magazine said in 1995 that experts now dismiss Millers experiment because 'the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.,'" 14

I asked, "What's the current thinking of scientists concerning the gas content of the early earth?"

"The best hypothesis now is that there was very little hydrogen in the atmosphere because it would have escaped into space. Instead, the atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor," Wells said. "So my gripe is that textbooks still present the Miller experiment as though it reflected the earth's early environment, when most geochemists since the 1960s would say it was totally unlike Miller's."

I asked the next logical question: "What happens if you replay the experiment using an accurate atmosphere?"

"Til tell you this: you do not get amino acids, that's for sure," he replied. "Some textbooks fudge by saying, well, even if you use a realistic atmosphere, you still get organic molecules, as if that solves the problem."

Actually, that sounded promising. "Organic molecules?" I said. "I'm not a biochemist, but couldn't those be precursors to life?"

Wells recoiled. "That's what they sound like, but do you know what they are? Formaldehyde! Cyanide!" he declared, his voice rising for emphasis. "They may be organic molecules, but in my lab at Berkeley you couldn't even have a capped bottle of formaldehyde in the room, because the stuff is so toxic. You open the bottle and it fries proteins all over the place, just from the fumes. It kills embryos. The idea that using a realistic atmosphere gets you the first step in the origin of life is just laughable.

"Now, it's true that a good organic chemist can turn formaldehyde and cyanide into biological molecules. But to suggest that formaldehyde and cyanide give you the right substrate for the origin of life," he said, breaking into a chuckle, "Well, it's just a joke."

He let the point sink in before delivering the clincher. "Do you know what you get?" he asked. "Embalming fluid!"

Putting Humpty-Dumpty Together

The march of science has clearly left Millers experiment in the dust, even if some textbooks haven't yet noticed. But I wanted to press on and test other scenarios.

"Let's say that a scientist someday actually manages to produce amino acids from a realistic atmosphere of the early earth," I began. I could see "Wells was ready to interrupt, so I preempted him: "Look, I understand it's not chemically possible, but let's say it was. Or let's say amino acids came to earth in a comet or some other way. My question is this: how far would that be from creating a living cell?"

"Oh," he said as he pounced on the question, "Very far. Incredibly far. That would be the first step in an extremely complicated process. You would have to get the right number of the right kinds of amino acids to link up to create a protein molecule—-and that would still be a long way from a living cell. Then you'd need dozens of protein molecules, again in the right sequence, to create a living cell. The odds against this are astonishing. The gap between nonliving chemicals and even the most primitive living organism is absolutely tremendous."

I needed a visual picture to help me understand this. "Can you give me an illustration?" I asked.

"Let me describe it this way," he said. "Put a sterile, balanced salt solution in a test tube. Then put in a single living cell and poke a hole in it so that its contents leak into the solution. Now the test tube has all the molecules you would need to create a living cell, right? You would already have accomplished far more than what the Miller experiment ever could—you've got all the components you need for life."

I nodded. "That's right."

"The problem is you can't make a living cell," he said. "There's not even any point in trying. It would be like a physicist doing an experiment to see if he can get a rock to fall upwards all the way to the moon. No biologist in his right mind would think you can take a test tube with those molecules and turn them into a living cell."

"In other words" I said, "if you want to create life, on top of the challenge of somehow generating the cellular components out of nonliving chemicals, you would have an even bigger problem in trying to put the ingredients together in the right way."

"Exactly! In my illustration, the cell is dead, and you can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. So even if you could accomplish the thousands of steps between the amino acids in the Miller jar —-which probably didn't exist in the real world anyway— and the components you need for a living cell-—all the enzymes, the DNA, and so forth—you're still immeasurably far from life."

"But," I protested, "the first cell was probably a lot more primitive than even the simplest single-cell organism today."

"Granted," he said. "But my point remains the same—-the problem of assembling the right parts in the right way at the right time and at the right place, while keeping out the wrong material, is simply insurmountable. Frankly, the idea that we're on the verge of explaining the origin of life naturalistically is just silly to me."

"There's no theory, then, that can account for how life could have naturally come together by itself without any direction or guidance?"

Wells stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. "The word 'theory' is very slippery," he replied. "I can make up a story, but it would be unsupported at every crucial step by any experimental evidence worth counting. I'm an experimentalist at heart. I'd want to see some evidence —and it's just not there.

"For instance, one popular theory was that RNA, a close relative of DNA, could have been a molecular cradle from which early cells developed. This 'RNA world' hypothesis was heralded as a great possibility for a while. But nobody could demonstrate how RNA could have formed before living cells were around to make it, or how it could have survived under the conditions on the early earth.

"Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute, ruled out the RNA-first theory very colorfully by saying, 'You have to build straw man upon straw man to get to the point where RNA is a viable first biomolecule."15

"In short," declared Wells, "it was a dead end-—as all other theories have been."

"... and Hence a Miracle"

In hindsight, my materialistic philosophy had been built on a foundation that history has subsequently dismantled piece by piece. Millers experiment, once a great ally to my atheism, has been reduced to a mere scientific curiosity.

"What is the significance of his experiment today?" I asked Wells.

"To me, it has virtually no scientific significance," he replied. "It's historically interesting, because it convinced a lot of people through the years—-yourself included—that life could have arisen spontaneously, a point which I believe is false. Does it have a place in a science textbook? Maybe as a footnote."

"But it's more than a footnote in most texts, right?"

"Unfortunately, yes," he said. "It's prominently featured in current textbooks, often with pictures. The most generous thing I can say is that it's misleading. It's wrong to even give the impression that science has empirically shown how life could have originated. Now, they may have a disclaimer buried in the text, saying the earth's atmosphere may not have been what Miller thought it was. But then they say that if a realistic environment is used, you still get organic molecules. To me, that's just as misleading."

I thought about a student who encounters the Miller experiment today. Would he gloss over in his mind the complexities of creating life? Would he understand the nuances of the Miller story, or would he hear the term "organic molecules" and conclude that scientists are on the verge of resolving the problem of how nonliving chemicals somehow became living cells? Would a young person looking for an excuse to escape the accountability of God cling to the false conclusion that the origin-of-life problem is only a minor obstacle in the relentless march of evolutionary theory?

"Why do you think the Miller experiment is still published in textbooks?" I asked.

"Wells shrugged. "It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy, masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there's no other materialistic explanation. And if you try to invoke another explanation —for instance, intelligent design-—then the evolutionists claim you're not a scientist."

Wells's explanation was consistent with another interview I had conducted with origin-of-life expert Walter Bradley, a former professor at Texas A&M University, who co-authored the landmark 1984 book The Mystery of Life's Origin.16

I questioned Bradley about the various theories advanced by scientists for how the first living cell could have been naturalistically generated-—-including random chance, chemical affinity, self-ordering tendencies, seeding from space, deep-sea ocean vents, and using clay to encourage prebiotic chemicals to assemble-—and he demonstrated that not one of them can withstand scientific scrutiny. 17

Many other scientists have reached that same conclusion. "Science doesn't have the slightest idea how life began," journalist Gregg Easterbrook wrote about the origin-of-life field. "No generally accepted theory exists, and the steps leading from a barren primordial world to the fragile chemistry of life seem imponderable."18

Bradley not only shares that view, but he said that the mind-boggling difficulties in bridging the yawning gap between non-life and life mean that there may very well be no potential of ever finding a theory for how life could have arisen spontaneously. That's why he's convinced that the "absolutely overwhelming evidence" points toward an intelligence behind life's creation.

In fact, he said: "I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there's an Intelligent Designer."19

Even those who look askance at religious faith have been forced to conclude that the odds against the spontaneous creation of life are so absurdly high that there must be more to the creation story than mere materialistic processes. They can't help but invoke the only word that seems to realistically account for it all: miracle. It's a label many scientists are loathe to use but which the circumstances seem to demand.

For instance, one of the country's leading science journalists, John Horgan, who identifies himself as a "lapsed Catholic," conceded in 2002 that scientists have no idea how the universe was created or "how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures." Then came that word: "Science, you might say, has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle." 20

Even biochemist and spiritual skeptic Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, cautiously invoked the word a few years ago. "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going," he said. 21

Others are more adamant. "If there isn't a natural explanation and there doesn't seem to be the potential of finding one, then I believe it's appropriate to look at a supernatural explanation," said Bradley. "I think that's the most reasonable inference based on the evidence." 22

IMAGE #2: Darwin's Tree of Life

It was time to advance to the next image of evolution. One of the most recognizable icons is the drawing Darwin sketched for The Origin of Species to illustrate his theory that all living creatures had a common ancestor and that natural selection drove the eventual development of the countless organisms we see in the modern world. To me, his sketch of the evolutionary tree encapsulated why Darwinian evolution was so compelling: it seemed to explain everything in natural history. The question, though, is whether the tree represents reality.

"We now have more than a century of fossil discoveries since Darwin drew his picture," I said to Wells. "Has this evolutionary tree held up?"

"Absolutely not," came his quick reply. "As an illustration of the fossil record, the Tree of Life is a dismal failure. But it is a good representation of Darwin's theory.

"You see, he believed that if a population was exposed to one set of conditions, and another part of the population experienced other conditions, then natural selection could modify the two populations in different ways. Over time, one species could produce several varieties, and if these varieties continued to diverge, they would eventually become separate species. That's why his drawing was in the pattern of a branching tree.

"A key aspect of his theory was that natural selection would act, in his own words, 'slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations' and that no great or 'sudden modifications' were possible."

I didn't want to miss the significance of what Wells was claiming. "You're saying that the tree of life illustrates Darwin's ideas but that his theory is not supported by the physical evidence scientists have found in fossils?"

"That's right," he continued. "In fact, Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree. He acknowledged that major groups of animals —'he calls them divisions,' now they're called 'phyla'-—-appear suddenly in the fossil record. 23 That's not what his theory predicts. His theory predicts a long history of gradual divergence from a common ancestor, with the differences slowly becoming bigger and bigger until you get the major differences we have now. The fossil evidence, even in his day, showed the opposite: the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what's called the 'Cambrian explosion.' Darwin believed that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory—but that hasn't happened. Actually, fossil discoveries over the last hundred and fifty years have turned his tree upside down by showing the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than scientists once thought."

That begged for further explanation. "Elaborate on the Cambrian explosion," I said.

"The Cambrian was a geological period that we think began a little more than 540 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion has been called the 'Biological Big Bang' because it gave rise to the sudden appearance of most of the major animal phyla that are still alive today, as well as some that are now extinct," Wells said.

"Here's what the record shows: there were some jellyfish, sponges, and worms prior to the Cambrian, although there's no evidence to support Darwin's theory of a long history of gradual divergence. Then at the beginning of the Cambrian—boom!—all of a sudden, we see representatives of the arthropods, modern representatives of which are insects, crabs, and the like; echinoderms, which include modern starfish and sea urchins; chordates, which include modern vertebrates; and so forth. Mammals came later, but the chordates-—the major group to which they belong—were right there at the beginning of the Cambrian. This is absolutely contrary to Darwin's Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontologists have called the single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record."

Spectacular, indeed. It was staggering! But I was having trouble thinking in vast geological terms, where words like "sudden" and "abrupt" have meanings quite different from how we might use them in everyday conversation. I needed more clarity.

"How suddenly did these animals come onto the scene?" I asked Wells. "Put it into context for me."

"Okay," he said. His eyes swept the room, looking for a suitable illustration. Finding none, he turned to me and asked: "Are you a football fan?" I felt trapped. I didn't want to admit that I've followed the hapless Chicago Bears ever since I was a teenager. 24 After all, my credibility was at stake! So I kept my answer vague: "Uh, yeah, I like the game."

"Okay," he said, "imagine yourself on one goal line of a football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, you pass midfield, and you're approaching the other goal line. All you've seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms. You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then— boom!-—-in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear. As one evolutionary scientist said, 'the major animal groups appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus—full blown and raring to go.' 25

"Now, nobody can call that a branching tree! Some paleontologists, even though they may think Darwin's overall theory is correct, call it a lawn rather than a tree, because you have these separate blades of grass sprouting up. One paleontologist in China says it actually stands Darwin's tree on its head, because the major groups of animals—instead of coming last, at the top of the tree—come first, when animals make their first appearance. Either way, the result is the same: the Cambrian explosion has uprooted Darwin's tree."

The Hypothesis Fails

There seemed, however, to be an easy comeback. "Maybe," I said, "Darwin was right after all—the fossil record is still incomplete. "Who knows how natural history might be rewritten next week by a discovery that will be made in a fossil dig somewhere? Or perhaps," I speculated, "the organisms that existed prior to the Biological Big Bang were too small or their bodies were too soft to have left any trace in the fossil record."

Having raised those objections, I sat back in my chair. "Frankly, you can't prove otherwise," I said, my words almost a taunt.

Wells yielded a little. "As a scientist," he conceded, "I have to leave open the possibility that next year someone will discover a fossil bed in the Congo or somewhere that will suddenly fill in the gaps."

I nodded at his admission. However, he wasn't finished.

"But I sure don't think that's likely," he added. "It hasn't happened after all this time, and millions of fossils have already been dug up. There are certainly enough good sedimentary rocks from before the Cambrian era to have preserved ancestors if there were any. I have to agree with two experts in the field who said that the Cambrian explosion is 'too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record.' As for the pre-Cambrian fossils being too tiny or soft to be preserved-—-well, we have microfossils of bacteria in rocks dating back more than three billion years. And there have been soft-bodied organisms from before the Cambrian that have been found in Australia. In fact, scientists have found soft-bodied animals in the Cambrian explosion itself. So I don't think that's a very good explanation, either. Today evolutionists are turning to molecular evidence to try to show there was a common ancestor prior to the Cambrian."

"How does that work?" I asked.

"Not very well," he quipped. "But here's the process: you can't get molecular evidence from the fossils themselves; all of it comes from living organisms. You take a molecule that's basic to life—say, ribo-somal RNA—and you examine it in a starfish, and then you study its equivalent in a snail, a worm, and a frog. You're looking for similarities. If you compare this one molecule across different categories of animal body plans and find similarities, and if you make the assumption that they came from a common ancestor, then you can construct a theoretical evolutionary tree. But there are too many problems with this. If you compare this molecular tree with a tree based on anatomy, you get a different tree. You can examine another molecule and come up with another tree altogether. In fact, if you give one molecule to two different laboratories, you can get two different trees. There's no consistency, including with the dating. It's all over the board. Based on all this, I think it's reasonable for me, as a scientist, to say that maybe we should question our assumption that this common ancestor exists."

Wells stopped for a moment. He apparently felt some elaboration was in order. 

"Of course, descent from a common ancestor is true at some levels," he continued. "Nobody denies that. For example, we can trace generations of fruit flies to a common ancestor. Within a single species, common ancestry has been observed directly. And it's possible that all the cats-—-tigers, lions, and so on-—descended from a common ancestor. While that's not a fact, it might be a reasonable inference based on interbreeding. So as we go up these different levels in the taxonomic hierarchy —species, genus, family, order, class—common ancestry is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy. When you get to the level of phyla, the major animal groups, it's a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say its disconfirmed. The evidence just doesn't support it."

The facts were compelling. Nobody can claim that Darwin's tree is an accurate description of what the fossil record has produced. Protestations from Darwinists aside, the evidence has failed to substantiate the predictions that Darwin made. Yet when I encountered the drawing as a student, I walked away with the conclusion that it illustrated the success of his revolutionary ideas.

"Is the drawing still featured in textbooks today?" I asked.

"Not only is it included in the textbooks, but it's called a fact," Wells replied, sounding genuinely astonished. "I don't mind that it's shown; I think it's a good illustration of an interesting theory. What I mind is when textbooks call it a fact that all animals share a common ancestor. Well, it's not a fact!" he declared, his voice punctuating his point.

"If you consider all of the evidence, Darwin's tree is false as a description of the history of life. I'll even go further than that: it's not even a good hypothesis at this point."

IMAGE #3: Haeckel's Embryos

Like every young student of evolution, Wells had seen Ernst Haeckel's comparative drawings of embryos, often described as among the best evidence for Darwinism. But it wasn't until Wells was working on his doctorate in vertebrate embryology that he saw the sketches for what they really were.

Haeckel's most renowned images depict the embryos of a fish, salamander, tortoise, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit, and human side-by-side at three stages of development. The illustrations support Darwin's assertion that the striking similarities between early embryos is "by far the strongest single class of facts" in favor of his theory that all organisms share a universal ancestor.

I was mesmerized by the nineteenth-century drawings when I first encountered them as a student. As I carefully compared the embryos at their earliest stage, looking back and forth from one to the other, I could see they were virtually indistinguishable. I searched my mind, but I couldn't think of any logical explanation for this phenomenon other than a common ancestor. My verdict was swift: Darwin prevails.

The real explanation, as it turns out, would have been far too bizarre for me to have even considered at the time.

"When you saw these drawings," I said to "Wells, "did you have the same reaction that I did-—-that this was strong evidence for Darwinism?"

"Yes, I did, the first time I looked at them," Wells answered. "It wasn't until I was doing my graduate work that I began to compare actual photographs of embryos to what Haeckel had drawn."

"And what did you find?"

"I was stunned!" he said, his eyes widening. "They didn't fit. There was a big discrepancy. It was really hard to believe."

As he described what had happened, I slowly shook my head in amazement at the implications of what he was saying. "I sort of rationalized by saying, well, textbooks tend to oversimplify things," he continued. "But over time it bothered me more and more. 

"I was hungry for details. "

"What was it specifically that bothered you?" I asked.

"There are three problems with these drawings," he said. "The first is that the similarities in the early stages were faked."

He leveled the accusation without emotion in his voice, but nevertheless it was a stunning charge. "Faked?" I repeated. "Are you sure?" It seemed inconceivable that the books I had relied upon as a student could have so blatantly misled me.

"You can call them fudged, distorted, misleading, but the bottom line is that they were faked," he replied. "Apparently in some cases Haeckel actually used the same woodcut to print embryos from different classes because he was so confident of his theory that he figured he didn't have to draw them separately. In other cases he doctored the drawings to make them look more similar than they really are. At any rate, his drawings misrepresent the embryos."

"That's amazing!" I said. "How long has this been known?"

"They were first exposed in the late 1860s, when his colleagues accused him of fraud."

I cocked my head. "Wait a minute-—I saw these drawings in books that I studied when I was a student in the 1960s and '70s-—more than a hundred years later. How is that possible?"

"It's worse than that!" he declared. "They're still being used, even in upper-division textbooks on evolutionary biology. In fact, I analyzed and graded ten recent textbooks on how accurately they dealt with this topic. I had to give eight of them an F. Two others did only slightly better; I gave them a D."

Anger was brewing inside of me. I had bought into Darwinism— and subsequendy atheism, partially on the basis of drawings that scientists had known for a century were doctored. "This is really hard to believe," I said. "Doesn't it make you mad?"

"Of course it does, because I was raised on this stuff too. I was misled," he said. "There was no excuse for it. When some biologists exposed this in an article a few years ago, the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard complained that this was nothing new. He had known about it for twenty years! It was no secret to the experts. But then why was it still in textbooks? Even Gould said textbook writers should be ashamed of the way the drawings had been mindlessly recycled for over a century. At least he was honest enough to call it what it was: 'the academic equivalent of murder.' " 27

The Sins of Haeckel

Wells's first disclosure about Haeckel's embryos was a stunner, but he had said there were a total of three problems with the drawings. I couldn't wait to hear him address the others. "What are the other two problems?" I asked.

"The minor problem is that Haeckel cherry-picked his examples," Wells explained. "He only shows a few of the seven vertebrate classes. For example, his most famous rendition has eight columns. Four are mammals, but they're all placental mammals. There are two other kinds of mammals that he didn't show, which are different. The remaining four classes he showed—reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fish-—happen to be more similar than the ones he omitted. He used a salamander to represent amphibians instead of a frog, which looks very different. So he

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TO  BE  CONTINUED

CASE FOR A CREATOR #4 continued

Doubts about Darwinism #2

The Sins of Haeckel

"Wells's first disclosure about Haeckel's embryos was a stunner, but he had said there were a total of three problems with the drawings. I couldn't wait to hear him address the others. "What are the other two problems?" I asked.

"The minor problem is that Haeckel cherry-picked his examples," Wells explained. "He only shows a few of the seven vertebrate classes. For example, his most famous rendition has eight columns. Four are mammals, but they're all placental mammals. There are two other kinds of mammals that he didn't show, which are different. The remaining four classes he showed—reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fish—-happen to be more similar than the ones he omitted. He used a salamander to represent amphibians instead of a frog, which looks very different. So he stacked the deck by picking representatives that came closest to fitting his idea—-and then he went further by faking the similarities."

That sounded like a pretty serious breach of scientific protocol to me. "If that's the minor problem," I said sarcastically, "then what's the major one?"

Wells moved to the edge of his chair; clearly, this was tapping into his passion area. "To me, as an embryologist, the most dramatic problem is that what Haeckel claimed is the early stage of development is nothing of the sort. It's actually the midpoint of development," he explained. "If you go back to the earlier stages, the embryos look far more different from each other. But he deliberately omits the earlier stages altogether."

I didn't immediately catch the full significance of this. ""Why is that important?"

"Remember Darwin claimed that because the embryos are most similar in their early stages, this is evidence of common ancestry. He thought that the early stage showed what the common ancestor looked like-—-sort of like a fish.

"But embryologists talk about the 'developmental hourglass,' which refers to the shape of an hourglass, with its width representing the measure of difference. You see, vertebrate embryos start out looking very different in the early cell division stages. The cell divisions in a mammal, for example, are radically different from those in any of the other classes. There's no possible way you could mix them up. In fact, it's extremely different within classes. The patterns are all over the place. Then at the midpoint-—which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage—the embryos become more similar, though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again."

What a devastating critique! Haeckel's drawings, which had been published countless times over more than a century, had failed on three levels. I couldn't help but ask "Wells: "If they're so misleading, then why did scientists continue to publish them for generation after generation of students?"

"One explanation that's often given," he replied, "is that although the drawings are false, they teach a concept that's basically true. "Well, this is not true. Biologists know that embryos are not most similar in their earliest stages."

With that, Wells picked up his book from the desk and flipped to the chapter on Haeckel. "Yet listen to this: one textbook shows Haeckeis drawings and says, 'Early developmental stages of animals whose adult forms appear radically different are often surprisingly similar.' One 1999 textbook has a slightly redrawn version of Haeckeis work and tells students, 'Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other.'

Another textbook accompanies its drawings with the statement: 'The early embryos of vertebrates strongly resemble one another.' Another says flatly: 'One fact of embryology that pushed Darwin toward the idea of evolution is that the early embryos of most vertebrates closely resemble one another.'" 28

Wells snapped the book shut. "As I said, it's just false that embryos are most similar in their earliest development. Of course, some Darwinists try to get around Haeckeis problems by changing their tune. They use evolutionary theory to try to explain why the differences in the embryos are there. They can get quite elaborate," he said.

"But that's doing the same thing that the theory-savers were doing with the Cambrian explosion. "What was supposed to be primary evidence for Darwin's theory—the fossil or embryo evidence—turns out to be false, so they immediately say, well, we know the theory's true, so let's use the theory to explain why the evidence doesn't fit. But then, inheres the evidence for the theory?' he demanded, sounding both frustrated and perturbed. "That's what I'd like to know. "Why should I accept the theory as being true at all?"

The Truth about Gills

Wells's explanation made me feel foolish for ever having believed the embryo drawings I had seen as a student, much less the previous two icons that 'Wells had already deconstructed. I felt a little like the victim of a con game, blaming myself for being so uncritical and naive in accepting what evolution textbooks and biology teachers had told me.

But HaekePs drawings weren't the only evidence I had been taught about universal ancestry. I also had been told a fascinating fact that helped convince me that our progenitors dwelled in the ocean: all human embryos, so my teachers said, go through a stage in which they actually develop gill-like structures on their necks.

The encyclopedia I consulted as a youngster declared unequivocally that "the fetuses of mammals at one stage have gill slits which resemble those of fish," which to me was dramatic confirmation of our aquatic ancestry. 29 In 1996, Life magazine described how human embryos grow "something very much like gills," which is "some of the most compelling evidence of evolution." 30 Even some contemporary biology textbooks assert that human embryos have "gill pouches" or "gill slits." 31

This colorful tidbit stayed with me from the first time I heard it. "Aren't gills strong evidence that our ancestors lived in the ocean?" I asked Wells.

