Intelligent Design

In Britain, fewer and fewer people make any acknowledgement of God. They live as if He did not exist; they never attend public worship; they assume that beyond death there is nothing – no judgement, no eternity, no heaven, no hell. And behind all this unbelief lies one highly-significant factor – the theory of evolution. The education system and the media consistently support the view that the universe just happened to come into existence and that life developed from one stage to another through a series of random changes.

The situation in America seems, at first glance, to be different. After all, a sizeable proportion of the population claim to believe in God as Creator. Yet the education system and the media there oppose such a belief just as effectively as in this country. Indeed the curious interpretation the courts have put on the constitution – that the state must not support religion in any way – has turned American schools into wholly-secular institutions. Accordingly in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to teach creation in science classes. And the merest suggestion that a public school teaches what may be taken to imply that God is Creator is likely to provoke a law case. Which is what Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania discovered when they arranged for a brief statement to be read out to 14 to 15 year old pupils at the beginning of their biology course.

This statement seems totally innocuous and includes the following: “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the origins of life to individual students and their families.” However, a group of 11 parents are asking a Federal Court to rule against the statement. A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, who are supporting the parents, has claimed that there are two questions at the heart of this case: “Did the school board have religious intentions in adopting a policy that mentions intelligent design? and Does intelligent design have ‘religious underpinnings’?”

Lying at the back of this case is one which involved the state of Louisiana, after it passed, in 1981, a law requiring the teaching of evolution to be balanced with creation science. The Supreme Court held the law unconstitutional because its purpose “was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind”. The court was no doubt influenced by the National Academy of Sciences, which argued that creation science is not science, because “it fails to display the most basic characteristic of science: reliance upon naturalistic explanations” [1] – in other words, explanations which do not in any way involve the supernatural. By this definition, nothing is science if it involves any reference to God.

Of all who argue in this way, it must be said: “God is not in all his thoughts”; so, no matter how vast their knowledge or how powerful their intellects, they display a fundamental foolishness (see Psalm 14:1). No doubt, they feel much more at ease by persuading themselves that there is no divine creator. T H Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog, claimed that he found great comfort in not having to account for his sins to a creator. Is this what explains the militant tone of the outburst by Richard Dawkins, a professor at Oxford University and one of the most prominent promoters of evolution today: “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)”? He went on to state that what he dislikes particularly about creationists is that they are intolerant, which sounds very much like a pot calling the kettle black! [2]

Promoters of the concept of intelligent design point to the vast amount of evidence in nature for a designer and demonstrate that the random changes supposed by naturalistic evolution could not have produced life. Professor Dawkins admits: “Physics books may be complicated, but . . . the objects and phenomena that a physics book describes are simpler than a single cell in the body of its author. And the author consists of trillions of those cells .. . . organised with intricate architecture and precision-engineering into a working machine capable of writing a book. . . . Each nucleus . . . contains a digitally-coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell.” [3] Dawkins does indeed admit that there is apparent design, but he adamantly refuses, in common with all other Darwinists, to accept any evidence of actual design.

However, in his Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe uses the concept of irreducible complexity to demonstrate the fact of design in nature. For a simple illustration he uses a mousetrap. It consists of a platform, a hammer, a spring, a catch and a holding bar; if any of these components is missing, it cannot function as a mousetrap. So with a cell, or indeed the constituent parts of a cell. William A Dembski summarises Behe’s description of the bacterial flagellum: it “is a whip-like rotary motor that enables a bacterium to navigate through its environment. The flagellum includes an acid-powered rotary engine, a stator, O-rings, bushings and a drive shaft. The intricate machinery of this molecular motor requires approximately 50 proteins. Yet the absence of any one of these proteins results in the complete loss of motor function.” [4] On the other hand, Darwinian speculation assumes that a flagellum or any other component of an organism has come about by a long series of slight, random mutations, each of which brings about an improvement in that component, which has functioned effectively during its development.

Intelligent design performs a useful function by pointing out the weaknesses in Darwinism and stating what should be absolutely obvious: that the world as we know it cannot have come into being as a result of random changes. There was indeed a Designer. And, if through a widespread acceptance of intelligent design, the whole structure of evolution was swept into oblivion, there would, humanly speaking, be much less resistance to the truths of God’s Word – which would represent enormous progress. Yet there is generally an unwillingness among those who promote intelligent design to go on to identify the Designer. And some of them support theistic evolution, the idea that God somehow or other controlled the process of evolution to bring about life as it exists today. Others may be willing to go beyond intelligent design if Darwinism were to lose general support. Yet one fears that, however much progress is made in identifying its weaknesses, Darwinism is likely to continue to rule the scientific roost as long as the Bible continues to be despised.

When the Bible becomes once more generally received as a revelation from God, neither scientists or non-scientists will have any difficulty in accepting the evidences of design in nature. Nor will they have any difficulty in identifying the Designer – the One who in six days made heaven and earth. But, whatever may be the result of the Dover School Board court case, all who deny the facts about the origin of this world will yet have to appear before their Creator to account for all their activities, and for all their beliefs.

[1] Quoted in Phillip E Johnson, Darwin on Trial, pp 6-8.
[2] Quoted in Darwin on Trial, p 9.
[3] Quoted in Phillip E Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, p 126.
[4] Intelligent Design, p 148.

From the Free Presbyterian Magazine, December 2005, by permission, www.fpchurch.org.uk