He sighed. Apparently, I was not the first person to raise this issue with him. "Yes, that's the standard argument, but—here," he said, gesturing toward me, "look down toward your navel for a moment." Feeling a little awkward, I bowed my head. "Now, feel your neck," he said. "There are ridges in the skin, right?" I nodded. Well, if you look at an embryo, it's doubled over. It has ridges in the neck. I'm not saying they're only skin folds; they're more complicated than that. But it's just an anatomical feature that grows out of the fact that this is how vertebrate embryos develop. Let me be clear: they're not gills!" he stressed. "Even fish don't have gills at that stage. In humans, the ridges become one thing; in fish,'they become gills. They're not even gill slits. To call them gill-like structures is merely reading evolutionary theory back into the evidence. They're never gill-like except in the superficial sense that they're lines in the neck area. As British embryologist Lewis Wolpert said, the resemblance is only illusory. 32

It's interesting how these misconceptions continue to thrive," he went on. "Evolutionists used to teach that famous phrase 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,' which is a fancy way of saying that embryos repeat their evolutionary history by passing through the adult forms of their ancestors as they develop. But this theory has been widely dismissed for many decades, because it's empirically false. Even so, there are aspects of it that still come up. And gill slits' would be a prime example of that."

Wing, Flipper, Leg, Hand

Earlier in our interview, Wells had brought up another category of evidence for universal ancestry: homology in vertebrate limbs. I remember as a student seeing the drawings depicting the similar bone structures in a bat's wing, a porpoise's flipper, a horse's leg, and a human's hand. I was told that even though these limbs have been adapted for different uses, their underlying similarity-—-or "homology"-—-is proof that they all share a common ancestor. Wells had briefly mentioned this phenomenon at the outset of our interview. "Isn't homology good evidence for Darwinism?" I asked.

"Actually, these homologies were described and named by Darwin's predecessors-—-and they were not evolutionists," he replied. "Richard Owen, who was the most famous anatomist of Darwin's time, said they pointed toward a common archetype or design, not toward descent with modification."

"But," I protested, "the similarities are there—-you can't deny that."

"Yes, but the explanation can go either way: design or descent with modification. How do we determine which is true? Listen—similarity alone doesn't tell us. Look at Berra's Blunder."

He threw out that comment assuming I would know what he was referring to. Although the term sounded vaguely familiar, I couldn't pinpoint what it meant. "Berra's Blunder?" I asked. "What's that?"

"Phillip Johnson coined that term based on a book that was written by a biologist named Tim Berra in 1990. Berra compared the fossil record to a series of automobile models, saying that if you compare a 1953 and 1954 Corvette side by side, and then a 1954 and 1955 Corvette and so on, then it becomes obvious that there has been descent with modification. He said this is what paleontologists do with fossils, 'and the evidence is so solid and comprehensive that it cannot be denied by reasonable people.' 33

"Far from demonstrating his point, the illustration shows that a designer could have been involved," Wells said. "These successive models of the Corvette are based on plans drawn up by engineers, so there's intelligence at work to guide and implement the process. If you wanted to demonstrate that the similar features resulted from a Darwinian process, you would have to show that once you somehow got an automobile, the natural forces of rust, wind, water, and gravity would turn one model into its successor. The point I want to make is this: quite unintentionally, Berra had illustrated the fact that merely having a succession of similar forms does not provide its own explanation. A mechanism is needed. With the Corvette, that mechanism is human manufacturing."

"What mechanism is proposed for Darwinism?" I asked.

"One is called 'common developmental pathways,' which means if you have two different animals with homologous features and you trace them back to the embryo, they would come from similar cells and processes. This happens to be mostly untrue. I mentioned frogs earlier. There are some frogs that develop like frogs and other frogs that develop like birds, but they all look pretty much the same when they come out the other end. They're frogs. So the developmental pathway explanation is false—I don't know anybody who studies development and takes it seriously. A more common explanation nowadays is that the homologies come from similar genes. In other words, the reason two features are homologous in two different animals would be that they're programmed by similar genes in the embryo. But it turns out this doesn't work very well, either. We know some cases where you have similar features that come from different genes, but we have lots and lots of cases where we have similar genes that give rise to very different features. I'll give you an example: eyes. There's a gene that's similar in mice, octopuses, and fruit flies. If you look at a mouse eye and an octopus eye, there's a superficial similarity, which is odd because nobody thinks their common ancestor had an eye like that. What's more striking is if you look at a fruit fly's eye-—a compound eye with multiple facets—-it's totally different. Yet all three of these eyes depend on the same or very similar gene. In fact, it's so similar that you can put the mouse gene into a fruit fly that's missing that gene and you can get the fruit fly to develop its eyes as it normally would. The genes are that similar. So neither the developmental pathway explanation nor the similar gene explanation really accounts for homology."

I asked, "What's the answer, then?"

Wells shrugged. "Frankly, it remains a mystery. If you read the literature on homology, the experts know it's a mystery. They may not give up Darwinism, but they know they haven't solved the problem. To me, if you haven't solved the problem of a mechanism, then you haven't distinguished between common descent and common design. It could be either one. The evidence isn't pointing one way or the other. I think students deserve to know that scientists haven't resolved this problem. Instead, some textbooks simply define homology as similarity due to common ancestry. So the theory becomes true by definition. What the textbook is saying is that similarity due to common ancestry is due to common ancestry. And that's circular reasoning."

Human Genes, Ape Genes

Since Wells had brought up genetics, I was reminded of another question I wanted to raise with him about the theory of common descent. "What about recent genetic studies that show humans and apes share ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of their genes?" I asked. "Isn't that evidence that we share a common ancestor?"

"If you assume, as neo-Darwinism does, that we are products of our genes, then you're saying that the dramatic differences between us and chimpanzees are due to two percent of our genes," he replied. "The problem is that the so-called body-building genes are in the ninety-eight percent. The two percent of genes that are different are really rather trivial genes that have little to do with anatomy. So the supposed similarity of human and chimpanzee DNA is a problem for neo-Darwinism right there. Second, it's not surprising that when you look at two organisms that are similar anatomically, you often find they're similar genetically. Not always; there's a striking discordance with some organisms. But does this prove common ancestry?"

He shook his head as he answered his own question: "No, it's just as compatible with common design as it is with common ancestry. A designer might very well decide to use common building materials to create different organisms, just as builders use the same materials— steel girders, rivets, and so forth—-to build different bridges that end up looking very dissimilar from one another."

As I mentally wrestled with this concept, I stood to stretch my legs. Walking over to the window, I looked down at cars backed up along the busy street and people hustling down the sidewalks on either side. A rudimentary illustration popped into my mind.

"Let me see if I understand you. If I were to chemically analyze that street and sidewalk," I said, pointing out the window, "I'd find they would be identical or very similar. They'd both be made of concrete. But that wouldn't mean that they shared a common ancestor—say, a path for a golf cart—that got wider and more substantial over millions of years. A better explanation would be that there was a common designer who decided to use basically the same materials to construct similar, but functionally different, structures."

Wells thought about my example for a moment. "Essentially, that's right," he said. "It sounds ridiculous to suggest a golf path could evolve into a sidewalk and street, but it's not any more outlandish than some of the claims for biological evolution. The important point is that similarity by itself doesn't distinguish between design and Darwinism."

We had strayed from Haeckel's embryos, but the issues were the same: is there persuasive evidence through embryology or homology that all living creatures evolved over time from an ancient progenitor? I concluded that Darwin was wrong: examining embryos of different creatures in their early stages does not yield support for his theory. And the undeniable similarities between some vertebrate limbs certainly doesn't distinguish between design or descent as a cause. Once again, the persuasive power of the evolutionary icons had been deflated.

I glanced at my watch; if I were to catch my plane back to Los Angeles, I would need to turn to the last of the four evolutionary images from my days as a student: the awe-inspiring fossil of a prehistoric creature that once effectively silenced many of Darwin's critics.

IMAGE #4: The Archaeopteryx Missing Link

"When Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859, he conceded that "the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory" was that the fossil record failed to back up his evolutionary hypothesis.

"Why," he asked, "if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?" He attributed the problem to the fossil record being incomplete and predicted that future discoveries would vindicate his theory.

As if on cue, two years later scientists unearthed the archaeopteryx (pronounced ar-key-OPT-er-icks) in a German quarry. Darwin's supporters were thrilled—surely this missing link between reptiles and modern birds, unveiled so promptly after the appearance of Darwin's book, would just be the first of many future fossil discoveries that would validate Darwin's claims. Like many people, including the scientist who "actually fell upon his knees in awe" when he first glimpsed the archaeopteryx at the National History Museum in England, 34 I was enthralled by the dramatic pictures of the prehistoric creature. I was under the impression that it was featured in my books on evolution because it is just one example of many transitional links that have been found. But I was wrong. Since that time I have come to learn that the fossil record has utterly let Darwin down. Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, summarized the bleak situation this way:

... [T]he universal experience of paleontology... [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life ... what they have never yielded is any of Darwin's myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin. The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record. 35 As a result, said Denton, the fossil record "provides a tremendous challenge to the notion of organic evolution."36 But what about the archaeopteryx. The fossils of this magnificent creature, its detailed image pressed into fine-grained limestone, still seemed to stand in stark contrast to this trend.

"Doesn't archaeopteryx fill the gap between reptiles and modern birds?" I asked Wells.

"There are several problems with that," came his reply. "Does it show Darwinian evolution? Well, no, for the same reason that the Corvettes don't illustrate Darwinian evolution. We would need more than an intermediate form to show that; we would need to know how you get from one to the other. The question is, do you get from a reptile to a bird—which is an astonishingly huge step—by some totally natural process or does this require the intervention of a designer? An archaeopteryx, as beautiful as it is, doesn't show us one way or the other. Besides, we see strange animals around today, like the duck-billed platypus, which nobody considers transitional but which has characteristics of different classes."

"But the archaeopteryx is a half-bird, half-reptile, right?"

"No, not even close," he insisted. "It's a bird with modern feathers, and birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways— their breeding system, their bone structure, their lungs, their distribution of weight and muscles. It's a bird, that's clear—-not part bird and part reptile. But there are more interesting parts to the archaeopteryx story," he added. "The main one comes from a branch of evolutionary theory called cladistics. This takes Darwinian theory to the extreme. Cladists define homology, or physical similarities, as being due to common ancestry. Then they say, well, the main way we can group animals in the evolutionary tree is through homologies, which is already a bit of a circular argument. When they go back into the fossil record, they assume birds came from reptiles by descent, and they look for reptiles that are more bird-like in their skeletal structure."

"Where do they find them?" I asked.

Wells smiled. "That's the fascinating part," he said. "It turns out they find them millions of years after archaeopteryx. So here we have archaeopteryx, which is undeniably a bird, and yet the fossils that look most like the reptilian ancestors of birds occur tens of millions of years later in the fossil record. The missing link is still missing! Now evolutionists are stuck looking for another theoretical ancestor to try to fill the gaps, but it hasn't been found."

"So the archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of modern birds?"

"Not at all. Paleontologists pretty much agree on that. There are too many structural differences. Larry Martin, a paleontologist from the University of Kansas, said clearly in 1985 that the archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of any modern birds; instead, it's a member of a totally extinct group of birds." 37

So much for the power of archaeopteryx to authenticate Darwin's claims. Even ardent evolutionist Pierre Lecomte du Nouy agrees:

We are not even authorized to consider the exceptional case of the archaeopteryx as a true link. By link, we mean a necessary stage of transition between classes such as reptiles and birds, or between smaller groups. An animal displaying characters belonging to two different groups cannot be treated as a true link as long as the intermediary stages have not been found, and as long as the mechanisms of transition remain unknown. 38

Yet even if archaeopteryx had turned out to be a transitional creature, it would have been but a whisper of protest to the fossil records deafening roar against classical Darwinism.

"If we are testing Darwinism rather than merely looking for a confirming example or two," Phillip Johnson said, "then a single good candidate for ancestor status is not enough to save a theory that posits a worldwide history of continual evolutionary transformation." 39

Frauds and Turkeys

Paleontologists, however, have been on a frenzy to try to locate an actual reptilian ancestor for birds. Driven by an all-consuming commitment to evolutionary theory, their zeal has resulted in some recent embarrassments for science. Wells was more than willing to regale me with some examples.

"A few years ago the National Geographic Society announced that a fossil had been purchased at an Arizona mineral show that turned out to be 'the missing link between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could actually fly'" he said. "It certainly looked that way. They called it the archaeoraptor, and it had the tail of a dinosaur and the forelimbs of a bird. National Geographic magazine published an article in 1999 that said there's now evidence that feathered dinosaurs were ancestors of the first bird."

"That sounds pretty convincing," I said.

"Well, the problem was that it was a fake!" Wells said. "A Chinese paleontologist proved that someone had glued a dinosaur tail to a primitive bird. He created it to resemble just what the scientists had been looking for. There was a firestorm of criticism—-the curator of birds at the Smithsonian charged that the Society had become aligned with zealous scientists' who were 'highly biased proselytizers of the faith' that birds evolved from dinosaurs."

Then Wells made a blanket statement that struck me at the time as being too cynical. "Fakes are coming out of these fossil beds all the time," he said, "because the fossil dealers know there's big money in it."

I remained skeptical about that charge until I subsequently read an interview with ornithologist Alan Feduccia, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When a reporter for Discover magazine raised the archaeoraptor fraud, Feduccia said:

Archaeoraptor is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it's difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard there is a fake-fossil factory in northeast China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found. 40

Asked what would motivate such fraud, Fedducia replied: "Money. The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business. These fossil forgeries have been sold on the black market for years now, for huge sums of money. Anyone who can produce a good fake stands to profit." 41

Other outlandish incidents occurred at about the same time the archaeoraptor fraud was coming to light. "Wells was attending a conference in Florida, where the star of the show was a fossil called bambiraptor-- a chicken-sized dinosaur with supposedly bird-like characteristics.

"Again, paleontologists called it the missing link," Wells told me. "And, sure enough, the reconstructed animal on display had feathers or feather-like structures on it. The problem was that no feathers were ever found with the fossil! But because scientists said they should be there, they were added. And the dinosaur looked even more like a bird because the guy who did the reconstruction used the same artificial eyes that taxidermists put in stuffed eagles. While there was a brief disclaimer," he added, "it was rather cryptically written. Then a group of molecular biologists at the conference reported finding bird DNA in dinosaur bones that were sixty-five million years old. Now, that would be pretty exciting! They suggested that this was genetic evidence that birds are closely related to dinosaurs. The problem is that the bones from which the DNA was supposedly extracted are from a branch of dinosaurs that had nothing to do with bird ancestry. Furthermore, the DNA they found was not ninety or ninety-nine percent similar to birds—it was one-hundred-percent turkey DNA! Even chickens don't have DNA that's one hundred percent similar to turkey DNA. Only turkeys have one-hundred-percent turkey DNA. So these people said they found turkey DNA in a dinosaur bone— and it actually got published in Science magazine! This is just incredible to me! The headline in the magazine said with a straight face: 'Dinos and Turkeys: Connected by DNA?'"

That last story begged the next question: "How in the world do you explain how the turkey DNA got in there?"

Shaking his head, "Wells said, "Maybe somebody dropped a turkey sandwich in the dig or there was lab contamination. If I had reported something like this in my grad student research, I would have been laughed out of the room. They would have told me, 'Go do the test again—it's contaminated.' But for goodness sake, this was taken seriously enough to publish it in Science. Even the scientist who reported the finding admitted he was 'quite skeptical' of his own work at this points—-and yet people were willing to seize on it to support their belief in Darwinian theory." 42

The Legend of Java Man

I couldn't end my conversation without touching on one more icon related to the fossil evidence: the pictures I've seen from time to time of a parade of ape-like creatures that morph into modern human beings. In fact, this illustration is emblazoned across the cover of a 1998 edition of The Origin of Species. 43 For many, this "ultimate icon" is not just a theory, but an established fact.

"If you go back far enough," legendary newscaster "Walter Cronkite intoned in a documentary on evolution, "we and the chimps share a common ancestor. My father's father's father's father, going back maybe a half-million generations-—about five million years ago—was an ape." 44

That kind of certainty about human evolution was engendered in me as a youngster, when I would devour my World Book Encyclopedia. One of my favorite entries was "Prehistoric Man," where I would linger for hours, fascinated by the part-ape, part-human nicknamed "Java man." Apparently, I wasn't the only member of this missing link's fan club. Said the author of a book on paleoanthropology:

Java man is like an old friend. We learned about him in grade school In fact, the vast majority of people who believe in human evolution were probably first sold on it by this convincing salesman. Not only is he the best-known human fossil, he is one of the only human fossils most people know. 45

World Book's two-page spread highlighted a parade of prehistoric men. Second in line was a lifelike bust of Java man from the American Museum of Natural History, accompanied by an outline showing his profile. "With his sloping forehead, heavy brow, jutting jaw, receding chin and bemused expression, he was exactly what a blend of ape and man should look like. For me, studying his face and looking into his eyes helped cement the reality of human evolution.

The encyclopedia confidently described how Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois, excavating on an Indonesian Island in 1891 and 1892, "dug some bones from a riverbank." Java man, which he dated back half a million years, "represents a stage in the development of modern man from a smaller-brained ancestor." 46 He was, according to Dubois, the missing link between apes and humans. 47

And I believed it all. I was blithely ignorant, however, of the full Java man story. What is not so well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth, and a great deal of imagination, one author would later write. 48 In other words, the lifelike depiction of Java man, which had so gripped me when I was young, was little more than speculation fueled by evolutionary expectations of what he should have looked like if Darwinism were true.

As a youngster beginning to form my opinions about human evolution, I wasn't aware of what I have more recently discovered: that Dubois' shoddy excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by todays standards. Or that the femur apparently didn't really belong with the skullcap. Or that the skull cap, according to prominent Cambridge University anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, was distinctly human and reflected a brain capacity well within the range of humans living today. 49 Or that a 342-page scientific report from a fact-finding expedition of nineteen evolutionists demolished Dubois' claims and concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution. 50

In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I had been led to believe, but he was "a true member of the human family." 51 This was a fact apparently lost on Time magazine, which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor. 52

The Narrative of Human Evolution

Wells listened intently as I described to him how my exposure to misinformation about Java man had paved the way for my eventual wholehearted embrace of Darwinian evolution. The factors that contributed to that debacle, he pointed out, are still quite relevant.

"One of the major problems with paleoanthropology is that compared to all the fossils we have, only a minuscule number are believed to be of creatures ancestral to humans," Wells said. "Often, it's just skull fragments or teeth. So this gives a lot of elasticity in reconstructing the specimens to fit evolutionary theory. For example, when National Geographic hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur. Of course, this lack of fossil evidence also makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct supposed relationships between ancestors and descendents. One anthropologist likened the task to trying to reconstruct the plot of War and Peace by using just thirteen random pages from the book." 53

Wells reached over again to pick up Icons of Evolution. "I thought Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature, was quite candid in talking about this issue in 1999," Wells said as he searched for the right page. "Gee wrote, 'The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.' He called each fossil 'an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.' In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution 'between ten and five million years ago-—-several thousand generations of living creatures—-can be fitted into a small box.' Consequendy, he concluded that 'the conventional picture of human evolution is a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.' Then he said quite blundy: 'To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific',"

Wells put down the book. "In other words, you're not going to reconstruct human evolutionary history just based on examining the few fossils we have," he continued. "The only reason anyone thinks the evidence supports human evolution is because Darwinism is assumed to be true on other grounds. If it is, then it makes perfect sense to extrapolate that to human history, which is what Darwin did in his book The Descent of Man. But what if the other evidence for Darwinism is faulty-—which, in fact, it is? You and I didn't even go into the major flaws with a whole host of other evolution icons that are used to teach students today. There's no shortage of books debunking Darwin. And without any compeling evidence for Darwinism in these areas, the whole question of human evolution is up for grabs. Instead, Darwinists assume the story of human life is an evolutionary one, and then they plug the fossils into a preexisting narrative where they seem to fit. The narrative can take several forms depending on ones biases. As one anthropologist said, the process is 'both political and subjective' to the point where he suggested that paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science.' 55 In fact, a paleoanthropologist named Misia Landau wrote a book in which she talked about the similarities between the story of human evolution and old-fashioned folk tales. She concluded that many classic texts in the field were 'determined as much by traditional narrative frameworks as by material evidence' and that these themes 'far exceed what can be inferred from the study of fossils alone.'" 56

I took a few moments to soak in what Wells had said. He was right—certainly Java man's fall from grace is instructive. It highlights how many people, including myself, became adherents of Darwinism through fossils or other evidence that later discoveries have either undermined or disproved. But the damage has already been done in many cases—-the student, unaware of these subsequent findings, has already graduated into full-fledged naturalism.

As I leaf back through my time-worn copies of the World Book from my childhood, I can now see how faulty science and Darwinian presuppositions forced my former friend Java man into an evolutionary parade that's based much more on imagination than reality. Unfortunately, he's not the only example of that phenomenon, which is rife to the point of rendering the record of supposed human evolution totally untrustworthy.

"There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution," conceded Berkeley evolutionary biologist E Clark Howell. "Alas, there never really has been." 57

Outdated, Distorted, Fake, Failure

At the end of our discussion about the fossil record, I reflected back on the four images that had paved the way for my descent into atheism. I could only shake my head.

I was left with an origin-of-life experiment whose results have been rendered meaningless; a Tree of Life that had been uprooted by the Biological Big Bang of the Cambrian explosion; doctored embryo drawings that don't reflect reality; and a fossil record that stubbornly refuses to yield the transitional forms crucial to evolutionary theory. Doubts piled on doubts.

Are these icons the sole evidence for Darwinism? Of course not. But their fate is illustrative of what happens time after time when macro-evolution is put under the microscope of scrutiny. As I continued to investigate the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of evolutionary theory, in a long-standing probe that goes far beyond my encounter with Wells, I kept getting the same kind of results. No wonder a hundred scientists signed a public dissent from Darwinism.

Yet every time an icon of evolution is discredited, Darwinists claim with religious zeal that it was never really the whole story in the first place and insist that new findings really do buttress macro evolution. New narratives are created; new stories are told. The theory of evolution, now unsupported by the original icon, is never questioned; instead, it's used afresh to justify a redesigned model. For instance, several years ago Gould and a colleague proposed a new hypothesis, called "punctuated equilibrium," in a desperate bid to explain away the fossil gaps. They suggested that radically new species somehow managed to develop rapidly among isolated populations, conveniently leaving behind no fossils to document the process. When these new creatures rejoined the larger, central populations, this resulted in the preserving of fossils that suggested the sudden appearance of new species. This model has been roundly criticized, and rightly so, for creating far more questions than answers. 58 In the end, Darwinism has remained a philosophy still in search of convincing empirical data to back it up.

Similarly, neo-Darwinists have proudly displayed four-winged fruit flies as evidence that small genetic changes can yield major physiological differences in organisms. As Wells reveals in his book, however, these fruit flies must be carefully bred from three artificially maintained mutant strains-—an exceedingly unlikely circumstance in nature. What's more, the males have difficulty mating, and because the extra wings are nonfunctional, these mutant flies are seriously handicapped. "As evidence for evolution," he said, "the four-winged fruit fly is no better than a two-headed calf in a circus sideshow." 59

Once again, closer investigation revealed that even the latest icons cannot buttress the sagging credibility of evolutionary theory. As for me, I finally came to the point where I realized that I just didn't have enough faith to maintain my belief in Darwinism. The evidence, in my estimation, was simply unable to support its grandest and most sweeping claims.

The Cry of "Design!"

Before I packed my belongings and grabbed a cab for the airport, I wanted to ask Wells a few closing questions about the overall case for Darwinian evolution. 

"After years of studying this," I said, "when you take the most current scientific evidence into consideration, what is your conclusion about Darwin's theory?"

Wells's answer began as soon as the words left my mouth. "My conclusion is that the case for Darwinian evolution is bankrupt," he said firmly. "The evidence for Darwinism is not only grossly inadequate, its systematically distorted. I'm convinced that sometime in the not-too-distant future—I don't know, maybe twenty or thirty years from now —-people will look back in amazement and say, 'How could anyone have believed this?' Darwinism is merely materialistic philosophy masquerading as science, and people are recognizing it for what it is.

"Now, having said that," he continued, "I still see room for some evolutionary processes in limited instances. But saying evolution works in some cases is far from showing that it accounts for everything."

I asked, "If macroevolution has failed to prove itself to be a viable theory, then where do you believe the evidence of science is pointing?"

There was no equivocation in Wells's voice. Speaking with conviction, he said: 

"I believe science is pointing strongly toward design. To me, as a scientist, the development of an embryo cries out, 'Design!' The Cambrian explosion—the sudden appearance of complex life, with no evidence of ancestors-—-is more consistent with design than evolution. Homology, in my opinion, is more compatible with design. The origin of life certainly cries out for a designer. None of these things make as much sense from a Darwinian perspective as they do from a design perspective."

"Let me get this straight," I said. "You're not merely saying that the evidence for evolution is weak and therefore there must be an intelligent designer. You're suggesting there is also affirmative evidence for a designer."

"I am," he replied. "However, the two are connected, because one of the main functions of Darwinian theory is to try to make design unnecessary. This is what you experienced as you became an atheist. This is what I experienced. So showing that the arguments for evolution are weak certainly opens the door to design. And then," he said, "when you analyze all of the most current affirmative evidence from cosmology, physics, astronomy, biology, and so forth—well, I think you'll discover that the positive case for an intelligent designer becomes absolutely compelling."

I stood and shook Wells' hand. "That," I said, "is what I'm going to find out."

Science versus Faith

The plane ride through the black velvet sky over the Pacific Coast was exceptionally smooth that evening, and I closed my eyes as I reclined my seat as far as it would go. I felt satisfied by my interview with Wells and was anxious to determine whether the most up-to-date scientific evidence supports the existence of the intelligent designer he had talked about. Still, though, some pesky questions continued to bother me.

I remained troubled by the intersection of science and faith. I needed to resolve whether these two domains are destined to be at war with each other, as some people claim. Can a scientific person legitimately entertain the idea of the supernatural? How much can empirical data tell us about the divine? Should scientists merely stick to their test tubes and let the theologians ponder God? Should pastors be allowed to poke their nose into the research laboratory? Can science and faith ever really be partners in pursuit of the ultimate answers of life?

I knew I needed to get some answers to those questions before I could go any further. I pulled the blanket up to my neck and decided to get some sleep. Tomorrow, I'd be planning another journey.

FOR FURTHER EVIDENCE

More Resources on This Topic

Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1986.

HanegraafF, Hank. The Face That Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution. Nashville: Word, 1998.

Johnson, Phillip. Darwin on Trial. 2nd ed. Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity Press, 1993.

Wells, Jonathan. Icons of Evolution. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000.

………………..

WHAT  IS  ALSO  NOT  TAUGHT  IS  THE  REPORT  BY  THE  LADY  THAT  LOOKED  AFTER  CHARLES  DARWIN  DURING  HIS  LAST  WEEKS  OF  LIFE.  SHE  SAID  HE  WAS  ALWAYS  READING  THE  BIBLE.  SHE  SAID  HE  SAID,  "I  WAS  JUST  A  YOUNG  MAN  LETTING  MY  MIND  WANDER;  I  NEVER  EXPECTED  THE  WORLD  WOULD  TAKE  MY  WANDERING  MIND  AND  GO  WITH  IT  AS  THEY  HAVE  DONE."

TO  BE  CONTINUED

THE  CASE  FOR  GOD  #5

CHAPTER 4

Where Science Meets Faith

I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and, religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for an intelligent person to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

Physicist Steven Weinberg, 1

Science and religion ... are friends, not foes, in the common quest for knowledge. Some people may find this surprising, for there's a feeling throughout our society that religious belief is outmoded, or downright impossible, in a scientific age. I don't agree. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if people in this so-called "scientific age" knew a bit more about science than many of them actually do, they'd find it,easier to share my view.

Physicist and theologian John Polkinghome 2

Allan Rex Sandage, the greatest observational cosmologist in the world—-who has deciphered the secrets of the stars, plumbed the mysteries of quasars, revealed the age of globular clusters, pinpointed the distances of remote galaxies, and quantified the universe's expansion through his work at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories— prepared to step onto the platform at a conference in Dallas.

Few scientists are as widely respected as this one-time protege to legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble. Sandage has been showered with prestigious honors from the American Astronomical Society, the Swiss Physical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, receiving astronomy's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The New York Times dubbed him the "Grand Old Man of Cosmology."

As he approached the stage at this 1985 conference on science and religion, there seemed to be little doubt where he would sit. The discussion would be about the origin of the universe, and the panel would be divided among those scientists who believed in God and those who didn't, with each viewpoint having its own side of the stage.

Many of the attendees probably knew that the ethnically Jewish Sandage had been a virtual atheist even as a child. Many others undoubtedly believed that a scientist of his stature must surely be skeptical about God. As Newsweek put it, "The more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, you'd expect, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds." 3 So Sandage's seat among the doubters was a given.

Then the unexpected happened. Sandage set the room abuzz by turning and taking a chair among the theists. Even more dazzling, in the context of a talk about the Big Bang and its philosophical implications, he disclosed publicly that he had decided to become a Christian at age fifty.

The Big Bang, he told the rapt audience, was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it. Science had taken us to the First Event, but it can't take us further to the First Cause. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence.

"It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science," he would later tell a reporter. "It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence." 4

Sitting among the Dallas crowd that day, astounded by what he was hearing from Sandage, was a young geophysicist who had dropped by the conference almost by accident. Stephen Meyer had become a Christian through a philosophical quest for the meaning of life, but he hadn't really explored the issue of whether science could provide evidential support for his faith.

Now here was not only Sandage but also prominent Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich concluding that the Big Bang seemed to fit best into a theistic worldview. Later came a session on the origin of life, featuring Dean Kenyon, a biophysicist from San Francisco State University, who had co-authored an influential book asserting that the emergence of life might have been "biochemically predestined," because of an inherent attraction between amino acids. 5 This seemed to be the most promising explanation for the conundrum of how the first living cell could somehow self-assemble from nonliving matter. To Meyers surprise, Kenyon stepped to the podium and actually repudiated the conclusions of his own book, declaring that he had come to the point where he was critical of all naturalistic theories of origins. Due to the immense molecular complexity of the cell and the information-bearing properties of DNA, Kenyon now believed that the best evidence pointed toward a designer of life.

Instead of science and religion being at odds, Meyer heard specialists at the highest levels of achievement who said they were theists—-not in spite of the scientific evidence but because of it. As Sandage would say, "Many scientists are now driven to faith by their very work." 6

Meyer was intrigued. It seemed to him that the theists had the intellectual initiative in each of the three issues discussed at the conference —the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of human consciousness. Even skeptics on the panels conceded the shortcomings of naturalistic explanations. Their main response was only to challenge the theists to provide "scientific answers" instead of merely invoking the idea of intelligent design.

That objection didn't make much sense to Meyer. "Maybe the world looks designed," he mused, "because it really is designed!"

As he walked away from the conference, Meyer was brimming with excitement over what he had experienced. Despite his background in science, he simply had been unaware of the powerful scientific findings that were supporting belief in God. All of this, he decided, was worth a much more thorough investigation. He didn't know it at the time, but his life's mission had just crystallized.

INTERVIEW #2: Stephen C. Meyer, PhD

Already having earned degrees in physics and geology, Meyer went on to receive his master's degree in the history and philosophy of science at prestigious Cambridge University in England, where he focused on the history of molecular biology, the history of physics, and evolutionary theory. He then obtained his doctorate from Cambridge, where his dissertation analyzed the scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology-—a field he first got excited about when he heard Kenyon speak at the Dallas conference.

In the past fifteen years, Meyer has become one of the most knowledgeable and compelling voices in the burgeoning Intelligent Design movement. He has contributed to numerous books-—-including Darwinism, Design and Public Education; Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design; Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design; Science and Christianity: Four Views; The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Creator, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe; The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition; Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins; Darwinism: Science or Philosophy; and Facets of Faith and Science, and is currently finishing books on DNA and the Cambrian explosion.

He has spoken at symposia at Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Baylor, the University of Texas, and elsewhere; debated skeptics, including Michael Shermer, editor of The Skeptical Inquirer, written for magazines ranging from Origins and Design (where he's an associate editor) to The Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies to National Review; appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, and a host of other newspapers; and faced off with Darwinists on National Public Radio, PBS, and network television.

When I flew into snowy Spokane, Washington, to interview Meyer at Whitworth College, where he was an associate professor of philosophy, I wasn't aware that he was in the midst of telling his colleagues that he would be leaving soon to become director and senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. His impending departure was a poignant time for Meyer, since he had spent more than a decade as one of the most popular professors at the school.

To steal some time alone, we commandeered a nondescript off-campus office, where decorating was an apparent afterthought, and sat down in facing chairs for what would turn out to be virtually an entire day of animated, rapid-fire conversation. In fact, the full transcript of our discussion would top a whopping thirty thousand words—a small book in itself.

At one point, Meyer said, "I was once tested for hyperactivity as a kid. Can you imagine?" Yes, I could. Dressed in a dark blue suit, patterned tie, woolly grey socks, and brown Doc-Martin shoes, the lanky, Meyer was crackling with energy, speaking enthusiastically in quick bursts of words. His wispy brown hair spilled down onto his forehead, giving him a youthful appearance, but his eyebrows were furrowed in intensity. His students sometimes faulted him for an absentminded professors lack of classroom organization, but he made up for it with his infectious passion and disarming sincerity. When he answered my questions, it was in a thorough, systematic, and structured way, almost as if he were reading off invisible note cards. He came off as being brilliant, articulate, and driven. After swapping some personal stories, we zeroed in on the issue of science and faith. His perspective, not surprisingly, was vastly different from the one I had when I began studying Darwinism in school.

A Robust Case for Theism

"We live in a technological culture where many people believe science trumps all other forms of knowledge," I said to Meyer. "For example, philosopher J. P. Moreland described meeting an engineer who was completing his doctorate in physics. According to him, Moreland said, 'only science is rational; only science achieves truth. Everything else is mere belief and opinion.' He went on to say that if something cannot be quantified or tested by the scientific method ... 'it cannot be true or rational.' 7 Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin claimed science is 'the only begetter of truth.' 8 Do you agree with those perspectives?"

"No, I don't," came Meyers reply. "Ironically, to say that science is the only begetter of truth is self-contradicting, because that statement in itself cannot be tested by the scientific method. It's a self-defeating philosophical assumption. Beyond that," he continued, "while I certainly respect science, I don't believe scientific knowledge necessarily takes precedence over other things that we know. For instance, Moreland has argued that there are some things we know more certainly through introspection, than we know from the sciences. I know I have free will on the basis of my introspection, and no studies in the social sciences will convince me otherwise."

He motioned toward a light switch on the wall. "I know I can turn that switch on, and I refute those who say I was determined thus," he said, leaning over to turn on the light. "In addition, history can tell us much, even though we can't test it by repeated experiment. Now, there's no question that science does teach us many important things about the natural world. But the real question is, 'Do these things point to anything beyond themselves?' I think the answer is yes. Science teaches us many true things, and some of those true things point toward God." I quickly interrupted. "On the contrary," I said, "when I learned about Darwinism as a student, I was convinced that science and faith were at odds—and that science definitely had the edge in the credibility department. What would you say to someone who believes that science and Christianity are destined to be at war?"

"Well, that's certainly one way that people have conceptualized the relationship between science and faith," he said. "Some claim science and faith are fundamentally at odds. Others have said science and faith represent two separate and distinct realms that don't and can't interact with each other. However, I personally take a third approach, which is that scientific evidence actually supports theistic belief. In fact, across a wide range of the sciences, evidence has come to light in the last fifty years which, taken together, provides a robust case for theism. Only theism can provide an intellectually satisfying causal explanation for all of this evidence."

"For instance?"

"For instance," he continued, "if it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. Those are just three examples," he concluded. "And that's just the beginning."

The Problem with NOMA

"Isn't it dangerous to mix science and faith that way?" I asked. "A lot of scientists follow the lead of the late Stephen Jay Gould in saying that science and faith occupy distinctly different 'magisterial' or domains. He called this philosophy NOMA, which is short for non-overlapping 'magisterial.' He said: 'The net of science covers the empirical universe ... [while] the net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.' 5 What's wrong with having that kind of strong dividing line between the hard facts of science and the soft faith of religion?"

"I think NOMA is partially true," Meyer said—a concession that surprised me a bit. "There are domains of science that are metaphysically neutral. They answer questions like: 'How many elements are in the periodic table?' Or 'What is the mathematical equation that describes gravitational attraction?' Or 'How does nature ordinarily behave under a given set of conditions?' Questions of this sort don't affect big world-view issues one way or the other. Some people use Galileo's old aphorism—-'Science tells you how the heavens go, and the Bible tells you how to go to heaven.'"

I jumped in. "That sounds trite, but it does make some sense."

"Of course," he said. "There is a sense in which science and religion do have different objects of interest and focus, like the nature of the Trinity on one hand, and what are the elementary particles present at the Big Bang on the other hand. However, there are other scientific questions that bear directly on the great worldview issues. For instance, the question of origins. If fully naturalistic models are correct, then theism becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. Its in these instances where science and metaphysics intersect-—-where worldview questions are at stake—that it's impossible to impose the NOMA principle. That's because what science discovers will inevitably have implications for these larger worldview questions. The only real way to keep the two separate is to subtract from the claims of one or the other. You see, NOMA says science is the realm of facts, and religion is the realm of morality and faith. The essential problem is that biblical religion makes very specific claims about facts. It makes claims about the universe having a beginning, about God playing a role in creation, about humans having a certain kind of nature, and about historical events that are purported to have happened in time and space. Let's just take the historic Christian creed: 'I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; the third day he rose again from the dead.' Well, Pontius Pilate is situated historically in Palestine in the first century. A claim is made that Jesus of Nazareth lived at the same time. An assertion is made that he rose from the dead. God is called the Creator of heaven and earth. You see, it's inherent to the Christian faith to make claims about the real world. According to the Bible, God has revealed himself in time and space, and so Christianity-—for good or ill —is going to intersect some of the factual claims of history and science. There's either going to be conflict or agreement. To make NOMA work, its advocates have to water down science or faith, or both. Certainly Gould did—he said religion is just a matter of ethical teaching, comfort, or metaphysical beliefs about meaning. But Christianity certainly claims to be more than that."

This particular statement about Gould seemed vague. I wanted to pin him down by demanding specifics. "Could you give me one concrete example of how Gould watered down Christianity to make NOMA work?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "In his book Rocks of Ages, Gould reduces the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to doubting Thomas to being merely a moral tale. 10 This was necessary for Gould to do under the rules of NOMA because all of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances come from a religious document—-the Bible-—-and NOMA says religion must confine its claims to matters of morality and values. But the Bible clearly portrays Jesus' appearances as being actual historical events. Christianity hinges on the conviction that they really occurred. NOMA may try to exclude this possibility by restricting religion to mere matters of morality, but the writers of the Bible did not see fit to limit their claims about God to the nonfactual domain that NOMA has allocated to religion. Now, there might be some religions that can fit comfortably with NOMA. But biblical Christianity-—because it's built not just on faith, but on facts—simply cannot."

Law professor Phillip Johnson also has been strongly critical of the NOMA concept. "Stephen Jay Gould condescendingly offers to allow religious people to express their subjective opinions about morals, provided they don't interfere with the authority of scientists to determine the 'facts'-—-one of the facts being that God is merely a comforting myth," he said. 11

"So," I said to Meyer in summing up, "while much of science and biblical religion are concerned with different things, they clearly do have some overlapping territory."

"Precisely. And when that happens, either they agree or disagree. The judgment of nineteenth-century historians, who were writing mainly out of an Enlightenment framework, was that where they did overlap, they invariably disagreed—and of the two domains, science was a more warranted system of belief. They believed conflict would continually grow between science and biblical religion."

"What do you believe?" I asked.

"My judgment is quite different," he said. "I believe that the testimony of science supports theism. While there will always be points of tension or unresolved conflict, the major developments in science in the past five decades have been running in a strongly theistic direction."

He paused momentarily, then punched his conclusion: "Science, done right, points toward God."

I asked him for an example. 

"Take the expansion rate of the universe, which is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion," he said. "That is, if it were changed by one part in either direction—a little faster, a little slower—we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life. As Sir Fred Hoyle commented, 'A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.' 13 Well, maybe this looks fine-tuned because there actually is a fine-tuner. In the opinion of physicist Paul Davies, 'The impression of design is overwhelming.' And I thoroughly agree. This is powerful evidence for intelligent design. The third example of science pointing toward God is the origin of life and the origin of information necessary to bring life into existence," he continued. "Life at its root requires information, which is stored in DNA and protein molecules. Richard Dawkins of Oxford said that 'the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' 15 If you reflect on that, you realize that computers run on software programs that are produced by intelligent engineers. Every experience we have about information—whether its a computer code, hieroglyphic inscription, a book, or a cave painting —-points toward intelligence. The same is true about the information inside every cell in every living creature."

"Isn't that just an argument from ignorance?" I asked. "Scientists may not currently be able to find any explanation for how life began, but that doesn't necessarily point toward a supernatural conclusion."

"This is not an argument from ignorance," Meyer insisted. "We're not inferring design just because the naturalistic evolutionary theories all fail to explain information. We infer design because all those theories fail and we, know of another causal entity that is capable of producing information—namely, intelligence. Personally, I find this to be a very strong argument indeed."

An Ensemble of Evidence

Continuing on to the fourth example, Meyer said, "Then there's the evidence for design in molecular machines that defy explanation by Darwinian natural selection. These integrative, complex systems in biological organisms-—-which microbiologist Michael Behe calls 'irreducibly complex'—include signal transduction circuits, sophisticated motors, and all kinds of biological circuitry."

"What's the argument based on this?" I asked.

"You see, these biological machines need all of their various parts in order to function. But how could you ever build such a system by a Darwinian process of natural selection acting on random variations? Natural selection only preserves things that perform a function—-in other words, which help the organism survive to the next generation. That's survival of the fittest. The problem with irreducibly complex systems is that they perform no function until all the parts are present and working together in close coordination with one another. So natural selection cannot help you build such systems; it can only preserve them once they've been built. And it's virtually impossible for evolution to take such a huge leap by mere chance to create the whole system at once. Of course, this forces the question: how did the biochemical machine arise? Behe says maybe these biological systems look designed because they really were designed. After all, whenever we see irreducibly complex systems and we know how they arose, invariably a designer was the cause."

"How strong of an argument do you think that is?" I asked.

"I think it's very strong," he replied with a smile. "And you see that in the weak objections that are proposed by Darwinists. And again, that's just one more example. The next one would be the Cambrian explosion, which is yet another striking piece of evidence for design in the history of life."

I told him that in a previous interview Jonathan Wells had already explained the basics of Biologys Big Bang. "He talked about it primarily in terms of being an argument against Darwinism," I said.

"Indeed, it is," Meyer replied. "You have between twenty and thirty-five completely novel body plans that come online in the Cambrian. You have a huge jump in complexity, its sudden, and you have no transitional intermediates. But this is also affirmative evidence for design, because in our experience information invariably is the result of conscious activity.. Here we have the geologically sudden infusion of a massive amount of new biological information needed to create these body plans, far beyond what any Darwinian mechanism can produce. Darwinism simply can't account for it; design is a better explanation. Think about how suddenly these new body plans emerged. As one paleontologist said, 'What I want to know from my biology friends is just how fast does this evolution have to happen before they stop calling it evolution.' Darwin said nature takes no sudden leaps. Yet here's a huge leap-—-which is what intelligent agents cause. Consequently, the Cambrian explosion provides not just a negative case against Darwinian evolution, but also a compelling positive argument for design."

"All right," I said, "I asked for half a dozen examples. What would be the sixth?"

Meyer thought for a moment. "I'd say human consciousness certainly supports a theistic view of human nature," he said. "Judaism and Christianity clearly teach that we are more than just matter-—-'we're not a computer made of meat,' in the words of Marvin Minsky, but we're made in God's image. We have the capacity for self-reflection, for representational art, for language, for creativity. Science can't account for this kind of consciousness merely from the interaction of physical matter in the brain. Where did it come from? Again, I think theism provides the best explanation."

Meyer scooted to the edge of his chair. "So what we have here," he said, wrapping up his impromptu presentation in a tone of urgency, "is an ensemble of half a dozen evidences that point to a transcendent, intelligent cause. This is mind-boggling stuff! Scientists in the nineteenth century weren't aware of these things when they said naturalism accounts for everything. Thanks to the discoveries of the last five decades, we know a lot more today."

"Based on the evidence you've mentioned," I said, "how do you complete the case for God?"

"First, theism, with its concept of a transcendent Creator, provides a more causally adequate explanation of the Big Bang than a naturalistic explanation can offer," he said. "The cause of the universe must transcend matter, space, and time, which were brought into existence with the Big Bang. The Judeo-Christian God has precisely this attribute of transcendence. Yet naturalism, by definition, denies the existence of any entity beyond the closed system of nature. The fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants of the universe and the precise configuration of its initial conditions, dating back to the very origin of the universe itself, suggest the need for a cause that's intelligent. Theism affirms the existence of an entity that's not only transcendent but intelligent as well-—namely, God. Thus, theism can explain both Big Bang cosmology and the anthropic fine-tuning. Pantheism can't explain the origin of the universe, because pantheists believe in an impersonal god that's coextensive with the physical universe. Such a god can't bring the universe into being from nothing, since such a god doesn't exist independently of the physical universe. If initially the physical universe didn't exist, then the pantheistic god wouldn't have existed either. If it didn't exist, it couldn't cause the universe to exist."

"What about deism?" I interjected, referring to the belief that God created the world but has since let it run on its own. "Can't deism account for the origin of the universe too?"

"Yes, I'll provide that caveat—deism can do the same," he acknowledged. "But I believe the existence of design subsequent to the Big Bang undermines deism as an adequate explanation. You see, deism can't explain the evidence of discrete acts of design or creation after the universe was created. The deistic god never intervenes in nature, yet we're seeing evidence of intelligent design in the history of life. For example, the high information content in the cell provides compelling evidence for an act of intelligent design of the first life, long after the beginning of the universe. Taken together, what we know today gives us heightened confidence —from science—-that God exists. The weight of the evidence is very, very impressive—in fact, in my opinion it's sufficiently conclusive to say that theism provides the best explanation for the ensemble of scientific evidence we've been discussing. Science and faith are not at war. When scientific evidence and biblical teaching are correctly interpreted, they can and do support each other. I'd say to anyone who doubts that: investigate the evidence yourself."

Meyer's whirlwind tour was exhilarating. At first blush, the cumulative case for God, built point by point from the discoveries of science, seemed staggering. Of course, I had a whole slew of follow-up questions, some of which I intended to pose to Meyer, and others I would save for the experts I planned to interview in each of the categories of evidence Meyer had mentioned. I decided to begin with the issue of just how much evidence for God is needed to establish the case for a Creator.

The God Hypothesis

In the legal arena, different courtrooms have different standards of proof. In criminal cases, the prosecutor must prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In most civil cases, the plaintiff must prevail by a considerably lesser standard, called a preponderance of the evidence. In some civil cases, there's even a third level of proof situated between the other two: clear and convincing evidence.

When I asked Meyer what standard of proof he considered appropriate in the theological realm, he gave me an interesting history lesson on the topic of evidence for God. I decided to sit back and let him talk, reserving my follow-up questions for the end.

"One extreme is to deny that there is any evidential basis for Christian belief and instead to say that all we need is faith," Meyer began. "That's known as 'fideism.' This came out of the Enlightenment, with the perceived failure of certain theistic proofs for the existence of God. In particular, French philosopher Rene Descartes offered some pretty sloppy proofs to try to establish with absolute certainty that God exists. He used what are called 'deductive proofs,' where you have major and minor premises, and if these premises can be shown to be true and explain the evidence for design in biology after the origin of the universe. And so theism has superior explanatory power. We reach conclusions with a high degree of confidence using this form of reasoning in our everyday life. This is what detectives do. This is what lawyers do in courts of law. Scientists use this approach. This model can enable us to achieve a high degree of practical certainty. And when we look at the evidence I've mentioned from cosmology, physics, biology and human consciousness, we find that theism has amazing explanatory scope and power. The existence of God explains this broad range of evidence more simply, adequately, and comprehensively than any other worldview, including its main competitors, naturalism or pantheism. And the discovery of corroborating or supportive evidence is accelerating. In 1992, the historian of science Frederic Burnham said the God hypothesis 'is now a more respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last one hundred years.' 17  I'd go even further. More than just being 'respectable,' I'd say that the God hypothesis is forceful enough to warrant a verdict that he's alive and well."

The Motives of Scientists

Several questions popped into my mind as I listened to Meyer's analysis. "I gave you the opportunity to offer six strands of scientific evidence for theism, and will be following up with specific objections when I explore them in-depth with other experts," I said. "But I don't want to leave without posing at least four overall challenges to you."

As he listened, Meyer removed his gold-rimmed glasses and started cleaning them with a handkerchief. He looked up at me and said, "That sounds fair. Go ahead. What's your first question?"

I glanced down at my notes before speaking. "If the scientific evidence for theism is so compelling," I began, "then why don't more scientists believe in God? A study in 1966 showed that sixty percent of scientists either disbelieve or were doubtful about God, and the percentage goes up if you look at the most elite scientists."18

Meyer pursed his lips as he reflected on the question. "Initially, I'd say that it takes time for new discoveries to percolate and for their implications to be fully considered, and some of the best evidence for theism is very new," he said. "Scientists who are focused on one particular field may not be aware of discoveries in other fields that point toward theism. Also, the materialistic worldview has exercised dominance on intellectual life in western culture for a hundred and fifty years. It has become the default worldview in science, philosophy, and academia in general. It's presupposed. Some people who dissent from it have experienced intense hostility and sometimes persecution. That could discourage others from exploring this area or speaking out favorably toward it." 19

This point reminded me of a quote by Sandage, who once told a reporter that the scientific community is so scornful of faith that "there is a reluctance to reveal yourself as a believer, the opprobrium is so severe.

"Finally," continued Meyer, "within the scientific culture there are belief systems that are philosophically very questionable. For instance, many believe that science must only allow naturalistic explanations, which excludes from consideration the design hypothesis. Many scientists put blinders on, refusing to acknowledge that evidence, and a kind of 'group think' develops."

His answer sounded plausible, but it prompted a second line of inquiry. "There's a flip side to that issue," I said. "Skeptic Michael Shermer said almost all the people he sees in the Intelligent Design movement are Christians. 20 Doesn't that undermine the legitimacy of their science? Maybe they're only looking for what they want to find and aren't open to naturalistic explanations that might be sufficient."

This challenge seemed to push a button with Meyer. "Every scientist has a motive," he said firmly, "but motives are irrelevant to assessing the validity of scientific theories, a case in court, or an argument in philosophy. You have to respond to the evidence or argument that's being offered, regardless of who offers it or why. If every person in the Intelligent Design movement were a fundamentalist who attends Baptist Bible Church, it wouldn't matter. Their arguments have to be weighed on their own merits."

"But is this an exclusively Christian movement?" I asked.

"No, it's not," he replied. "There are scientists who are proponents of intelligent design who are agnostic or Jewish, but I still don't think that's relevant. The vast majority of people who advocate Darwinism are naturalists or materialists, so you could play the motive-mongering game either way. Besides, look at it this way: if a scientist becomes persuaded by the evidence that theism is true and thus becomes a follower of God, should he or she then be disqualified from doing science in that area? Of course not. I say let's get beyond this side issue and let the evidence speak for itself. Is design the best explanation or not?"

"That leads to the third question," I said. "If scientists do allow the possibility of the miraculous as an explanation, then doesn't that foreclose further investigation? Biologist Kenneth Miller has suggested that inferring the existence of an intelligent designer would result in a scientific dead-end. 21 Why continue to explore an area scientifically once you've thrown up your hands and said, 'God did this'?"

Meyer immediately fired back. "I think the shoe is exactly on the other foot," he said.

"How so?"

"Let's take the issue of origins, for example," he said. "The question that's asked is, 'How did the cell arise on earth?' If you say, 'We're only going to let you consider answers that involve materialistic processes,' then that shuts down inquiry, because one of the possible causal explanations for the origin of life is that intelligence could have played a role."

"So," I said, "you believe that ruling out the possibility of intelligent design stifles intellectual and scientific inquiry."

"That's exactly right," he replied. "And I've seen it happen far too often."

I pointed at him. "You want to change the rules of the game, don't you?" I said, my tone suggesting I had just caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.

"In a sense, yes," he conceded. "I don't think it's right to invoke a self-serving rule that says only naturalistic explanations can be considered by science. Let's have a new period in the history of science where we have methodological rules that actually foster the unfettered seeking of truth. Scientists should be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it leads—even if it leads to a conclusion that makes some people uncomfortable."

Seeing Eye to Eye

My fourth objection concerned a topic called "disteleology," which refers to apparent poor design in the biological and physical world. "To adopt the explanation of design, we are forced to attribute a host of flaws and imperfections to the Designer," Miller wrote. 22 The implication is that an imperfect design disproves the existence of a perfect God. One example Miller cited is the vertebrate eye. "We would have to wonder why an intelligent designer placed the neural wiring of the retina on the side facing the incoming light," he wrote. "This arrangement scatters the light, making our vision less detailed than it might be, and even produces a blind spot at the point that the wiring is pulled through the light-sensitive retina to produce the optic nerve that carries visual images to the brain." 23 Other Darwinists, including Oxford's Richard Dawkins, also have decried the eye's poor structure, with George Williams going so far as to declare it "stupidly" designed because "the retina is upside down." 24 This seemed to be a compelling counter-argument to intelligent design. "If there is a designer," I said to Meyer, "doesn't the botched eye design prove he's not really intelligent?"

He pounced on the issue. "There's an important physiological reason as to why the retina has to be inverted in the eye," he said. "Within the overall design of the system, it's a tradeoff that allows the eye to process the vast amount of oxygen it needs in vertebrates. Yes, this creates a slight blind spot, but that's not a problem because people have two eyes and the two blind spots don't overlap. Actually, the eye is an incredible design."

With that, Meyer stood and walked to the other side of the room, where his briefcase was leaning against a desk. He rifled through some papers and finally withdrew a photocopy of an article.

"In fact," he said as he handed it to me, "biologist George Ayoub wrote this piece to refute the claim that the eye was badly created." I glanced at the technical article, in which Ayoub, a professor whose expertise is the cellular physiology of the retina, concludes:

The vertebrate retina provides an excellent example of functional-— though non-intuitive-— design. The design of the retina is responsible for its high acuity and sensitivity. It is simply untrue that the retina is demonstrably suboptirnal, nor is it easy to conceive how it might be modified without significantly decreasing its function. 25

Feeling a little chagrined, I put down the article. "Okay," I conceded, "maybe that's not a good example of disteleology, but there are a lot of others."

Meyer interrupted. "Don't move on too quickly," he said. "There's a good lesson here. People make a lot of claims about bad biological design, but sometimes the entire picture is changed when you hear the rest of the story. For instance, people claim a design is bad because they look at only one parameter and claim it could have been better designed. However, engineers know all designs require optimizing a whole suite of parameters, and so tradeoffs are inevitable to create the best overall result."

That was a mouthful that demanded elaboration. "Give me an example," I said.

He gestured toward the Apple computer in the open briefcase at my feet. "One illustration that's sometimes given is a laptop," he said. "You could look at the screen and say, 'Bad design; it should have been bigger.' You could look at the memory and say, 'Bad design; should have had a larger capacity' You could look at the keyboard and say, 'Bad design; should have been easier to use.' But the engineer isn't supposed to be creating the best screen, the best memory, and the best keyboard—he's supposed to be producing the best computer he can given certain size, weight, price, and portability requirements. Could the screen be bigger? Yes, but then portability suffers. Could the computer have more memory? Sure, but then the cost goes too high. So there are inevitable tradeoffs and compromises. Each individual part might be criticized for being suboptirnal, but that's not the issue. The real issue is how well the overall laptop functions. That's how good engineering works—and that explains some of the examples of supposed disteleology that are raised."

While that made sense, it didn't answer everything. "You'll have to admit that there are other illustrations of disteleology that are more difficult to explain away," I said.

"I don't deny that," he relied. "Some are just silly. Others are more thoughtful and serious, and they require effort to think through. For instance, Gould claimed the panda's thumb looks jerry-rigged and not designed. Well, experts on the panda say it's a pretty efficient way of scraping the bark off bamboo. In the absence of a standard of good design, which Gould can't provide, it's really hard to say whether it's good or bad. It seems to perform its function exceedingly well. Other illustrations of disteleology get into issues of theodicy, or reconciling belief in God and natural evil. For example, what about viruses and bacteria that harm people? Did God create those? Natural theologians in the nineteenth century believed that if a perfect God created the world, then it would be perfect, so they were ill-equipped to deal with Darwin's disteleological arguments. However, from a biblical point of view, there isn't an expectation that nature would be perfect. The Bible says there has been decay or deterioration because evil entered the world and disrupted the original design. We're not given all of the specifics on how this happened, but the biblical book of Romans affirms the natural world is groaning for its redemption, because something has gone wrong with the original creation. 26 Based on the biblical account, we would expect to see both evidence of design in nature as well as evidence of deterioration or decay —which we do."

It was time to move on, but I glanced down at the laptop computer in my briefcase. I had to admit that Meyer's basic explanations about disteleology did make a lot of sense.

Road Map to the Future

As we wrapped up our conversation, I felt a little like Meyer did when he attended the Dallas conference in 1985: enthused about the affirmative scientific case for God. So far, the evidence from the telescope to the microscope was pointing powerfully in the direction of a Creator— a circumstance I never would have dreamed possible back in my days as a student. I was left with an urgent desire to continue my investigation. Still, I also was experiencing an underlying skepticism. Would the case for a Creator hold up when it was scrutinized more carefully and when I could cross-examine experts with all of the questions that plagued me? What fascinating new details would be supplied by those who have spent years studying the various categories of evidence that Meyer had described? Would his case emerge strengthened, weakened, or destroyed?

As a legal affairs journalist, I had seen a lot of trials where the prosecutor provided a persuasive overview of the evidence during his opening statement to the jury. But the judge always instructs the jury that the prosecutors words aren't evidence. They're merely a road map to help them process the subsequent testimony by witnesses.

In a sense, this is what Meyer had provided for me: an outline of the scientific evidence for theism. Now was the time for me to put experts in cosmology, physics, astronomy, microbiology, biological information, and consciousness to the test and see whether the case is as strong as Meyer claimed. My plan was to start at the literal beginning—-the origin of the universe, which occurred in an explosion of energy so incomprehensibly powerful that its echo, in effect, is still being heard billions of years later.

I couldn't wait to get started!

The Wry Smile of God

I didn't want to leave, however, without taking a few moments to ponder my impressions of Meyer. I especially liked his endearing blend of a professor's academic depth combined with an advocate's savvy and an enthusiast's winsome earnestness. But while we had talked a lot about science, a bit about philosophy, and a little about theology, I realized we hadn't delved into Meyer's personal reflections. His journey from scientist to intelligent design advocate was fascinating to me, and I was curious about the state of Stephen Meyer's spiritual life.

"Over the years as you've studied the scientific evidence that supports theism, how has this affected your faith?" I asked.

"It has strengthened it, no question," he replied. "The trend is definitely toward more discoveries that point toward God, and that excites me. More and more people are going to find themselves open to God as a result of new findings that make theistic belief the best explanation for the evidence of nature."

He stopped at that. It was a safe answer, but I could tell he was weighing whether he should risk more. I sensed he was the kind of person who would be more comfortable extolling the virtues of microbiology than opening up about something as personal as his own relationship with God. But as I sat quietly and listened, he was about to prove me wrong.

"One thing I haven't told you about my spiritual journey," he continued, "is that for a two-year period in my life, I was very attracted to Nietzsche's version of existentialism. Nietzsche had a different objection than the ones we've been talking about. He asked, Why should God rule and I serve? This resonated with me. Why should a condition of my happiness be submission to the will of God? I sensed I couldn't be happy without him; I knew my bad lifestyle only brought misery. So I ended up literally shaking my fist at God in a wheat field in Washington state. My point is that the intellectual rebellion the apostle Paul talks about is very true in my own life. Even in my Christian thinking today, I find a tendency to slide back into what Paul refers to as the natural mind. And here's what the scientific evidence for God does for me: it realigns me. It helps me recognize that despite my natural tendency toward self-focus and self-absorption, I can't ignore what God has accomplished in this world to let everyone know that he is real, that he is the Creator, and that we need to get right with him. I see this not only in cosmology and physics and biology, but also in the historical revelation of the Bible, principally in the revelation of Jesus Christ himself. He is so compelling! Einstein thought so. Napoleon thought so. This Nazarene captivated their attention, and he continues to captivate mine. I remember thinking at one point that if the Jesus of the Bible weren't real, I would need to worship the person who created the character. Jesus is so beyond what I can comprehend! And the evidence for God in nature constantly challenges me to a deeper and fuller relationship with him. My study of the scientific evidence isn't separate from my life as a Christian; its marbled throughout that experience.

"I remember when I first began teaching a college course on the evidence for God, I got flack from some people who claimed that these kinds of arguments can produce an idol of the mind or make science a god. I felt a little reticent for a while—but no longer. I've come to an even stronger conviction that this is evidence that God has used to reveal himself to us.

"I look at the stars in the night sky or reflect on the structure and information-bearing properties of the DNA molecule, and these are occasions for me to worship the Creator who brought them into existence. I think of the wry smile that might be on the lips of God as in the last few years all sorts of evidence for the reliability of the Bible and for his creation of the universe and life have come to light. I believe he has caused them to be unveiled in his providence and that he delights when we discover his fingerprints in the vastness of the universe, in the dusty relics of paleontology, and in the complexity of the cell.

"So exploring the scientific and historical evidence for God is not only a cognitive exercise, but it's an act of worship for me. It's a way of giving the Creator the credit and honor and glory that are due to him. To attribute creation to a mere natural process is a form of idolatry to which we're all prone. I don't judge my naturalistic colleagues for being prone to that. That's how I'm constituted as well. All of us have a tendency to minimize God, to think and behave as if we weren't really immersed in his creation and that we aren't ourselves the product of his unimaginable creative power.

"Looking at the evidence-—in nature and in Scripture—-reminds me over and over again of who he is. And it reminds me of who I am too—someone in need of him."

For Further Evidence

More Resources on This Topic

Dembski, William. The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design. Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity, 2004.

McGrath, Alister. Glimpsing the Face of God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002.

Meyer, Stephen C. "Evidence for Design in Physics and Biology." In Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, ed. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999.

Modern Science and the Return of the God Hypothesis. In Science and Christianity: Four Views, ed. Richard F. Carlson. Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity, 2000.

Moreland, J. P. Christianity and the Nature of Science. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1989.

Witham, Larry. By Design: Science and the Search for God. San Francisco: Encounter, 2003.

………………..

TO  BE  CONTINUED

AS  A  CHILD  BORN  IN  A  SMALL  VILLAGE  IN  SOUTH  WALES,  WITH  A  FIELD  LITERALLY  A  STONE'S  THROW  AWAY,  I  SAW  THE  TREES,  THE  STREAM,  THE  FLOWERS;  I  SAW  THE  BIRDS,  THE  BUTTERFLY,  THE  CATERPILLAR,  THE  LADY-BIRD,  THE  VEGETABLES  IN  THE  GARDEN;  I  SAW  THE  DOG,  THE  CAT,  THE  HORSE.  AND  IT  ALL  JUST  AMAZED  ME;  IT  WAS  AMAZING  AND  BEAUTIFUL.  AT  THE  AGE  OF  7  GOING  INTO  THE  MIDDLE  SCHOOL  OF  THE  CHURCH  OF  ENGLAND  SCHOOL  MY  PARENTS  SENT  ME  TO,  WE  WERE  GIVEN  A  BIBLE  ON  THAT  FIRST  DAY,  WE  WERE  TOLD  TO  OPEN  IT  TO  GENESIS  CHAPTER  ONE.  THE  TEACHER  READ….."IN  THE  BEGINNING  GOD  CREATED……"  WOW,  THAT  WAS  IT,  LIKE  A  LIGHT  WENT  OFF  IN  MY  HEAD.  YES  I  THOUGHT,  THERE  HAD  TO  BE  A  CREATOR  OF  ALL  I  COULD  SEE.  I  BELIEVED  THERE  WAS  A  GOD  FROM  THAT  DAY  FORWARD.  AS  I  READ  LATER  IN  MY  SCHOOL  LIFE,  JESUS  SAID,  UNLESS  YOU  BECOME  AS  A  LITTLE  CHILD  YOU  SHALL  NOT  ENTER  THE  KINGDOM  OF  GOD.

Keith Hunt

THE CASE  FOR  GOD  #6

CHAPTER 5

The Evidence of Cosmology

Beginning with a Bang

Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization—-that something transcendent started it all— which has hard-science types... using terms like 'miracle.'

Journalist Gregg Easterbrook 1

Perhaps the best argument ... that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas ... being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.

Astrophysicist C. J. Isham 2

My eyes scanned the magazines at the newsstand near my home. A beautiful woman graced Glamour. Sleek, high-performance cars streaked across the front of Motor Trend. And there on the cover of Discovermagazine, sitting by itself, unadorned, floating in a sea of pure white background, was a simple red sphere. It was smaller than a tennis ball, tinier than a Titleist—just three quarters of an inch in diameter, not too much bigget than a marble.

As staggering as it seemed, it represented the actual size of the entire universe when it was just an infinitesimal fraction of one second old. Cried out the headline: Where Did Everything Come From?

Thousands of years ago, the Hebrews believed they had the answer:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," opens the Bible. 4 Everything began, they claimed, with the primordial fiat lux —-the voice of God commanding light into existence. 5 But is that a simplistic superstition or a divinely inspired insight? What do the cosmologists—-scientists who devote their lives to studying the origin of the universe—have to say about the issue?

It seemed to me that the beginning of everything was a good place to start my investigation into whether the affirmative evidence of science points toward or away from a Creator. At the time, I wasn't particularly interested in internal Christian debates over whether the world is young or old. The "when" wasn't as important to me as the "how"-—-how do scientific models and theories explain the origin of all? 6

"In the beginning there was an explosion," explained Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes. "Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle." 7

Within the tiniest split second, the temperature hit a hundred thousand million degrees Centigrade. "This is much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together," he wrote. 8 The matter rushing apart, he explained, consisted "of such elementary particles as negatively charged electrons, positively charged positrons, and neutrinos, which lack both electrical charge and mass. Interestingly, there were also photons: "The universe," he said, "was filled with light." 9

"In three minutes," wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, "ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich." 10

The most intriguing question is what caused the universe to suddenly spring into existence. For Bryson and many others, its mere presence somehow seems to explain itself. In a chapter called "How to Build a Universe," he vaguely speculates on exotic theories about a "false vacuum," or "scalar field," or "vacuum energy"-—-some sort of "quality or thing" that may have "introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was" and thus sparked the Big Bang through which emerged the entire universe.

"It seems impossible that you could, get something from nothing," he said, "but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can." 11

Yet could there be another explanation that better accounts for the evidence? Might the mysterious causation be divine? Maybe Edward Milne was right when he capped his mathematical treatise on relativity by saying: "As to the first cause of the Universe ... that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him." 12

I knew this investigation would take me into the slippery world of theoretical physics, where its sometimes difficult to discern between what's profoundly scholarly and what's just plain silly. That was well-illustrated in late 2002 when a debate broke out over a highly speculative theory from two French mathematical physicists (who happened to be twins) about what might have preceded the Big Bang. As amazing—-and amusing—as it seems, the scientific community couldn't figure out whether the brothers "are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense," said a New York Times article that featured the provocative headline: "Are They a) Geniuses or b) Jokers?" While one professor found their work "intriguing," another dismissed it as "nutty." Yet another protested: "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature." The journal that published a paper by the disputed scientists, who had both received their doctorates with the lowest passing grades, later repudiated it. 13 Obviously, delving into the dawning of the universe—way back to the first 1/10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second, which is the furthest back scientists believe they can peer—is going to require a certain degree of speculation. Theories abound. Conceded one prominent cosmologist from Stanford University: "These are very close to religious questions. 14

As for myself, I wasn't interested in unsupported conjecture or armchair musings by pipe-puffing theorists. I wanted the hard facts of mathematics, the cold data of cosmology, and only the most reasonable inferences that can be drawn from them. And that's what sent me to Georgia to visit the home of a widely published expert who has studied and debated these issues for decades.

INTERVIEW #3: William Lane Craig, PhD, ThD

As a college student who graduated in 1971, Bill Craig had been taught that various arguments for the existence of God were weak, outdated, and ultimately ineffective. And that's what he believed-—until he happened upon philosopher Stuart C. Hackett's 1957 book, The Resurrection of Theism,15 This dense tome never burned up the best-seller list. In fact, the self-effacing Hackett commented years later that "the book fell stillborn from the press because of its heavy style and technical context." 16 Still, it absolutely stunned Craig.

Hackett is a brilliant thinker who took these theistic arguments seriously, rigorously defending them from every objection he could find or imagine. One argument in the book was that the universe must have had a beginning and, therefore, a Creator. Craig was so intrigued that he decided to use his doctoral studies under British theologian John Hick to come to a resolution in his own mind concerning the soundness of this argument. Would it really withstand scrutiny? Craig ended up writing his dissertation on the topic-—an exercise that launched him into a lifetime of exploring cosmology.

Craig's books include a landmark debate with atheist Quentin Smith called Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology., published by Oxford University Press; The Kalam Cosmological Argument, The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe; The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz; and Reasonable Faith, as well as contributions on this and related topics to the books Does God Exist?; Faith and Reason; A Companion to Philosophy of Religion; Questions of Time and Tense; Mere Creation; The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition; Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal; and God and Time.

His articles on cosmological issues also have appeared in a wide range of scientific and philosophical journals, including Astrophysics and Space Science, Nature, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,The Journal of Philosophy, and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. A member of nine professional societies, including the American Philosophical Association, the Science and Religion Forum, the American Scientific Affiliation, and the Philosophy of Time Society, Craig currently is a research professor at the Talbot School of Theology.

I hardly needed directions to Craig's suburban Atlanta home. In previous visits, I had interviewed him for The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith, both times walking away thoroughly impressed by his scholarly depth and disarming sincerity. He has an uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts in accessible and yet technically accurate language-—a rare skill that I would certainly put to the test again with this challenging subject.

Craig answered the front door wearing a short-sleeved shirt, dark blue shorts, and brown moccasins. We descended a short flight of stairs to his office, where a soft, humid breeze wafted through a half-opened window. He sat behind his desk and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. I pulled up a chair and set up my tape recorder.

We were ready to investigate what Craig himself believes to be "one of the most plausible arguments for God's existence" 17-—-an argument based on evidence that the universe is not eternal, but that it had a beginning in the Big Bang.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

"You're a famous proponent of an argument for God's existence that's formally called the 'kalam cosmological argument,'" I said in opening our conversation. "Before you define what that is, though, give me some background. What does kalam mean?"

"Let me describe the origins of the argument," he said. "In ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that God isn't the Creator of the universe but that he simply imbues order into it. In his view, both God and the universe are eternal. Of course, that contradicted the Hebrew notion that God created the world out of nothing. So Christians later sought to refute Aristotle. One prominent Christian philosopher on the topic was John Philoponus of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived in the fourth century. He argued that the universe had a beginning. When Islam took over North Africa, Muslim theologians picked up these arguments, because they also believed in creation. So while this tradition was lost to the Christian West, it began to be highly developed within Islamic medieval theology. One of the most famous Muslim proponents was al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111. These arguments eventually got passed back into Latin-speaking Christendom through the mediation of Jewish thinkers, who lived side-by-side with Muslim theologians, particularly in Spain, which at that time had been conquered by the Muslims. They became hotly debated. Bonaventure, the Italian philosopher, supported the arguments in the thirteenth century; John Locke, the British philosopher, used them in the seventeenth century, though I don't know if he knew of their Islamic origins; and eventually they found their way to Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, in the eighteenth century.

"Now, back to your question about the word kalam—it reflects the arguments Islamic origin. It's an Arabic word that means 'speech' or 'doctrine,' but it came to characterize the whole medieval movement of Islamic theology. That was called kalam-—-this highly academic theology of the Middle Ages, which later evaporated."

I spoke up. "Obviously, none of these early philosophers knew about any of the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe," I said. "How did they argue that the universe had a beginning?"

"They relied on philosophical and mathematical reasoning," he said. "However, when scientists in the last century began to discover hard data about the Big Bang, this provided a more empirical foundation."

"How do you frame the kalam argument?"

"As formulated by al-Ghazali, the argument has three simple steps:

'"Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Then you can do a conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe, and a striking number of divine attributes can be identified."

I decided to work my way through all three steps of al-Ghazali's nearly millennium-old argument, starting with a point that-—surprisingly— has become more and more disputed in recent years.

STEP #1: Whatever Begins to Exist Has a Cause

"When I first began to defend the kalam argument," Craig said, "I anticipated that its first premise-—-that whatever begins to exist has a cause—would be accepted by virtually everyone, I thought the second premise-—-that the universe began to exist—would be much more controversial. But the scientific evidence has accumulated to the extent that atheists are finding it difficult to deny that the universe had a beginning. So they've been forced to attack the first premise instead."

Craig shook his head. "To me, this is absolutely bewildering!" he declared, his voice rising in dismay. "It seems metaphysically necessary that anything which begins to exist has to have a cause that brings it into being. Things don't just pop into existence, uncaused, out of nothing. Yet the atheist Quentin Smith concluded our book on the topic by claiming that 'the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing.' 18 That sounds like a good conclusion to the Gettysburg Address of Atheism! It simply amazes me that anyone can think this is the most rational view. Generally, people who take this position don't try to prove the premise is false, because they can't do that. Instead, they fold their arms and play the skeptic by saying, 'You can't prove that's true.' They dial their degree of skepticism so high that nothing could possibly convince them."

"On the other hand," I interjected, "they have every right to play the skeptic. After all, the burden of proof should be on you to present affirmative evidence to establish this first premise."

Craig conceded my point with a nod. "Yes, but you shouldn't demand unreasonable standards of proof," he cautioned.

I asked, "What positive proof can you offer?"

"In the first place," he replied, "this first premise is intuitively obvious once you clearly grasp the concept of absolute nothingness. You see, the idea that things can come into being uncaused out of nothing is worse than magic. At least when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, there's the magician and the hat!

"But in atheism, the universe just pops into being out of nothing, with absolutely no explanation at all. I think once people understand the concept of absolute nothingness, its simply obvious to them that if something has a beginning, that it could not have popped into being out of nothing but must have a cause that brings it into existence."

Admittedly, that was difficult to dispute, but I needed something more substantial. "Can you offer anything harder than just intuition? "What scientific evidence is there?"

"Well, we certainly have empirical evidence for the truth of this premise. This is a principle that is constantly confirmed and never falsified. We never see things coming into being uncaused out of nothing. Nobody worries that while he's away at work, say, a horse might pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing, in his living room, and be there defiling the carpet. We don't worry about those kinds of things, because they never happen. So this is a principle that is constantly verified by science. At least, Lee, you have to admit that we have better reason to think it's true than it's false. If you're presented with the principle and its denial, which way does the evidence point? Obviously, the premise is more plausible than its denial."

Still, my research had yielded at least one substantive objection to kalam's first premise. It emanates from the wacky world of quantum physics, where all kinds of strange, unexpected things happen at the subatomic level-—-a level, by the way, at which the entire universe existed in its very earliest stages, when electrons, protons, and neutrinos were bursting forth in the Big Bang. Maybe our commonplace understanding of cause-and-effect doesn't apply in this circus-mirror environment of "quantum weirdness," a place where, as science writer Timothy Ferris writes, "the logical foundations of classical science are violated." 19

Is the Universe a Free Lunch?

I pulled out the copy of the Discover magazine that I had been prompted to purchase after I had seen the marble-sized universe on its cover. I flipped it open and read the following to Craig:

Quantum theory ... holds that a vacuum ... is subject to quantum uncertainties. This means that things can materialize out of the vacuum, although they tend to vanish back into it quickly.... Theoretically, anything-—-a dog, a house, a planet—can pop into existence by means of this quantum quirk, which physicists call a vacuum fluctuation. Probability, however, dictates that pairs of subatomic particles ... are by far the most likely creations and that they will last extremely briefly.... The spontaneous, persistent creation of something even as large as a molecule is profoundly unlikely. Nevertheless, in 1973 an assistant professor at Columbia University named Edward Tryon suggested that the entire universe might have come into existence this way.... The whole universe may be, to use [MIT physicist Alan] Guth's phrase, "a free lunch." 20

I closed the magazine and tossed it on Craig's desk. "Maybe Tryon was right when he said, 'I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.' " 21

Craig was listening intently. "Okay, that's a good question," he replied. "These subatomic particles the article talks about are called 'virtual particles.' They are theoretical entities, and it's not even clear that they actually exist as opposed to being merely theoretical constructs. However, there's a much more important point to be made about this. You see, these particles, if they are real, do not come out of nothing. The quantum vacuum is not what most people envision when they think of a vacuum-—-that is, absolutely nothing. On the contrary, it's a sea of fluctuating energy, an arena of violent activity that has a rich physical structure and can be described by physical laws. These particles are thought to originate by fluctuations of the energy in the vacuum. So it's not an example of something coming into being out of nothing, or something coming into being without a cause. The quantum vacuum and the energy locked up in the vacuum are the cause of these particles. And then we have to ask, well, what is the origin of the whole quantum vacuum itself? Where does it come from?"

He let that question linger before continuing. "You've simply pushed back the issue of creation. Now you've got to account for how this very active ocean of fluctuating energy came into being. Do you see what I'm saying? If quantum physical laws operate within the domain described by quantum physics, you can't legitimately use quantum physics to explain the origin of that domain itself. You need something transcendent that's beyond that domain in order to explain how the entire domain came into being. Suddenly, we're back to the origins question."

Craig's answer satisfied me. In fact, there didn't seem to be any rational objection that could seriously jeopardize the initial assertion of the kalam argument. And it has been that way since the early philosophers began to use it centuries ago.

"Even the famous skeptic David Hume didn't deny the first premise," Craig noted. "Hume wrote in 1754, 'I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.' 22 It wasn't until the discovery of scientific confirmation for the beginning of the universe in the twentieth century that people began to say, well, maybe the universe just came from nothing. Nobody has defended such an absurd position historically," said Craig, "which, again, makes me inclined to think this is just a corner they're being backed into by the evidence for the beginning of the universe."

STEP #2: The Universe Had a Beginning

Turning to the second premise of the kalam argument, I said to Craig, "If we were sitting here a hundred years ago, the idea that the universe began to exist at a specific point in the past would have been very controversial, wouldn't it?"

"No question about it," replied Craig. "The assumption ever since the ancient Greeks has been that the material world is eternal. Christians have denied this on the basis of biblical revelation, but secular science always assumed the universes eternality. Christians just had to say, well, even though the universe appears static, nevertheless it did have a beginning when God created it. So the discovery in the twentieth century that the universe is not an unchanging, eternal entity was a complete shock to secular minds. It was utterly unanticipated."

Still, I needed evidence. "How do we really know that the universe started at some point in the past?" I asked. "What proof is there?"

"Essentially," said Craig, "there are two pathways toward establishing it. One could be called either mathematical or philosophical, while the other is scientific. Lets begin with the mathematical argument, which, incidentally, picks up on the thinking of Philoponus and the medieval Islamic theologians I mentioned earlier."

The Pathway of Mathematics

"The early Christian and Muslim scholars," Craig explained, "used mathematical reasoning to demonstrate that it was impossible to have an infinite past. Their conclusion, therefore, was that the universe's age must be finite-—-that is, it must have had a beginning. They pointed out that absurdities would result if you were to have an actually infinite number of things," he said. "Since an infinite past would involve an actually infinite number of events, then the past simply can't be infinite."

It took a moment for that statement to sink in. I have always been a reluctant student of mathematics, especially such esoteric permutations as transfinke arithmetic. Before we could venture into any mathematical complexities, I reached over and pushed the "pause" button on my tape recorder.

"Hold on a minute, Bill," I said. "If I'm going to track with you on this, you're going to have to give me some illustrations to clarify things."

Craig already had some in mind. "Okay, no problem," he replied. "When I turned the recorder back on, he continued.

"Let's use an example involving marbles," he said. "Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles left for myself. However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself, and you would have an infinity too. You'd have just as many as I would—and, in fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided into odd and even! Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of marbles, but I would have only three marbles left.

What these illustrations demonstrate is that the notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to contradictory results. In the first case in which I gave you all the marbles, infinity minus infinity is zero; in the second case in which I gave you all the odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity; and in the third case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number from the identical number, but we have come up with nonidentical results. For that reason, mathematicians are forbidden from doing subtraction and division in transfinite arithmetic, because this would lead to contradictions. You see, the idea of an actual infinity is just conceptual; it exists only in our minds. Working within certain rules, mathematicians can deal with infinite quantities and infinite numbers in the conceptual realm. However—-and here's the point—it's not descriptive of what can happen in the real world."

I was following Craig so far. "You're saying, then, that you couldn't have an infinite number of events in the past."

"Exactly, because you would run into similar paradoxes," he said. "Substitute past events for 'marbles,' and you can see the absurdities that would result. So the universe can't have an infinite number of events in its past; it must have had a beginning. In fact, we can go further. Even if you could have an actual infinite number of things, you couldn't form such a collection by adding one member after another. That's because no matter how many you add, you can always add one more before you get to infinity. This is sometimes called the Impossibility of Traversing the Infinite. But if the past really were infinite, then that would mean we have managed to traverse an infinite past to arrive at today. It would be as if

someone had managed to count down all of the negative numbers and to arrive at zero at the present moment. Such a task is intuitively nonsense. For that reason as well, we can conclude there must have been a beginning to the universe."

Still, I spotted an inconsistency that threatened to unravel Craig's argument. "If the idea of the universe being infinitely old leads to absurd conclusions, then what about the idea of God being infinitely old?" I asked. "Doesn't your reasoning also automatically rule out the idea of an eternal deity?"

"That depends," he said. "It rules out the concept of a God who has endured through an infinite past time. But that's not the classic idea of God. Time and space are creations of God that began at the Big Bang. If you go back beyond the beginning of time itself, there is simply eternity. By that, I mean eternity in the sense of timelessness. God, the eternal, is timeless in his being. God did not endure through an infinite amount of time up to the moment of creation; that would be absurd. God transcends time. He's beyond time. Once God creates the universe, he could enter time, but that's a different topic altogether."

I quickly reviewed in my mind what Craig had said so far, concluding that it was logically coherent. "How convincing do you think the mathematical pathway is?" I asked.

"Well, I'm convinced of it!" he replied with a chuckle. "In fact, this is such a good argument that even if I were living in the nineteenth century, when there was little scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe, I would still believe that the universe is finite in the past on the basis of these arguments. For me, the scientific evidence is merely confirmation of a conclusion already arrived at on the basis of philosophical reasoning."

The Pathway of Science

At this point, we turned the corner to begin discussing the scientific evidence for the universe being created in the Big Bang billions of years ago. "What discoveries began pointing scientists toward this model?" I asked.

"When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn't allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to fudge his equations by putting in a factor that would hold the universe steady. In the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre were able to develop models based on Einstein's theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn't exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang-—and the name stuck! Starting in the 1920s, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models. For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be, and that this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubbies astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaitre. Then in the 1940s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universes background radiation —-and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There's no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model.

"The third main piece of evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements, like carbon and iron, are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernovae into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There's no other explanation. So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials."

"And that," I observed, "has surprised a lot of people."

"It was an absolute shock!" he declared. "Up to this time, it was taken for granted that the universe as a whole was a static, eternally existing object."

I knew, however, that there have been more recent refinements of the standard Big Bang model. "Most scientists would add inflation theory to the description of how the universe got started," I said. "How has that changed the way we look at the Big Bang?"

"Yes, inflation is a wrinkle that most theorists would add," he acknowledged. He paused for a moment, then added: "Personally, though, I think the reasons for it are a bit suspect."

That took me aback. "Why is that?"

"You see, the Big Bang was not a chaotic, disorderly event. Instead, it appears to have been fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and precision that literally defies human comprehension. In other words, the universe we see today— and our very existence —-depends upon a set of highly special initial conditions. This phenomenon is strong evidence that the Big Bang was not an accident, but that it was designed. Theorists who are uncomfortable about this want to avoid the problem by trying to explain how you can get a universe like ours without these special initial conditions. Inflation is one attempt to do this."

I had read about inflation theory in several books and articles, but I asked Craig to describe it so that we were working from a common definition.

"Inflation says that in the very, very early history of the universe, the universe underwent a period of super-rapid, or 'inflationary,' expansion. Then it settled down to the more leisurely expansion we observe today. This inflationary expansion supposedly avoids the problem of the initial conditions of the universe by blowing them out beyond the range of what we can observe. So in a sense, inflation isn't something that is motivated by the scientific evidence; it's motivated by a desire to avoid these special initial conditions that are present in the standard model. And inflation itself has been plagued with problems. There are probably fifty different inflationary models. Nobody knows which, if any, is correct. There isn't any empirical test that proves inflation has occurred. So even though most theorists accept inflation today, I'm rather suspicious of the whole thing, because it appears to be motivated by a philosophical bias."

I stopped to analyze Craig's comments. As I thought about inflationary theory, I didn't understand how it would erode anyone's confidence in the overall Big Bang model. "Since this inflationary period supposedly happened a microsecond after the Big Bang occurred," I said, "then it really doesn't affect the question of the origin of the universe."

"That's right," Craig replied. "Prior to inflation, the universe still shrinks back to a singularity."

I put up my hand to stop him. "A what?'

"A singularity," he repeated. "That's the state at which the space-time curvature, along with temperature, density, and pressure, becomes infinite. It's the beginning point. It's the point at which the Big Bang occurred."

I nodded to acknowledge the clarification. "Okay," I said. "Then how would you assess the health of the Big Bang model today?"

"It's the standard paradigm of contemporary cosmology," he answered. "I would say that its broad framework is very securely established as a scientific fact. Stephen Hawking has said, almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang." 23

By this point in our discussion, Craig had provided compelling facts to support the two premises of the kalam argument. All that remained was its conclusion—-and the absolutely staggering implications that logically flow from it. 

STEP #3: Therefore, the Universe Has a Cause

In arguing for the existence of God, thirteenth-century Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas always presupposed Aristotle's view that the universe is eternal. On the basis of that difficult assumption, he then sought to prove that God exists. Why did he take this approach? Because, Aquinas said, if he were to start with the premise that the universe had a beginning, then his task would be too easy! Obviously, if there was a beginning, something had to bring the universe into existence. But now, modern astrophysics and astronomy have dropped into the lap of Christians precisely the premise that, according to Aquinas, makes God's existence virtually undeniable.

Craig offered that story to punch his next point. "Given that whatever begins to exist has a cause and that the universe began to exist, there must he some sort of transcendent cause for the origin of the universe," Craig told me.

"Even atheist Kai Nielsen said, 'Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang ... and you ask me, What made that bang? and I reply, Nothing, it just happened. You would not accept that.' 24 He's right, of course. And if a cause is needed for a small bang like that, then it's needed for the Big Bang as well. This is an inescapable conclusion— and it's a stunning confirmation of the millennia-old Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing."

At the time an agnostic, American astronomer Robert Jastrow was forced to concede that although details may differ, "the essential element in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy." 25

But although logic dictates that a cause sparked the Big Bang, I wondered how much logic can also tell us about its identity. "What specifically can you deduce about this cause?" I asked Craig.

"There are several qualities we can identify," he replied. "A cause of space and time must be an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal being endowed with freedom of will and enormous power," he said. "And that is a core concept of God."

"Hold on, hold on!" I insisted. "Many atheists see a fatal inconsistency. They don't see how you can say the Creator could be 'uncaused.' For instance, atheist George Smith says, 'If everything must have a cause, how did God become exempt?' 26 In The Necessity of Atheism, David Brooks says: 'If everything must have a cause, then the First Cause must be caused and therefore: Who made God? To say that this First Cause always existed is to deny the basic assumption of this theory.' 27 What would you say to them?"

Craig's eyebrows shot up. "Well, that just misses the point!" he exclaimed. "Obviously, they're not dealing with the first premise of the kalam argument, which is not that every thing has a cause, but that whatever begins to exist has a cause. I don't know of any reputable philosopher who would say everything has a cause. So they're simply not dealing with a correct formulation of the kalam argument. And this is not special pleading in the case of God. After all, atheists have long maintained that the universe doesn't need a cause, because it's eternal. How can they possibly maintain that the universe can be eternal and uncaused, yet God cannot be timeless and uncaused?"

At that point, another objection popped into my mind. "Why does it have to be one Creator?" I asked. "Why couldn't multiple Creators have been involved?"

"My opinion," Craig answered, "is that Ockham's razor would shave away any additional creators."

"What's Ockham's razor?"

"It's a scientific principle that says we should not multiply causes beyond what's necessary to explain the effect. Since one Creator is sufficient to explain the effect, you would be unwarranted in going beyond the evidence to posit a plurality"

"That seems a little soft to me," I said.

"Well, it's a universally accepted principle of scientific methodology," he replied. "And besides, the kalam argument can't prove everything about the Creator. Nothing restricts us from looking at wider considerations. For instance, Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed the truth of monotheism, and he was vindicated by his resurrection from the dead, for which we have convincing historical evidence. 28 Consequently, we have good grounds for believing that what he said was true."

I conceded the point, but at the same time my mind began to fill with other objections concerning the identity of the universe's cause. Among the most troubling was whether the kalam argument can tell us if the Creator is personal, as Christians believe, or merely an impersonal force, as many New Age adherents maintain.

The Personal Creator

"You said earlier that there's evidence that the cause of the universe was personal," I said. "I don't see how this can be logically deduced. In fact, Smith has complained that arguments like yours cannot establish whether the first cause was, or is, alive or conscious-—-and, he says, 'an inanimate, unconscious god is of little use to theism.' 29 He has a point there, doesn't he?"

"No, I don't think so," said Craig. "One of the most remarkable features of the kalam argument is that it gives us more than just a transcendent cause of the universe. It also implies a personal Creator."

"How so?"

Craig leaned back into his chair. "There are two types of explanations—scientific and personal," he began, adopting a more professorial tone. "Scientific explanations explain a phenomenon in terms of certain initial conditions and natural laws, which explain how those initial conditions evolved to produce the phenomenon under consideration. By contrast, personal explanations explain things by means of an agent and that agent's volition or will."

I interrupted to ask Craig for an illustration. He obliged me by saying: 

"Imagine you walked into the kitchen and saw the kettle boiling on the stove. You ask, 'Why is the kettle boiling?' Your wife might say, 'Well, because the kinetic energy of the flame is conducted by the metal bottom of the kettle to the water, causing the water molecules to vibrate faster and faster until they're thrown off in the form of steam.' That would be a scientific explanation. Or she might say, 'I put it on to make a cup of tea.' That would be a personal explanation. Both are legitimate, but they explain the phenomenon in different ways."

So far, so good. "But how does this relate to cosmology?"

"You see, there cannot be a scientific explanation of the first state of the universe. Since it's the first state, it simply cannot be explained in terms of earlier initial conditions and natural laws leading up to it. So if there is an explanation of the first state of the universe, it has to be a personal explanation—that is, an agent who has volition to create it. That would be the first reason that the cause of the universe must be personal.

"A second reason is that because the cause of the universe transcends time and space, it cannot be a physical reality. Instead, it must be non-physical or immaterial. Well, there are only two types of things that can be timeless and immaterial. One would be abstract objects, like numbers or mathematical entities. However, abstract objects can't cause anything to happen. The second kind of immaterial reality would be a mind. A mind can be a cause, and so it makes sense that the universe is the product of an unembodied [not sure what Craig thinks here; maybe the theology that God has no body, which I prove in studies is totally wrong - Keith Hunt] mind that brought it into existence.

"Finally, let me give you an analogy that will help explain a third reason for why the first cause is personal. Water freezes at zero degrees Centigrade. If the temperature were below zero degrees from eternity past, then any water that was around would be frozen from eternity past. It would be impossible for the water to just begin to freeze a finite time ago. In other words, once the sufficient conditions were met— that is, the temperature was low enough—-then the consequence would be that water would automatically freeze.

"So if the universe were just a mechanical consequence that would occur whenever sufficient conditions were met, and the sufficient conditions were met eternally, then it would exist from eternity past. The effect would be co-eternal with the cause.

"How do you explain, then, the origin of a finite universe from a timeless cause? I can only think of one explanation: that the cause of the universe is a personal agent who has freedom of will. He can create a new effect without any antecedent determining conditions. He could decide to say, 'Let there be light,' and the universe would spring into existence. I've never seen a good response to this argument on the part of any atheist. Putting the issue a bit simpler, British physicist Edmund Whittaker made a similar observation in his book The Beginning and End of the World. He said, 'There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before and was suddenly galvanized into action. For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo—Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness." 30

Craig had made a good case for the cause of the universe being personal, and yet he offered no evidence concerning whether the Creator is still living today. Perhaps the Creator put the universe into motion and then ceased to exist. Smith also makes this challenge, saying that an argument like Craig's is "capable only of demonstrating the existence of a mysterious first cause in the distant past. It does not establish the present existence of the first cause." 31

This objection, though, didn't faze Craig. "It's certainly plausible that this being would still exist," he said, "because he transcends the universe and is therefore above the laws of nature, which he created. It therefore seems unlikely that anything in the laws of nature could extinguish him. And, of course, Christians believe this Creator has not remained silent but has revealed himself decisively in the person, ministry, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which shows that he's still around and still working in history. Again, the kalam argument can't prove everything, and that's fine. We're free to look around for other evidence that the Creator still exists. Let's see if he answers prayers, if he raised Jesus from the dead, if he revealed himself in the fulfillment of prophecy, and so forth. It seems that the burden of proof should be on the person claiming he did once exist, but he no longer does."

Even though that seemed to make sense, something inside of me was saying, "Not so fast!" The kalam argument was a little too cut-and-dried; Craig's evidence seemed a bit too airtight. Was his conclusion that a personal Creator was behind the Big Bang really warranted, or might there be a way to get around it?

There was too much at stake not to probe every reasonable possibility, including whether there's an explanation that would negate the need for an absolute beginning of the universe-—and thus eliminate the Creator that the Big Bang implies.

Alternatives to the Big Bang

Eflforts to come up with alternatives to the standard Big Bang model have intensified in recent years. Many scientists are troubled by the fact that the beginning of the universe necessitates a Creator. Others are perturbed because the laws of physics can't account for the creation event. Einstein admitted the idea of the expanding universe "irritates me" 32 (presumably, said one prominent scientist, "because of its theological implications"). 33 British astronomer Arthur Eddington called it "repugnant." MIT's Phillip Morrison said, "I would like to reject it." 34 Jastrow said it was "distasteful to the scientific mind," adding:

There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause. This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. "When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. 35

Has this attitude, I asked Craig, fuelled efforts to circumvent the idea of the Big Bang?

"I believe it has. A good example is the Steady State theory proposed in 1948," he replied. "It said that the universe was expanding all right but claimed that as galaxies retreat from each other, new matter comes into being out of nothing and fills the void. So in contradiction to the First Law of Thermodynamics, which says that matter is neither created nor destroyed, the universe is supposedly being constantly replenished with new stuff."

The concept was intriguing if nothing else. "What was the evidence for it?" I asked.

"There was none!" Craig exclaimed. "It never secured a single piece of experimental verification. It was motivated purely by a desire to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Big Bang model—in fact, one of its originators, Sir Fred Hoyle, was quite overt about this. He was very up front about his desire to avoid the metaphysical and theological implications of the Big Bang by proposing a model that was eternal in the past."

I interrupted. "Wait a minute, Bill," I said. Recalling a comment by science philosopher Stephen C. Meyer in my earlier interview, I asked: "Wouldn't you agree that the motivations behind a theory are independent of its scientific worth?"

"Yes, yes, I'd agree with that," Craig replied. "In this case, though, there were no scientific data supporting it. It's a good illustration of how scientists are not mere thinking machines but are driven by philosophical and emotional factors as well."

Rather than try to second-guess the motivations of cosmologists, I decided to ask Craig about several alternatives to the standard Big Bang model that have gained currency through the years. Maybe one of them could succeed in toppling the theistic conclusion of the kalam argument.

Exploring Sagan's Cosmos

The first alternative I mentioned to Craig—the Oscillating Model of the universe-—-was popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan on his Cosmos television program. This theory eliminates the need for an absolute beginning of the universe by suggesting that the universe expands, then collapses, then expands again, and continues in this cycle indefinitely. Interestingly, Sagan even quoted from Hindu scriptures to show how this is consistent with its cyclical themes. When I asked Craig about Sagan's theory, he said that, yes, he was quite familiar with it.

"That model was popular in the 1960s, particularly among Russian cosmologists," he said. "In 1968, when I was at the World Congress on Philosophy in Diisseldorf, I heard Soviet bloc cosmologists espousing this model, simply because of their commitment to dialectical materialism. They could not deny the eternality of matter because this was part of Marxist philosophy, and so, despite the evidence, they were holding out hope for the Oscillating Model."

"But," I interjected, "support for this model apparently hasn't waned. As recently as 2003, Bill Bryson, in his bestseller A Short History of Nearly Everything, said that one notion among scientists is that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine.' " 36

"Well, several problems with the Oscillating Model have been well known for decades," he replied. "For one thing, it contradicts the known laws of physics. Theorems by Hawking and Penrose show that as long as the universe is governed by general relativity, the existence of an initial singularity—or beginning-—is inevitable, and that it's impossible to pass through a singularity to a subsequent state. And there's no known physics that could reverse a contracting universe and suddenly make it bounce before it hits the singularity. The whole theory was simply a theoretical abstraction. Physics never supported it. Another problem is that in order for the universe to oscillate, it has to contract at some point. For this to happen, the universe would have to be dense enough to generate sufficient gravity that would eventually slow its expansion to a halt and then, with increasing rapidity, contract it into a big crunch. But estimates have consistently indicated that the universe is far below the density needed to contract, even when you include not only its luminous matter, but also all of the invisible dark matter as well.

"Recent tests, run by five different laboratories in 1998, calculated a ninety-five-percent certainty that the universe will not contract, but that it will expand forever. In fact, in a completely unexpected development, the studies indicated that the expansion is not decelerating, but it's actually accelerating. This really puts the nails in the coffin for the Oscillating Model.

"And one more problem: even if physics allowed the universe to contract, scientific studies have shown that entropy would be conserved from one cycle to the next. This would have the effect of each expansion getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, trace that backwards in time and what do you get? They get smaller and smaller and smaller, until you finally come to the smallest cycle—-and then the beginning of the universe. So Joseph Silk, in his book The Big Bang, estimates that even if the universe were oscillating, it could not have gone through more than a hundred previous oscillations prior to today." 37

All of this did, indeed, seem to doom this theory. "Sagan was an agnostic who liked to say that the universe 'is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be,'" 38 1 said. "But you're saying that the evidence indicates—"

"—-that the Oscillating Model itself implies the beginning of the universe which its proponents sought to avoid. That's right," Craig said.

"But," I pointed out, "permutations of his theory are being proposed even today." I removed a newspaper article from my briefcase and read the headline to Craig: "Princeton Physicist Offers Theory of Cyclic Universe."39

"This cosmologist says the Big Bang is not the beginning of time but a bridge to a pre-existing era," I said. "He says the universe undergoes an endless sequence of cycles in which it contracts with a big crunch and reemerges in an expanding Big Bang, with trillions of years of evolution in between. He says mysterious 'dark energy' first pushes the universe apart at an accelerating rate, but then it changes its character and causes it to contract and then rebound in cycle after cycle."

Craig was familiar with the concept. "This model is based on a certain version of string theory, which is an alternative to the standard quark model of particle physics," he explained.

"The scenario postulates that our universe is a three-dimensional membrane in a five-dimensional space, and that there's another three-dimensional membrane which is in an eternal cycle of approaching our membrane and colliding with it. "When this happens, it supposedly causes an expansion of our universe from the point of collision. Then our universe retreats and repeats the cycle again, and on and on.

"The idea is that this five-dimensional universe is eternal and beginningless. So you have a cyclic model of our universe that is expanding, but nevertheless this larger dimensional universe as a whole is eternal."

Though difficult to conceptualize, this idea had a certain amount of appeal. 

"What do you think of this model?" I asked.

"Well, this isn't even a model, it's just sort of a scenario, because it hasn't been developed. The equations for string theory haven't even all been stated yet, much less solved. So this is extremely speculative and uncertain. But let's consider it on its merits," he said.

"This cyclic scenario is plagued with problems. For one thing, it is inconsistent with the very string theory it's based on! Nobody has been able to solve that problem. Moreover, this is simply the five-dimensional equivalent of a three-dimensional oscillating universe. As such, it faces many of the same problems that the old oscillating model did.

"But more interesting is that in 2001, inflation theorist Alan Guth and two other physicists wrote an article on how inflation is not past eternal. They were able to generalize their results to show that they were also applicable to multidimensional models, like the one in this newspaper article. So it turns out that even the cyclical model in five dimensions has to have a beginning."

Craig sighed as he sat back in his chair. "It s amazing how this falls into a consistent pattern," he said. "Theories designed to avoid the beginning of the universe have either turned out to be untenable, like the Steady State theory, or else they imply the very beginning of the universe that their proponents have been desperately trying to avoid."

"So the future of this cyclic scenario is ... what?"

"It will probably provide grist for further exploration," he said. "Still, another prominent inflation theorist, Andre Linde, said this concept has been very popular among journalists and very unpopular among cosmologists."

"Speaking of Linde," I said, "he proposed another theory, called chaotic inflation, that would eliminate the need for a beginning point."

"That's right," Craig said. "He speculated that maybe inflation —-this rapid expansion of the universe-—-never really quits. He said maybe the universe expands like a balloon, and when it reaches a certain point, then inflation is spawned off of it and begins to expand, and then something expands off of that. So you have inflation begetting inflation begetting inflation, and it goes on forever. The obvious question, then, is this: could inflation be eternal in the past? Could every inflationary domain be the creation of a prior domain so that the universe is an eternally inflating and self-reproducing entity?"

"Is that possible?"

"I'm afraid not. As I said earlier, a universe that is eternally inflating toward the future cannot be past eternal. Two prominent physicists demonstrated that as far back as 1994. There has to be a beginning at some point in the indefinite past. In Linde's response, he admitted they were correct."

I thought about another popular alternative: quantum models of the universe, like Edward Tryon's, which I mentioned earlier. There are several variations, but basically they claim that our universe is part of a bigger mother universe, which is made up of a quantum vacuum where fluctuations occur and turn into baby universes. Our universe is one of these offspring. While our universe is expanding, the bigger mother universe is infinite and eternal.

When I brought up this concept, though, Craig pointed out two fatal problems with it. "Remember we said earlier in our conversation that a quantum vacuum isn't nothing, but that it's a very active sea of fluctuating energy that itself demands an explanation for how it came into being," he said. "What accounts for its beginning? And second, there is a positive—-that is, a non-zero-—-probability that a fluctuation would occur and a universe would be spawned at each and every point in this quantum vacuum.

"So if the mother universe were eternal, eventually a universe would have formed at each point. Think about that. Finally these universes would be running into each other or coalescing until the entire quantum vacuum in the mother universe would be filled with an infinitely old universe, which contradicts our observations. That's why this model hasn't survived."

Hawking's Challenge

Most developments in cosmology live an obscure existence within the pages of arcane scientific journals, with only a few—-often, the most outlandish ones-—receiving even the briefest mention in the popular press. Luminaries in the field, such as Linde and Guth, are hardly household names. But when Stephen William Hawking speaks, the public listens.

A theoretical physicist who is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton, Hawking has become a science icon. He has sold millions of copies of A Brief History of Time, although Business Week once quipped that the book is "the least-read best-seller ever." 40 His celebrity status was validated when he achieved cartoon form on The Simpsons and chapter 5: played a cameo role on Star Trek, where he challenged a holographic Einstein to a game of chess.

Hawking, who uses a wheelchair for mobility and a synthesizer for speech due to a progressive neuromuscular disease, has been on a quest for the elusive Theory of Everything, which would unify general relativity with quantum theory. Along the way, he has proposed a quantum gravity model for the universe that he says eliminates the need for a singularity-—-that is, the Big Bang.

When actress Shirley MacLaine asked Hawking whether he believes God created the universe, he replied simply, "No." 41 He told the BBC: "We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence."

In a chapter called "The Origin and Fate of the Universe" in A Brief History of Time, Hawking says: "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" 43.

I broached Hawkings theory to Craig. "It sure sounds like he has finally managed to put God out of business," I said.

"Not quite," replied Craig.

When I asked him to explain why not, Craig pulled a piece of paper and pen out of his top drawer. "Let me draw you two pictures that will clarify what I mean," he said.

"The standard Big Bang theory can be represented by a cone," he said, drawing what looked like an empty sugar cone from Baskin-Robbins. "The point of the cone represents the beginning of the universe-—the singularity where the Big Bang occurred. It's the beginning point, and it has a sharp edge to it. 44 The expansion of the universe, as it gets older and grows, is represented by the cone's overall expanding shape."

I nodded that I was tracking with him. Then he took a second sheet of paper and began drawing a picture of Hawkings theory. "Hawkings model is like a cone, too, except it doesn't come to a point." He drew a picture of what resembled a badminton birdie; instead of coming to a sharp point, the end of the cone was rounded.

"As you can see, there's no singularity. There's no sharp edge. If you were to start at the mouth of the cone and go backward in time," he said, his pencil tracing the long side of the cone, "you would not come back to a beginning point. You would simply follow the curve-—-and suddenly you would find yourself heading forward in time again."

"This was consistent with the way Hawking's biographers envisioned his theory. They said it would be like walking northward until you reach the North Pole, and then suddenly, if you keep walking, you find yourself heading south. 'There is no beginning and no end-—-no boundaries,' one writer explained. 'The universe always was, always is, and always shall be.'" 6

Craig put down his pencil. "Presto!" I exclaimed as I looked at his drawing. "No beginning, no singularity, no Big Bang—no need for God."

Craig grimaced. "Let's think about this for a minute before you come to that conclusion," he said.

The World of Imaginary Numbers

"Has Hawking made a mistake?" I asked. The mere suggestion sounded impossible!

"I think he has made a philosophical error by thinking that having a beginning entails having a beginning point. And that's simply not the case," Craig replied.

He pointed toward his rendering of Hawking's model. "Granted, there isn't any singular point here, but notice this: the universe is still finite in its past. It still has a beginning in the sense that something has a finite past duration. In other words, pick an interval of time—-say, a second, a minute, or a year. For any finite interval of time you pick, there are only a finite number of equal intervals prior to that time. And in that sense, Hawking's model has a beginning. Even he says that the universe has an origin out of nothing in the sense that there's absolutely nothing that comes before it.

"So this would be an example of a model that has a beginning but doesn't involve a singularity. That's what many scientists are trying to come up with, because the laws of physics would apply all the way back. They don't break down in a singularity. And that's more palatable to them."

Before I could ask another question, Craig added: "Now, I've been taking Hawking's model at face value, but it's also important to note that he is only able to achieve this rounding-off effect by substituting 'imaginary numbers' for real numbers in his equations. What are imaginary numbers?

"They are multiples of the square root of negative one," he said. "In this model, they have the effect of turning time into a dimension of space. The problem is that when imaginary numbers are employed, they're just computational devices used to grease the equations and get the result the mathematician wants. That's fine, but when you want to get a real, physical result, you have to convert the imaginary numbers into real ones. But Hawking refuses to convert them. He just keeps everything in the imaginary realm. What happens if you convert the numbers into real ones? Presto, the singularity reappears!" Craig said. "In fact, the singularity is really there the whole time; it's just hidden behind the device of so-called imaginary time. Hawking concedes this in a subsequent book he co-authored with Roger Penrose. 47 He said he doesn't pretend to be describing reality, because he says he doesn't know what reality is. So Hawking himself recognizes that this is not a realistic description of the universe or its origin; it's merely a mathematical way of modeling the beginning of the universe in such a manner that the singularity doesn't appear."

I was amazed! Even though Hawking's Internet site says his theory implies that the universe "was completely determined by the laws of science," 48 even he wasn't able to successfully write God out of the picture.

"What's important to understand, Lee, is how reversed the situation is from, say, a hundred years ago," Craig continued. "Back then, Christians had to maintain by faith in the Bible that despite all appearances to the contrary, the universe was not eternal but was created out of nothing a finite time ago. Now, the situation is exactly the opposite. It is the atheist who has to maintain, by faith, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the universe did not have a beginning a finite time ago but is in some inexplicable way eternal after all. So the shoe is on the other foot. The Christian can stand confidently within biblical truth, knowing its in line with mainstream astrophysics and cosmology. It's the atheist who feels very uncomfortable and marginalized today."

As I sat there in Craigs office, my mind could conjure up no rational scenario that could derail the inexorable logic of the kalam argument. The philosophical and scientific evidence of contemporary cosmology was pointing persuasively toward the conclusion that a personal Creator of the universe does exist. This was powerful stuff—and I still had a long way to go in my investigation.

I wondered, however, how a cosmologist or physicist might respond to Craig. As compelling as the kalam argument undeniably is, does it really have the potential to change the mind of a scientist? Or would it merely become fodder for more and more creative—or, as some might say, desperate—-counter-arguments and objections? Christians often caution that a skeptic cannot be argued into the faith. Yet if someone were sincerely open-minded, could Craigs case be sufficient to prompt a personal verdict in favor of God?

I mused about this aloud to Craig. He thought for a moment and then launched into a fascinating story about a doctoral dissertation, a handmade booklet, and a changed life.

Physical Laws, Spiritual Laws

While in Germany to pursue his second doctorate, Bill and his wife, Jan, were attending a convention of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a prestigious German organization devoted to promoting international research cooperation between scholars. While chatting with various scientists, they met a prominent Eastern European physicist, who described for them how physics had destroyed her belief in God. She said that now when she looks at the world, all she sees is darkness without and darkness within, Craig recalled. "I remember how that struck me so forcefully. What a description of the modern worlds predicament—utter meaninglessness and despair. Suddenly, Jan spoke up. 'You should read Bill's doctoral dissertation,' she said. 'He uses physics to prove the existence of God.'"

Craig's eyes got wide as he relived the scene. "My first thought was, 'Oh, no! What is this famous physicist going to say?' But she replied that, yes, she would be very interested in reading it. So we gave her a copy of my dissertation on the kalam cosmological argument—the very kind of material we've been discussing today, Lee. As she read it over the coming days, she started to get more and more excited. She told me, 'I know these people you're quoting! These are my colleagues!' Finally, she returned the dissertation to us and announced, 'I now believe in the existence of God. Thank you so much for restoring my faith in him.' We were thrilled! We said, 'Would you like to know him in a-personal way?' She was a bit hesitant, but she said, 'Uh, of course.' So we asked her to meet us that night in the local restaurant. That afternoon Jan and I prepared a little handwritten version of the Four Spiritual Laws, which spell out how a person can become a follower of Jesus. 49 When we sat down with her at the meal that night, we opened the booklet and read the first sentence: 'Just as there are physical laws that govern the physical universe, so there are spiritual laws that govern your relationship with God.' And she said, 'Oh, physical laws! Spiritual laws! This is something I can understand! This is just for me!' Finally, we got to the point in the booklet that asks whether God is outside of your life or on the throne of your life. She clamped her hand over the booklet and said, 'Ah, this is so personal! I just can't answer at this time.' We said, 'That's all right. Let us just explain how you can receive Christ as your personal savior.' We described how she could pray to ask God to forgive her wrongdoing and to receive Jesus as her for-giver and leader. After that, we let her take the booklet home with her. Well, the next day when we saw her, her face was just radiant with joy! She told us she had gone home that night and there in her room had prayed to give her life to Christ. Then she took all her tranquilizers and booze and flushed them down the toilet! We gave her a copy of the New Testament and parted ways for several months. When we saw her later at another convention, we wondered what the status of her faith would be. But she had the same joy, the same radiance, and she greeted us with love and told us that her most precious possessions were her New Testament and her handmade Four Spiritual Laws."

Bill smiled. "You asked whether God can use cosmology to change the life of a scientist," he said. "Yes, I've seen it. I've seen it happen with all kinds of skeptics. Once I gave a talk at a college in Canada on the kalam argument. Afterward a student said, 'I've been an agnostic all my life. I've never heard anything like this. I now believe that God exists! I can hardly wait to go share this with my brother, who's an atheist.'"

Craig glanced out the window as he pondered what else to say. Then he turned to me once more. "Certainly there have been earlier ages when the culture was more sympathetic toward Christianity," he said. "But I think it's indisputable that there has never been a time in history when the hard evidence of science was more confirmatory of belief in God than today."

I leaned over and punched the "stop" button on my recorder. I couldn't think of a better segue to my next interview. Now that Craig had made a powerful case for God as Creator of the universe, it was time to consider the laws and parameters of physics. Is there any credibility, I wondered, to the claim that they have been tuned to an incomprehensible precision in order to create a livable habitat for humankind?

For Further Evidence

More Resources on This Topic

Craig, William Lane. "Design and the Cosmological Argument." In Mere Creation, ed. William A. Dembski. Downers Grove, InterVarsity, 1998.

Reasonable Faith. Rev. ed. Wheaton,  Crossway, 1994.

and Quentin Smith.  Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Moreknd, J. P., and Kai Nielsen. Does God Exist? Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993.

………………..

WITH  THIS  CHAPTER  I  THINK  WE  HAVE  PRESENTED  ENOUGH  EVIDENCE,  SCIENTIFIC  EVIDENCE,  THAT GOD  DOES  EXISTS.

THE  AUTHOR  OF  A  CASE  FOR  A  CREATOR  GOES  ON  WITH  MANY  MORE  PROOFS  FROM  PhD  SCIENTISTS  WITH  PROOF  THAT  THERE  IS  A  LIVING  DESIGNER  BEHIND  THE  UNIVERSE.

I  ENCOURAGE  THE  READER  TO  OBTAIN  THIS  REMARKABLE  BOOK;  YOU  CAN  OBTAIN  IT  FROM  CHRISTIAN  BOOK  DISTRIBUTORS.

  

Keith Hunt

THE  CASE  FOR  A  CREATOR

from  the  book  by  the  same  name

LITTLE  PROOF  FROM  PHYSICS

The Impression of Design

"When scientists talk about the fine-tuning of the universe," Collins said, "they're generally referring to the extraordinary balancing of the fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. Our minds can't comprehend the precision of some of them. The result is a universe that has just the right conditions to sustain life. The coincidences are simply too amazing to have been the result of happenstance—as Paul Davies said, 'the impression of design is overwhelming.'17

"I like to use the analogy of astronauts landing on Mars and finding an enclosed biosphere, sort of like the domed structure that was built in Arizona a few years ago. At the control panel they find that all the dials for its environment are set just right for life. The oxygen ratio is perfect; the temperature is seventy degrees; the humidity is fifty percent; there's a system for replenishing the air; there are systems for producing food, generating energy, and disposing of wastes. Each dial has a huge range of possible settings, and you can see if you were to adjust one or more of them just a little bit, the environment would go out of whack and life would be impossible. What conclusion would you draw from that?"

The answer was obvious. "That someone took great care in designing and building it," I said.

"That's right," he replied. "You'd conclude that this biosphere was not there by accident. Volcanoes didn't erupt and spew out the right compounds that just happened to assemble themselves into the biosphere. Some intelligent being had intentionally and carefully designed and prepared it to support living creatures. And that's an analogy for our universe.

"Over the past thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor's edge for life to exist. The coincidences are far too fantastic to attribute this to mere chance or to claim that it needs no explanation'. The dials are set too precisely to have been a random accident. Somebody, as Fred Hoyle quipped, has been monkeying with the physics."18

This has to be among the most fascinating scientific discoveries of the century. 

"Who first noticed this?" I asked.

"Way back in the late 1950s, Hoyle talked about the precise process by which carbon and oxygen are produced in a certain ratio inside stars. If you tinker with the resonance states of carbon, you won't get the materials you need for building life. Incidentally, recent studies by the physicist Heinz Oberhummer and his colleagues show that just a one-percent change in the strong nuclear force would have a thirty- to a thousand-fold impact on the production of oxygen and carbon in stars. Since stars provide the carbon and oxygen needed for life on planets, if you throw that off balance, conditions in the universe would be much less optimal for the existence of life.

"Anyway-—-back to your question—most of the research and writing about the fine-tuning has taken place since the early 1980s. There have been hundreds of articles and books written on it from both a technical and popular perspective."

Physics can get very complicated very quickly. So when I asked Collins to describe one of his favorite examples, I was relieved that he chose one that's among the easier to envision.

"Let's talk about gravity," he said. "Imagine a ruler, or one of those old-fashioned linear radio dials, that goes all the way across the universe. It would be broken down into one-inch increments, which means there would be billions upon billions upon billions of inches.

"The entire dial represents the range offeree strengths in nature, with gravity being the weakest force and the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei being the strongest, a whopping ten thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity.19 The range of possible settings for the force of gravity can plausibly be taken to be at least as large as the total range of force strengths.

"Now, let's imagine that you want to move the dial from where it s currently set. Even if you were to move it by only one inch, the impact on life in the universe would be catastrophic."

"One inch compared to the whole universe?" I asked. "What kind of impact could that have?"

"That small adjustment of the dial would increase gravity by a billion-fold" he said.

"Whoa!" I said. "That sounds like a lot."

"Actually, it's not," he replied, "Relative to the entire radio dial-— that is, the total range offeree strengths in nature—-it's extraordinarily small, just one part in ten thousand billion billion billion."

""Wow, that puts it into perspective," I said. "What would happen to life?"

"Animals anywhere near the size of human beings would be crushed," he said. "As astrophysicist Martin Rees said, 'In an imaginary strong gravity world, even insects would need thick legs to support them, and no animals could get much larger.'20 In fact, a planet with a gravitational pull of a thousand times that of the Earth would have a diameter of only forty feet, which wouldn't be enough to sustain an ecosystem. Besides which, stars with lifetimes of more than a billion years—compared to ten billion years for our sun—couldn't exist if you increase gravity by just three thousand times.

"As you can see, compared to the total range of force strengths in nature, gravity has an incomprehensibly narrow range for life to exist. Of all the possible settings on the dial, from one side of the universe to the other, it happens to be situated in the exact right fraction of an inch to make our universe capable of sustaining life."

And gravity is just one parameter that scientists have studied. One expert said there are more than thirty separate physical or cosmological parameters that require precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe.21

As for Collins, he likes to focus on gravity and a handful of other examples that he has personally investigated and which he believes are sufficient by themselves to establish the case for a designer. I decided to ask Collins about another parameter—the so-called "cosmological constant"—a phenomenon so bewildering that it even boggles the mind of one of the worlds most skeptical scientists.

Throwing Darts at an Atom

Nobel-winning physicist Steven "Weinberg, an avowed atheist, has expressed amazement at the way the cosmological constant—-the energy density of empty space—is "remarkably well adjusted in our favor."22 The constant, which is part of Einstein's equation for General Relativity, could have had any value, positive or negative, "but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large," "Weinberg said.

Fortunately, he added, it isn't:

If large and positive, the cosmological constant would act as a repulsive force that increases with distance, a force that would prevent matter from clumping together in the early universe, the process that was the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. If large and negative, the cosmological constant would act as an attractive force increasing with distance, a force that would almost immediately reverse the expansion of the universe and cause it to recollapse.23

Either way, life loses—-big time. But astonishingly, that's not what has happened.

"In fact," Weinberg said, "astronomical observations show that the cosmological constant is quite small, very much smaller than would have been guessed from first principles."

When I asked Collins about this, he told me that the unexpected, counterintuitive, and stunningly precise setting of the cosmological constant "is widely regarded as the single greatest problem facing physics and cosmology today."

"How precise is it?" I asked.

Collins rolled his eyes. "Well, there's no way we can really comprehend it," he said. "The fine-tuning has conservatively been estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion. That would be a ten followed by fifty-three zeroes. That's inconceivably precise."

He was right—-I couldn't imagine a figure like that. "Can you give me an illustration?" I asked.

"Put it this way," he said. "Let's say you were way out in space and were going to throw a dart at random toward the Earth. It would be like successfully hitting a bull's eye that's one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter. That's less than the size of one solitary atom."

Breathtaking was the word that came into my mind. Staggering. "No wonder scientists have been blown away by this," I said.

"I'll tell you what," Collins said, "in my opinion, if the cosmological constant were the only example of fine-tuning, and if there were no natural explanation for it, then this would be sufficient by itself to strongly establish design."

I had to agree. The way I saw it, if the universe were put on trial for a charge of having been designed, and the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant were the only evidence introduced by the prosecution, I would have to vote "guilty"—assuming there was no hidden naturalistic explanation. Statistically, this would be a far stronger case than even the DNA evidence that is used to establish guilt in many criminal trials today.

Collins continued. "Now, think about adding together the evidence for just the two factors I've discussed so far—the cosmological constant and the force of gravity," he said. "This would create an unimaginably stronger case. "When you combine the two, the fine-tuning would be to a precision of one part in a hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That would be the equivalent of one atom in the entire known universe!"

And Collins wasn't through. "There are other examples of fine-tuning," he said. "For instance, there's the difference in mass between neutrons and protons. Increase the mass of the neutron by about one part in seven hundred and nuclear fusion in stars would stop. There would be no energy source for life.

"And if the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life in the universe would be impossible. Or consider the strong nuclear force. Imagine decreasing it by fifty percent, which is tiny—one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion, compared to the total range of force strengths."

"What would happen if you tinkered with it by that amount?"

"Since like charges repel, the strong nuclear force would be too weak to prevent the repulsive force between the positively charged protons in atomic nuclei from tearing apart all atoms except hydrogen," he said. "And regardless of what they may show on Star Trek, you can't have intelligent life forms built from hydrogen. It simply doesn't have enough stable complexity."

I knew Collins could go on and on, but I needed a way to visualize the implications of these increasingly abstract concepts. "Go back to your Martian biosphere illustration," I said.

"Okay," he replied. "Set aside the issue of how the biosphere got there in the first place. Let's say when you found it, there were twelve dials that controlled the conditions inside the dome. Each dial had an incredibly huge range of possible settings. When you departed, you left the dials at random and as a result no life was possible in the biosphere.

"Then you come back a year later. When you look at the dials, you're amazed to find that each one of them has been carefully calibrated to just the right setting so that life is flourishing in the dome. Twelve dials, twelve different factors—all optimally set for life.

"Do you know what the headline would be in the newspaper the next day? It would say: extraterrestrial life exists. We would take that as proof that an intelligent being had landed and set those dials precisely where they needed to be for life.

"And I'm saying that the dials for the fundamental properties of the universe have been set like that. In fact, the precision is far greater. This would be totally unexpected under the theory that random chance was responsible. However, it's not unexpected at all under the hypothesis that there is a Grand Designer."

…………………

TO  THINK  THAT  ALL  THIS  JUST  BY  ACCIDENT  OR  AT  RANDOM  EVOLVED  OVER  TIME,  EVEN  BILLIONS  OF  YEARS,  IS  ABOUT  THE  DUMBEST  THING  THE  HUMAN  MIND  CAN  COME  UP  WITH.  AND  WHY  WOULD  THE  UNIVERSE  EVEN  BOTHER?  WHY  WOULD  IT  COME  INTO  EXISTENCE  IN  THE  FIRST  PLACE?  NOW  99  PERCENT  OF  SCIENTISTS  BELIEVE  THE  UNIVERSE  STARTED  WITH  A  "BIG  BANG"  -  WHAT  WAS  BEFORE  THE  BIG  BANG,  AND  WHY  DID  IT  BANG  OFF  IN  THE  FIRST  PLACE?  AND  THERE  HAD  TO  BE  SOME  LAWS  IN  EFFECT  FOR  IT  TO  BANG  INTO  BEING!  AND  LAWS  FOR  IT  TO  CONTINUE  TO  MOVE  AND  DEVELOP  OR  IT  WOULD  HAVE  BEEN  A  FROZEN  BIG  BANG,  JUST  KINDA  HANGING  THERE.  THE  WHOLE  FORM  OF  THE  UNIVERSE  PROVES  A  DESIGNER  WHO  BROUGHT  THE  PHYSICAL  OUT  OF  NOTHING,  AND  SET  LAWS  TO  GOVERN  THE  FORMATION  OF  GALAXIES,  STARS,  PLANETS  AND  MOONS,  BLACK  HOLES,  COSMIC  DUST  AND  GAS,  AND  CREATION  OF  STARS;  THE  MOVEMENT  OF  THE  UNIVERSE  STILL  EXPANDING  OUTWARD  IN  ALL  DIRECTION,  IS  PROOF  OF  LAWS  AND  PROOF  OF  AN  INTELLIGENT  DESIGNER.

Keith Hunt

THE  CASE  FOR  A  CREATOR

from  the  book  by  the  same  name

The Evidence of Astronomy

The Privileged Planet

As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency-—-or, rather, Agency-—-must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?

Astronomer George Greenstein 1

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say "supernatural") plan.

Nobel laureate Arno Penzias 2

There's nothing unusual about Earth. It's an average, unassuming rock that's spinning mindlessly around an unremarkable star in a run-of-the-mill galaxy—"a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark," as the late Carl Sagan put it.3

The fact that life flourishes on our planet isn't exceptional. Creatures of all kinds undoubtedly abound, we're told, in countless locations among the ten trillion billion stars in the universe. Some scientists have estimated there are up to ten trillion advanced civilizations.4 Sagan put the number at one million for our Milky Way galaxy alone.5

After all, the forces of nature are so automatic that life is sure to have evolved wherever water exists. That's why whenever scientists raise new speculation about liquid water being present on another celestial body-—the underground worlds of Jupiter's frozen moons Europa and Ganymede are currently the most fashionable examples—then the automatic assumption is that living organisms must necessarily and inexorably follow.

If life can emerge from non-life so quickly and efficiently on a planet as undistinguished as ours, they reason, then why not throughout the universe's hundreds of billions of galaxies? To them, life is like a soup mix: just add water!

The very title of astrobiologist David Darling's recent book nicely encapsulates this optimistic philosophy: Life Everywhere. He's enthusiastic about claims that "life may arise inevitably whenever a suitable energy source, a concentrated supply of organic (carbon-based) material and water occur together." These ingredients, he said, "are starting to look ubiquitous in space."7 Consequently, he believes microbial life, at least, "is widespread."8

In short, Earth has no privileged status. Polish scientist Nicholas Copernicus deflated our oversized ego by putting us in our place long ago—the universe doesn't revolve around us; instead, we're just living in a humdrum hamlet off the beaten path in a nondescript suburb of the vast Milky Way. We have no grand role, no meaning, no significance, no reason for being other than ... well, just being.

"The universe that we observe," said Oxford's Richard Dawkins, "has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."9

This is the essence of what I was taught as I studied science. Of course, these conclusions neatly bolstered my atheistic values. Somehow I managed to avoid getting too depressed by the personal implications of all of this, strangely finding hope and inspiration in the belief that we are not alone in the universe. Even if God didn't exist, at least there were millions of advanced civilizations out there.

Beaming Messages to Hercules

Ever since I first watched the classic movie The Day the Earth Stood Still as a child, I've been enthralled by the fanciful images of teeming inter-galactic life portrayed in science fiction. Sure, Star Trek and Star Wars are silly—but still, the idea of other exotic creatures living in the strange nooks and crannies of the universe was always intriguing and even comforting to me.

Later I became fascinated by the Drake Equation, an attempt by astronomer Frank Drake to quantify the number of civilizations that might exist in our galaxy. The equation factors in such variables as how many of the two hundred to three hundred billion stars in our Milky Way might resemble our own sun, the percentage of stars that may have planets in habitable zones, and so forth.

Though the specific numbers that scientists then plugged into Drakes equation mostly amounted to rank conjecture fuelled by their own biases— one scientist admitted it was "a way of compressing a large amount of ignorance into a small space"10—this did lend an air of scientific certainty to a highly speculative issue.

Then I cheered from afar in the mid-1970s as Drake and Sagan beamed a message of greeting to the great globular cluster M13, which is a concentration of a quarter million stars in the constellation Hercules. "While I knew there wasn't much practical science involved with this intragalactic phone call—it would take more than twenty-two thousand years for the message to reach its destination—nevertheless there was something romantic and adventurous about trying to communicate with the civilizations that most assuredly populated those distant stars.

All of this helped form my perspective as I would gaze over the years at the twinkling stars in the dark heavens. But now my attitude was changing. After studying the latest evidence from various scientific disciplines—-from astronomy to cosmology to geology to oceanography to microbiology-—my conclusions were being tugged in the opposite direction.

It's turning out that the Earth is anything but ordinary, that our sun is far from average, and that even the position of our planet in the galaxy is eerily fortuitous. The idea that the universe is a flourishing hothouse of advanced civilizations is now being undermined by surprising new scientific discoveries and fresh thinking.

In short, new findings are suggesting that we are special. More and more scientists are studying the mind-boggling convergence of scores of extraordinary "coincidences" that make intelligent life possible on Earth and concluding that this can't possibly be an accident. They're seeing signs of design, a kind of unlikely fine-tuning for life similar to the fine-tuning of physics that we explored in the previous chapter.

In fact, said one noted researcher, "new evidence which could potentially have refuted the [design] hypothesis has only ended up confirming it."11 Once again, we find the evidence of science pointing in the direction of a Creator.

And rather than our lives being purposeless, scientists for the first time are uncovering concrete evidence that suggests at least one surprising purpose for which we were created—that is, to discover and learn about the surroundings in which we have been placed.

In other words, as we'll see in this chapter, one purpose for which we were designed is to do science itself.

Right Place, Right Time

As the new millennium dawned, geologist Peter D. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee, both professors at the University of Washington in Seattle, published a provocative and highly successful book that raised this disquieting question about Earth: "What if it is utterly unique: the only planet with animals in this galaxy or even in the visible universe ...?"12

Their book, Rare Earth, marshals evidence from a wide range of scientific disciplines to build its case that "not only intelligent life, but even the simplest of animal life, is exceedingly rare in our galaxy and in the universe."13 They called the conclusion "inescapable" that "Earth is a rare place indeed." 

Although Ward and Brownlee uncritically buy into the idea that microbial life may very well be more prevalent, a view they draw from the way life seemed to have effortlessly developed on Earth "about as soon as environmental conditions allowed its survival,"15 their conviction that the existence of complex life is "extraordinarily rare" is bolstered by convincing data divorced from any theological framework.

Calling their book "carefully reasoned and scientifically astute," Don Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, remarked: "In spite of our wishful thinking, there just may not be other Mozarts or Monets."16 David Levy, of comet Shoemaker-Levy fame, added, "As we know it on Earth, complex life might be very rare, and very precious."17 Said the Times of London: "If they are right it could be time to reverse a process that has been going on since Copernicus."18

More and more scientists are observing the stunning ways in which our planet—against all odds—-manages to fulfill a large number of finely balanced criteria that are absolutely crucial to supporting a habitat suitable for humankind.

"Rather than being one planet among billions, Earth now appears to be the uncommon Earth," said science educators Jimmy H. Davis and Harry L. Poe. "The data imply that Earth may be the only planet 'in the right place at the right time. '"19

A Bold and Audacious Claim

Earth's location, its size, its composition, its structure, its atmosphere, its temperature, its internal dynamics, and its many intricate cycles that are essential to life-—the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, the sulfur cycle, the calcium cycle, the sodium cycle, and so on—testify to the degree to which our planet is exquisitely and precariously balanced.20

As they begin their influential textbook Earth, Frank Press of the National Academy of Sciences and Raymond Siever of Harvard University write about what they call "the uniqueness of planet Earth."21

They note how its atmosphere filters out harmful ultraviolet radiation while working with the oceans to moderate the climate through the storing and redistributing of solar energy, and how the Earth is just large enough so that its gravity retains the atmosphere and yet just small enough not to keep too many harmful gases. Then they describe the Earths interior as ... a gigantic but delicately balanced heat engine fuelled by radioactivity. ... Were it running more slowly... the continents might not have evolved to their present form; Iron may never have melted and sunk to the liquid core, and the magnetic field would never have developed. If there had been more radioactive fuel, and therefore a faster running engine, volcanic dust would have blotted out the sun, the atmosphere would have been oppressively dense, and the surface would have been racked by daily earthquakes and volcanic explosions.22

These kind of highly choreographed geological processes-—-and there are lots of them-—-leave me shaking my head at the astounding ways in which our biosphere is precisely tuned for life. Even more interesting, though, is the "why" question behind them. What accounts for all of these astounding "coincidences?"

Press and Siever, while marvelling that Earth "is a very special place," don't broach the possibility of design.23 Ward and Brownlee skirt the issue in Rare Earth, preferring instead to occasionally pepper in words like "sheer luck" and "a rare chance happening."24 At a conference, Ward remarked: "We are just incredibly lucky. Somebody had to win the big lottery, and we were it."

But does luck really explain why Earth enjoys this incredible convergence of extremely unlikely circumstances that have allowed human beings to flourish? Going far back into time, Christians have reached a far different conclusion: Earth was created by God as the stage upon which the human drama would be played out. What's amazing about modern science, including new discoveries just within the last few years, is that this view of the universe seems to be far better supported today than in ancient times.

Consider the conclusion of Michael J. Denton, a senior research fellow in human molecular genetics at the University of Otago in New Zealand, in his 1998 book Natures Destiny:

No other theory or concept ever imagined by man can equal in boldness and audacity this great claim... that all the starry heavens, that every species of life, that every characteristic of reality exists [to create a livable habitat] for mankind. But most remarkably, given its audacity, it is a claim which is very far from a discredited pre-scientific myth. In fact, no observation has ever laid the presumption to rest. And today, four centuries after the scientific revolution, the doctrine is again re-emerging. In these last decades of the twentieth century, its credibility is being enhanced by discoveries in several branches of fundamental science.25

How true are those words? Do the special conditions that allow for life on Earth demand a designer? To pursue reliable answers, I arranged a rendezvous at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago with two experts who had just collaborated on a ground-breaking book concerning this very topic. This would be a perfect opportunity to explore the stunning uniqueness of our planet.

INTERVIEW #5-. Guillermo Gonzalez, PhD, and Jay Wesley Richards, PhD

Tall, blond Jay Wesley Richards, dressed in a navy blazer, is an Ivy League philosopher who speaks in rapid-fire bursts with unflagging enthusiasm. Guillermo Gonzalez, clad in a short-sleeve shirt, his thinning hair cropped short, is a nuts-and-bolts astronomer who talks in professorial tones on such topics as "Chemical Abundance Trends among RV-Tauri Stars."

Together, they authored The Privileged Planet, which documents astonishing evidence pointing toward a designer for Earth—and toward at least one apparent purpose for humankind.

Gonzalez is informally known as a 'star guy." After graduating summa cum laude with degrees in astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona, he later earned his masters degree and doctorate in astronomy from the University of Washington at Seattle. Now an assistant professor at Iowa State University, his research centers on low and intermediate mass stars and theories about stellar and planetary evolution.

He's a hands-on and yet conceptually sophisticated scientist, having logged countless hours doing research through telescopes at Cerro Tololo International Observatory, located at an altitude of 6,600 feet in Chile, and four other locations. He is adept at analyzing photometric and spectroscopic data. A member of the International Astronomical Union and the American Scientific Affiliation, the low-key but engaging Gonzalez has seen dozens of his articles published in technical journals and featured on the covers of such popular magazines as Scientific American.

An academic overachiever with a sincere, self-effacing personality, Richards holds three advanced degrees in philosophy and theology, including a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary. He authored The Untamed God and has edited or contributed to such books as Unapologetic Apologetics, Signs of Intelligence, and Are We Spiritual Machines? His articles have appeared in publications ranging from Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith to the Washington Post to the Princeton Theological Review. As vice president of the Discovery Institute, Richards is considered a bright star in the burgeoning Intelligent Designmovement.

Each of us clutching a soft drink, we met in an airlines hospitality suite, with Richards and Gonzalez sitting across from me at a granite conference table under florescent lights in a simple room devoid of character. Anxious to proceed, I barely let them settle into their chairs before unleashing my first question.

The Copernican Principle

I turned toward Richards. "I was taught in school that our planet is unexceptional, that we revolve around a typical star in an average, mundane part of the universe, and that there's nothing particularly unusual or special about Earth," I began. "Isn't that the view of most scientists today?"

"Yes, that's the so-called Principle of Mediocrity or the Copernican Principle," Richards replied. "Open any introductory astronomy textbook and you'll see it stated over and over that we should assume there's nothing special about our situation, our location in the universe, or the particular features of the Earth, the solar system, or humans themselves."

"But," I interjected, "isn't that appropriate in some sense?" "Yes, of course," he said. "We shouldn't assume that the Earth, our solar system, or our sun is unique in every possible way. We wouldn't be able to do science if every place in the universe had a different law of gravity or atoms had a different mass. That's fine."

"Then where does the problem come in?" I asked.

"The problem is that the Copernican Principle has taken a metaphysically bloated form, which essentially says our metaphysical status is as insignificant as our astronomical location. In other words, we're not here for a purpose, we're not special in any way, and we don't occupy a privileged place in the cosmos."

I interrupted again. "Yet isn't it true that Copernicus's discovery —-that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, but that the Earth revolves around the sun—quite naturally demoted humankind?"

Richards nodded wearily as if he had heard that comment a lot. "Let's go back to the beginning," he said. He stood, removed his jacket, and draped it over an unoccupied chair. Sitting back down, he continued.

"The story is that the ancients-—-Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval Christians—all thought we were at the center of the universe, sort of the throne of the cosmos, the most important place that everything revolved around. Then Copernicus and Kepler came along and said they can explain the movement of the planets better by assuming that the sun is at the center and that the planets-—including Earth-—-revolve around it. So we've been displaced from the center and removed from our position of privilege. This was the start of a long march of science that continued to demote us. Scientists later determined the sun isn't at the center of the universe; that we aren't at the center of the galaxy; and that the universe ultimately had no center, because scientists came to believe in the nineteenth century that it was infinite and eternal. You can see how this trend helped us to see ourselves as less and less significant, less and less at the center of things. So the Copernican Revolution came to represent the conflict between science and religion. Religious superstition maintained the Earth and humankind are the center of the universe, both physically and metaphysically, but modern science has disproved that. Humans have been stripped of their false sense of uniqueness and importance. While religious folk continued to insist there is something unique, special, intentional, and purposeful about our existence, scientists maintain that the material world is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain its existence."

I was following along in full agreement. Richards's assessment was entirely consistent with what I had been taught in school. But then he added the clincher.

"The problem," he said, a slight smile playing at the corner of his mouth, "is that this historical description is simply false."

Setting the Record Straight

Richards's claim startled me. "False?" I declared. "What do you mean? In what way?"

"Read Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler. Read Dante," he said. "In Dante's Divine Comedy, the surface of the Earth is an intermediate place. This was true in Aristotelian cosmology, which was Christianized in the Middle Ages. For Aristotle, the world was made of air, earth, fire, and water. Earth is heaviest, so it naturally falls to the bottom. So the Earth was not so much at the center as it was at the bottom of the universe. It was sort of the cosmic sump. It was the place where things decay and die. Everything above the moon was made of a different type of matter—quintessence—and God dwelled in the heavenly sphere outside the celestial sphere of the stars. Man was in an intermediate place."

Gonzalez spoke up. "Dante then inverted these levels as you go the other way, down to hell," he said.

"Exactly," continued Richards. "You had nine levels going up toward God and getting closer to perfection, and then there were nine levels getting closer to absolute depravity, down to hell. Thus, in medieval cosmology, what we would call the center of the universe is Satan's throne. That's a very important point. If you imagine the center of the universe is Satan's throne and that the Earth itself is the cosmic sump, then clearly this is not the stereotype that we've been given that the center of the universe prior to Copernicus was the preeminent spot." 

Gonzalez added: "The Enlightenment later retold the story by saying the church, because of its arrogance, put humans in the center."

Richards nodded. "That's the irony," he said. "It was the Enlightenment that made man the measure of all things. When you really think about it, Christian theology never actually put man literally in the center. We have a very important role to play in this cosmic drama, so much so that God even becomes incarnate. But it was never the case that everything was literally created solely for us. Many centuries ago, Augustine said God didn't create the world 'for man' or because of some sort of compulsion, but 'because he wanted to.'26 In The Divine Comedy, the reader learns that the actual sense of us being in the center was merely a bias. We discover, in fact, that everything was arranged so that God is at the metaphysical center-—that is, the place of supreme importance. Instead of denigrating Earth, actually Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler saw their new scheme as exalting it. For instance, Galileo waxes poetic about how the Earth, like the other planets, reflects the glory of the sun and is no longer just a cosmic sump.27 So in the transformation from medieval cosmology to the Renaissance view, this new perspective elevated man in some ways."

Other historical researchers have come to the same conclusion. Said one: "The Copernican system, far from demoting man, destroyed Aristode's vision of the earth as a kind of cosmic sink, and if it did anything, it elevated humanity. In making the earth a planet, a heavenly body, Copernicus infinitely ennobled its status."28

But something didn't add up to me. "Didn't the church persecute Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno for their view that the Earth revolved around the sun?" I asked.

"First of all," Richards said, "some claim Copernicus was persecuted, but history shows he wasn't; in fact, he died of natural causes the same year his ideas were published. As for Galileo, his case can't be reduced to a simple conflict between scientific truth and religious superstition. He insisted the church immediately endorse his views rather than allow them to gradually gain acceptance, he mocked the Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was censured, but the church kept giving him his pension for the rest of his life."

Indeed, historian William R. Shea said, "Galileo's condemnation was the result of the complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded prides."29 Historical researcher Philip J. Sampson noted that Galileo himself was convinced that the "major cause" of his troubles was that he had made "fun of his Holiness" — that is, Pope Urban VIII—in a 1632 treatise.30 As for his punishment, Alfred North Whitehead put it this way: "Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed."31

"Bruno's case was very sad," Richards continued. "He was executed in Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on church history. But again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with Copernicanism. Now, here's the point I want to make: it's very important if you're going to advance the Copernican Principle that you make it look like it's grounded in the historical march of science. But when you actually look at the data, it's just not true. Writers of astronomy textbooks just keep recycling the myth, sort of like the flat-Earth myth, which was the idea that Columbus was told the Earth was flat and he thought it was round. That's just wrong too." 

"Scholars at the time knew it was a sphere," added Gonzalez. 

"Even the ancient Greeks knew it was a sphere. They'd known it for a thousand years or more," said Richards.

I knew they were right about that. David Lindberg, former professor of the history of science and currently director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, said in a recent interview:

One obvious [myth] is that before Columbus, Europeans believed nearly unanimously in a fiat Earth—a belief allegedly drawn from certain biblical statements and enforced by the medieval church. This myth seems to have had an eighteenth century origin, elaborated and popularized by Washington Irving, who flagrantly fabricated evidence for it in his four-volume history of Columbus. The truth is that it's almost impossible to find an educated person after Aristotle who doubts that the Earth is a sphere. In the Middle Ages, you couldn't emerge from any kind of education, cathedral school or university, without being perfectly clear about the Earths sphericity and even its approximate circumference.32

Now in addition to the flat-Earth myth being exploded, here were Richards and Gonzalez asserting that the Copernican Principle was based on faulty history as well.

"So," continued Richards, "Guillermo and I embarked on a project to document whether there are important ways in which Earth is special or exceptional. To do this we had to show that there's not this long historical march of science showing how unimportant we are. We had to point out that the history is wrong and that what we're doing stands in the good tradition of science, which says, 'Let's find out what the world is like to the best of our ability'"

"And," I said, "what did you find?"

Richards and Gonzalez exchanged glances. "Well, scientists have generally followed the Copernican Principle by saying that our planet is ordinary and that therefore life undoubtedly abounds in the universe," Richards began. "We believe, however, the evidence is quite to the contrary." He gestured toward his colleague to continue.

"We've found that our location in the universe, in our galaxy, in our solar system, as well as such things as the size and rotation of the Earth, the mass of the moon and sun and so forth—a whole range of factors— conspire together in an amazing way to make Earth a habitable planet," Gonzalez said. "And even beyond that, we've found that the very same conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it strangely well-suited for viewing and analyzing the universe."

"And we suspect this is not an accident," Richards added. "In fact, we raise the question of whether the universe has been literally designed for discovery."

The Ingredients for Life

With that framework set, I moved ahead to discuss one of the main attitudes of scientists who embrace the Copernican Principle. "They believe if you can just find a place anywhere in the universe where water stays liquid for a long enough period of time, then life will develop, just as it did on Earth," I said. "I assume you don't agree with that."

"No, I don't," Gonzalez said. "It's true that in order to have life you need water—which is the universal solvent-—-for reactions to take place, as well as carbon, which serves as the core atom of the information-carrying structural molecules of life. But you also need a lot more. Humans require twenty-six essential elements; a bacterium about sixteen. Intermediate life forms are between those two numbers. The problem is that not just any planetary body will be the source of all those chemical ingredients in the necessary forms and amounts."

I interrupted to point out that science fiction writers have managed to speculate about extra-terrestrial life that's built in a radically different form-—-for instance, creatures based on silicon instead of carbon. Gonzalez was shaking his head before I had even finished my question. "That just wont work," he insisted. "Chemistry is one of the better understood areas of science. We know that you just can't get certain atoms to stick together in sufficient number and complexity to give you large molecules like carbon can. You can't get around it. And you just can't get other types of liquids to dissolve as many different kinds of chemicals as you can with water. There's something like half a dozen different properties of both water and carbon that are optimal for life. Nothing else comes close. Silicon falls far short of carbon. Unfortunately, people see life as being easy to create. They think it's enough merely to have liquid water, because they see life as an epi-phenomenon—just a piece of slime mold growing on an inert piece of granite. Actually, the Earth's geology and biology interact very tightly with each other. You can't think of life as being independent of the geophysical and meteorological processes of the planet. They interact in a very intimate way. So you need not only the right chemicals for life but also a planetary environment that's tuned to life."

That sparked a related issue. Scientists have dreamed of terra-forming a planet like Mars, essentially making over its environment to create a planet that's more conducive to settlement by humans. "Would that be very difficult?" I asked.

"Absolutely. From the magnetic field to plate tectonics to the carbon dioxide cycle-—-ongoing life depends on a variety of very complicated interactions with the planet," he said.

Richards jumped in. "People generally think that because they plant a seed and it grows that it's easy to create the right environment for life, but that's misleading," he said. "A good example is the hermetically sealed biosphere that some people constructed in Arizona several years ago. They thought it would be relatively easy to create a self-contained environment conducive to life, but they had a devil of a time trying to make it work."

"But life can also exist in some terribly harsh conditions," I pointed out. "For instance, there are life forms that live off of deep-sea thermal vents. They don't seem to need oxygen or any particular support from the broader environment." 

"On the contrary," Gonzalez said, "the only things down there that don't need oxygen are some microorganisms that breathe methane. But larger organisms, which need to regulate their metabolism, are invariably oxygen-breathers. The oxygen comes from surface life and marine algae. The oxygen gets mixed in with the ocean and transported into deep waters. So those organisms are very directly tied to the surface and the overall ecosystem of the planet."

Astounded by the Earth's fine-tuned physical, chemical, and biological interrelationships, some writers have gone so far as to liken our biosphere to a "super-organism" that is quite literally alive. In fact, James Lovelock's pantheistic Gaia Hypothesis even seeks to deify our planet. However, Gonzalez and Richards said it's unnecessary to go that far.

"Despite these admittedly incredible interrelationships, there's nothing that requires anyone to see the Earth itself as being an organism, especially a god or goddess," Richards said.

Then he turned to an image quite familiar to those who see the earmarks of design in Earth's complex and interconnected machinery. "That's sort of like deifying a watch because of its amazing properties," he said, "rather than looking beyond the watch to the one who made it."

The Hostile World of M13

I granted the point that only certain kinds of planetary environments can play host to life. On the other hand, the universe is salted with trillions of stars, with countless terrestrial bodies undoubtedly revolving around them. Surely the mathematical odds favor many stars spawning Earth-like habitats—a point that argues against the idea that Earth is special and therefore designed. But while my untrained eyes see each star as having equal potential to preside over a civilization-bearing solar system, I was soon to learn differently as I pursued questions concerning the conditions that are necessary for life to flourish. I turned toward Gonzalez. "As we look out at the billions of stars that constitute our Milky Way galaxy," I said, "can't we logically assume that planets teeming with life are strewn all over the place?"

"No," he said unequivocally, "that's not a logical assumption based on the evidence. Along with Don Brownlee and Peter Ward of the University of Washington, I developed a concept called the Galactic Habitable Zone—that is, a zone in the galaxy where habitable planets might be possible. You see, you just can't form a habitable planet anywhere; there's a large number of threats to life as you go from place to place."

My mind flashed back to when Drake and Sagan beamed their message to the large concentration of stars called globular cluster M13. Their theory was that by transmitting their greeting toward a place packed with stars, there would be a higher chance of detection by an intelligent civilization. When I asked Gonzalez what he thought of that experiment, his reply was immediately dismissive.

"The problem is that if the probability of life at any one star is zero, then the probability for all the stars remains zero," he said.

"Zero?" I replied. "There are more than a quarter million stars in that globular cluster. Don't you think any of them harbor planets with life?"

Gonzalez stood his ground. "A globular cluster is one of the worst places in the entire galaxy to expect any life," he replied.

"Why?"

"Two reasons," he said. "First, globular clusters are among the most ancient things in our galaxy. Since they're extremely old, their stars have a very low abundance of heavy elements—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Instead, they're made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. In contrast, Earth is composed of iron, oxygen, magnesium, and silicone. Next comes sulfur.

"You see, the Big Bang produced basically hydrogen and helium. That's what the earliest stars were made of. The heavier elements were synthesized-—-cooked, if you will-—-in the interior of stars. Eventually, when these stars exploded as supernovae, these elements got expelled into the interstellar medium. They coalesced into other stars, where more heavy elements were cooked. Then they were expelled again and again, with stars subsequently containing ever-greater amounts of these metals, or heavier elements. Now, you need these elements to eventually build terrestrial planets like Earth. Because the very old stars in globular clusters formed so early that they're composed virtually exclusively of hydrogen and helium, they're not going to have planets accompanying them. Maybe there will be dust, or grains, or boulders, but that's about it. You're not going to have Earth-size planets.

"The second problem is that globular clusters are so densely packed with stars that they wouldn't allow for stable, circular orbits to exist around them. The gravitational pull of the stars would create elliptical orbits that would take a hypothetical planet into extremes of cold and heat, which would create a life-prohibitive situation."

His assessment made sense, but it caused me to wonder why Sagan and Drake, both knowledgeable astronomers, would waste their time trying to communicate with the stars of M13- Gonzalez shook his head when I asked him about it.

"It's really surprising that they would think there would be any chance of a civilization receiving their message in a globular cluster," Gonzalez said. "They should have known better! Frankly, I think they were so deluded by their complete belief in the metaphysical Copernican Principle—that life was just going to be everywhere in the galaxy —-that they overlooked the facts."

Living in the Safe Zone

Gonzalez's explanation made me wonder about the suitability of other places to harbor intelligent life. I knew that there are three basic types of galaxies in our universe. First, there are spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. These are dominated by a central spherical bulge and a disk with "spiral arms" extending outward from the nucleus in a spiral pattern, resembling a celestial pinwheel. Second, there are elliptical galaxies, which are sort of egg-shaped. And, third, there are irregular galaxies, which appear disorganized and distorted. I asked Gonzalez to assess the life-bearing potential of each one.

"Certainly, our type of galaxy optimizes habitability, because it provides safe zones," he said, his tone professorial. "And Earth happens to be located in a safe area, which is why life has been able to flourish here. You see, galaxies have varying degrees of star formation, where interstellar gases coalesce to form stars, star clusters, and massive stars that blow up as supernovae. Places with active star formation are very dangerous, because that's where you have supernovae exploding at a fairly high rate. In our galaxy, those dangerous places are primarily in the spiral arms, where there are also hazardous giant molecular clouds. Fortunately, though, we happen to be situated safely between the Sagittarius and Perseus spiral arms. Also, we're very far from the nucleus of the galaxy, which is also a dangerous place. We now know that there's a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. In fact, the Hubble space telescope has found that nearly every large nearby galaxy has a giant black hole at its nucleus. And believe me-—-these are dangerous things! Most black holes, at any given time, are inactive. But whenever anything gets near or falls into one, it gets torn up by the strong tidal forces. Lots of high energy is released—-gamma rays, X-rays, particle radiation—and anything in the inner region of the galaxy would be subjected to high radiation levels. That's very dangerous for life forms. The center of the galaxy is also dangerous because there are more supernovae exploding in that region. One more thing: the composition of a spiral galaxy changes as you go out from the center. The abundance of heavy elements is greater towards the center, because that's where star formation has been more vigorous over the history of the galaxy. So it has been able to cook the hydrogen and helium into heavy elements more quickly, whereas in the outer disk of the galaxy, star formation has been going on more slowly over the years and so the abundance of heavy elements isn't quite as high. Consequently, the outer regions of the disk are less likely to have Earth-type planets. Now, put all of this together-—-the inner region of the galaxy is much more dangerous from radiation and other threats, the outer part of the galaxy isn't going to be able to form Earth-like planets because the heavy elements are not abundant enough; and I haven't even mentioned how the thin disk of our galaxy helps our sun stay in its desirable circular orbit. A very eccentric orbit could cause it to cross spiral arms and visit the dangerous inner regions of the galaxy, but being circular it remains in the safe zone. All of this" he said, his voice sounding a bit triumphant, "works together to create a narrow safe zone where life-sustaining planets are possible."

Scanning the Stars for Life

Suddenly, the Earth was sounding pretty special, nestled as it is in a sliver of space that gives it safe haven from the otherwise menacing conditions of the Milky Way. But what about other types of galaxies? Might they also provide threat-free neighborhoods for life-populated planets?

"What about elliptical galaxies?" I asked Gonzalez. "Do they have the potential to harbor life?"

"Elliptical galaxies look amorphous and are sort of egg-shaped, with stars having very random orbits, like bees swarming a beehive," he explained. "The problem for life in these galaxies is that the stars visit every region, which means they'll occasionally visit the dangerous, dense inner regions, where a black hole may be active. In any event, you're less likely to find Earth-like planets in elliptical galaxies because most of them lack the heavy elements needed to form them."

This was an important point, because I knew that most galaxies fall into the elliptical category.

"Most elliptical galaxies are less massive and luminous than our galaxy," Gonzalez continued. "Our galaxy is on the top one or two percent of the most massive and luminous. The bigger the galaxy, the more heavy elements it can have, because its stronger gravity can attract more hydrogen and helium and cycle them to build heavy elements. In the low-mass galaxies, which make up the vast majority, you can have whole galaxies without a single Earth-like planet. They just don't have enough of the heavy elements to construct Earths. Just like a globular cluster-—you can have a whole globular cluster with hundreds of thousands of stars, and yet there won't be a single Earth. If you look at the deepest pictures ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, they show literally thousands of galaxies when the universe was really young. People have commented, 'Wow, look at all those galaxies! I wonder how many civilizations there are looking back at us?' In that picture, I'd say zero. Thousands and thousands and thousands of galaxies—-but zero Earths, because the heavier elements haven't built up enough yet."

Richards interrupted to say, "Of course, we're not looking at these galaxies as they exist now; we're looking back in time, say, nine billion years ago. It's possible that some of those galaxies are now at the state where the Milky Way is. We don't know for sure."

"But," added Gonzalez, "this was back when it was much more dangerous, because it's the era of quasars, supernovae going off, and black holes. Even if you had a few regions in the galaxy where there were sufficient heavy elements to build Earths, they would have been so irradiated that life wouldn't be possible."

With elliptical galaxies being unlikely sites for budding civilizations, I turned to the last category of galaxy, called irregulars. "What's their potential for life?" I asked.

"Like the ellipticals, they also don't provide a safe harbor. In fact, they're worse. They're distorted and ripped apart, with supernovae going off throughout their volume. There are no safe places where there are fewer supernovae exploding, like we have between our spiral arms. In fact, astronomers keep finding new threats to life. For example, we're learning more about gamma ray bursts, which are more powerful than a supernova. If one of these goes off near you, the lights go out. So the probability for there being civilizations elsewhere actually keeps declining as we learn about the new threats that we didn't know about before."

"What's your opinion, then, about where Earth is located in the universe?" I asked.

"In terms of habitability, I think we are in the best possible place," Gonzalez said. "That's because our location provides enough building blocks to yield an Earth, while providing a low level of threats to life. I really can't come up with an example of another place in the galaxy that is as friendly to life as our location. Sometimes people claim you can be in any part of any galaxy. Well, I've studied other regions—-spiral arms, galactic centers, globular clusters, edge of disks-—and no matter where it is, it's worse for life. I can't think of any better place than where we are."

"That's ironic," I said. "It's the reverse of the Copernican Principle."

Richards agreed. "The propaganda of the Copernican Principle has been that the long march of science has shown how common and ordinary our situation is. But the trend is in the opposite direction. The more you pile on the threats we're discovering in most places in the universe, and you contrast that with the many ways we're in a cocoon of safety, the more our situation appears special. 

"The most famous example is our own solar system," Gonzalez said. "At one time or another, scientists have speculated that there are civilizations on just about every body in our solar system-—-the moon, Mars, Jupiter. Percival Lowell built his own observatory in Arizona to find these civilizations on Mars. He actually quoted Copernicus to justify his belief that we can't be the only civilization. Now they've backtracked to the point of saying, well, maybe there's some very simple slime mold beneath the surface of Mars or Europa. And even that is extremely questionable. That's how far back they've had to retreat."

"Very often," observed Richards, "the Copernican Principle describes properties that don't matter. Who really cares whether we're in the physical center of the galaxy? It's irrelevant! What really matters is being in the place that's most conducive to life. And that's exactly where Earth finds itself."

Planets Circling Other Stars

Within the last few years, astronomers finally have been able to discover planets orbiting other stars-—-a major confirmation of what was once merely widespread speculation. "Doesn't this confirm that there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary about our nine-planet system?" I asked.

"I'll concede," said Gonzalez, "that it demonstrates our solar system is not unique when it comes to having planets circling a star. But prior to the detection of the first planet orbiting another sun-like star in 1995, the expectation was that astronomers would find giant gas planets in large circular orbits, much like Jupiter. Jupiter orbits the sun in twelve years in a nearly circular orbit, far out from the terrestrial planets —-Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. However, we're finding that the planets circling other stars are quite different from Jupiter. They orbit over a full range of distances, from just a tiny fraction of an Astronomical Unit-—which is the distance between the Earth and the sun-—-out to several Astronomical Units. Most of their orbits are highly elliptical; very few are circular. These strongly non-circular orbits utterly surprised astronomers. Because they strongly subscribed to the Copernican Principle, they had expected that other planetary systems would be just like ours. And that expectation was basically dashed."

"What's wrong with an elliptical orbit for those kind of planets?" I asked.

"It poses a problem for the habitability of any terrestrial planets in their system, because it would make them less likely to have stable circular orbits," Gonzalez replied. "For example, Earths orbit is almost a perfect circle. A planet with the mass of the Earth would be sensitive to any of the gas giant planets if they had more eccentric orbits. The Earth-like planets own orbit would be affected, making it less circular and therefore subjecting the planet to dangerous surface temperature variations."

"So," I said, "if our own Jupiter had a more elliptical orbit, the Earth wouldn't be able to maintain as circular an orbit and have the steady temperature and predictable climate that come with that."

"That's right," he said. "In fact, even small variations in our nearly circular orbit can cause ice ages, because of temperature shifts on the surface of the planet. We have to maintain a circular orbit as much as possible to maintain a relatively steady temperature. That's only possible because Jupiter's orbit isn't very elliptical and therefore doesn't threaten to distort our round orbit."

…………………

TO  BE  CONTINUED

THE  ILLUSTRA  MEDIA  [www. illustramedia.com]  HAVE  SOME  WONDERFUL  DVDs  TO  PROVE  A  MASTER  DESIGNER  -  A  CREATOR  OF  ALL  THAT  WE  SEE.

THE  FIRST  ONE  I  GOT  FROM  THEM  IS  CALLED  METAMORPHOSIS  -  the  beauty  and  design  of  butterflies.

ON  THE  BACK  WE  READ:

Throughout  history,  butterflies have fascinated artists and philosophers, scientists and school-children with their profound mystery and beauty. In Metamorphosis you will explore their remarkable world as few ever have before.

Spectacular photography, computer animation and magnetic resonance imaging open once hidden doors to every stage of a butterfly's life cycle - from an egg the size of a pinhead to a magnificent flying insect. It is a transformation so incredible biologists have called it "butterfly magic."

The butterfly's superbly engineered body is magnified hundreds of times to reveal compound eyes made of thousands of individual lenses, wings covered with microscopic solar panels, and navigational systems that unerringly guide Monarch butterflies on their annual migration from Canada to Mexico.

How did these extraordinary creatures come into being? Are they the product of a blind, undirected process? Or were they designed for a purpose by an intelligence?

Films in the lush rainforests of Ecuador, Mexico's Transvolcantic Mountains, and leading research centers Metamorphosis is an unforgettable documentary filled with the joys of discovery and wonder.

Running  time: Approximately 64 minutes, includes more than an hour of bonus features.

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THIS  IS  TRULY  A  WONDERFUL  DVD.  PROVING  THAT  EVOLUTION  IS  A  LAUGH  AND  ONE  OF  THE  SILLIEST  IDEAS  EVER  INVENTED  BY  MANKIND.

THE  APOSTLE  PAUL  SAID  THAT  BY  LOOKING  AT  NATURE  WE  CAN  SEE  THE  GREATNESS  OF  THE  GODHEAD:  "For  the  invisible  things  of  him  FROM  THE  CREATION  of  the  world  are  clearly  seen,  being  understood  by  the things  that  are  made,  even  his  eternal  power  and  Godhead;  so  they  are  without  excuse."  -  Romans  1:20.

PAUL  WENT  ON  TO  SAY  WHEN  THEY  KNEW  GOD  THEY  GLORIFIED  HIM  NOT  AS  GOD;  NEITHER  WERE  THANKFUL,  BUT  BECAME  VAIN  IN  THEIR  IMAGINATIONS,  AND  THEIR  FOOLISH  HEART  WAS  DARKENED.  PROFESSING  THEMSELVES  TO  BE  WISE,  THEY  BECAME  FOOLS.

THE  PROVERBS  SAYS  ONLY  THE  FOOL  HAS  SAID  IN  HIS  HEART  THEIR  IS  NO  GOD.

AND  THAT  IS  SO  VERY  TRUE.  TODAY  WE  HAVE  THE  TOOLS  OF  SCIENCE  THAT  CAN  LOOK  DEEP  INTO  THE  NATURE  OF  LIFE;  WHAT  SCIENCE  IS  FINDING  IS  SOMETHING  FAR  MORE  INTRICATE,  FAR  MORE  DESIGN,  THAN  THE SCIENTISTS  EVER  THOUGHT.

WHY  WOULD  CHANCE  EVOLUTION  EVEN  GIVING  THAT  CHANCE  STUFF  MILLIONS  OR  BILLIONS  OF  YEARS,  EVER  DECIDED [AND  IT  CANNOT  DECIDE,  FOR  IT  IS  RANDOM  UN-MINDED  EVOLUTION]  TO  DECIDE  TO  HAVE  A TINY  EGG  BECOME  A  CATERPILLAR,  AND  THEN  FOR  THAT  CATERPILLAR  TO  MAKE A  COCOON  AND  DECIDE  IT  DIDN'T  LIKE  CREEPING  AROUND  AND  EATING  LEAVES,  SO  IT  WOULD  DISINTEGRATE  ITSELF  AND  RE-ARRANGE  ITS  MATTER  AND  BECOME  A  BEAUTIFUL  BUTTERFLY??

WHY  WOULD  EVOLUTION  EVEN  BOTHER?  THE  CATERPILLAR  SURELY  WAS  HAPPY  BEING  SUCH  AND  EATING  LEAVES,  PLENTY   OF  LEAVES  AROUND,  NO  PROBLEM  FOR  A  FOOD  SUPPLY;  SO  WHY  EVOLVE  AT  ALL  INTO  SOMETHING  TOTALLY  DIFFERENT?  AND  IF  IT  WAS  ALL  BY  CHANCE,  THEN  UNLESS  IT  PLANNED  THINGS  OUT  FROM  START  TO  FINISH,  IT  WOULD  NEVER  BY  CHANCE,  EVER  FINISH.  UNLESS  IT  COULD  DESIGN  A  BLUEPRINT  TO  FINISH,  IT COULD  NOT  FINISH  AND  SO  WOULD  NEVER  BE  A  BUTTERFLY.

THE  SILLY  IDEA  OF  "CHANCE"  DOING,  CHANCE  TRANSFORMATION  EVEN  OVER  MILLIONS  OF  YEARS,  IS  DUMB  AND  DUMBER.  HOW  WOULD  1/4  OF  A  BUTTERFLY  LIVE,  OR  1/2  A  BUTTERFLY,  OR  FOR  THAT  MATTER 3/4  OF  A  BUTTERFLY.  UNLESS  YOU  BECOME  A  WHOLE  100  PERCENT  BUTTERFLY,  YOU  AIN'T  GOING  TO  BE  A  BUTTERFLY.  HOW  DID  EVOLUTION  TELL  ONE  PART  TO DO  THIS,  THEN  TELL  THE  NEXT  PART  TO  DO  THIS,  AND  SO  ON,  IN  STEP  BY  STEP,  FULLY  BLUEPRINTED,  SO  A  LIVING  BUTTERFLY  WOULD  BREAK  OUT  OF ITS  COCOON  AND  FLY  AWAY?

THEN  WHY  DID  EVOLUTION  TELL  THE  MONARCH  BUTTERFLY  TO  TRAVEL  THOUSANDS  OF  MILES  TO  A  PLACE  IN  MEXICO?  WHY  BOTHER?  WHY  WOULD  EVOLUTION  MAKES  THINGS  HARD  FOR  ITSELF?

WELL  AS  THIS  DVD  SHOWS,  THE  IDEA  OF  EVOLUTION  IS  ONE  OF  THE  STUPIDEST  IDEAS  MANKIND  HAS  EVER  COME  UP  WITH;  JUST  VAIN  IMAGINATIONS;  PROFESSING  THEMSELVES  TO  BE  WISE,  THEY  BECAME  FOOLS!

THIS  IS  JUST  ONE  PROOF,  OF  A  CREATOR  OF  DESIGN  IN  THE  MAKING  OF  THE  BLUE  PLANET  WE  CALL  EARTH.  

ONE  SCIENTIST  SAID  WITH  MORE  WATER  THAN  LAND,  EARTH  SHOULD  HAVE  BEEN  CALLED  "SEA"!  IT  IS  CALLED  EARTH  BECAUSE,  EVEN  IF  SOME  DON'T  LIKE  IT,  IT  WAS  GOD  WHO  SAID  IT  WOULD  BE  CALLED  "EARTH" - IT'S  IN  THE  BOOK  OF  GENESIS,  AND  SO  FAR,  DESPITE  AN  EVER  MORE  ATHEIST SECULAR  WORLD,  THE  WORD  "EARTH"  HAS  STILL  STUCK.

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