Literature

Robert Deyes

If Darwin was right then we would be just sophisticated monkeys, there would be no right or wrong, just 'make-em-up' ethics and there would be no God. This was the assessment of one local of Kanawha County in West Virginia as journalist Lee Strobel arrived to capture the story of Anti-Darwinian protests in 1974. Strobel at the time was a self-confessed atheist, believing that much of what the anti-Darwinian movement was promulgating reflected nothing more than blind ignorance. He considered the biblical creation story as simply fictitious, surpassed and discredited as it was by the knowledge gleaned by modern science. That year, as the protests against the teaching of Darwin in West Virginia's schools heated up, Strobel found himself alienated by the residents of a town that had already banished several hundred different textbooks from school circulation- books that, according to the local school board, taught the "wrong kind of ethic". In all truth Strobel was very much a convert of the scientific story of evolution, convinced as he was by the 'facts' and apparently clear-cut examples in support of evolutionary theory. As Strobel saw things, the random and undirected nature of Darwinism could not be reconciled with the purposeful nature of the biblical account. The very least that could be said was that, if Darwinism were as unshakable as its proponents claimed, God would not be needed for life to emerge. The Case For A Creator is an account of Strobel's journey to test the veracity of the apparent 'facts' of evolution and the materialistic world view- a journey that takes him across the United States as he interviews several key experts in various fields of science.

The first stop over for Strobel is with Jonathan Wells- a Berkeley graduate whose outspoken criticism of some of the icons of evolution is well known. During the interview Wells dismantles the evidences that Strobel had himself learnt as a graduate by showing how much of what we supposedly know about evolution is unsupported by the evidence. It is now widely accepted for example that Stanley Miller's laboratory experiments showing how amino acids could be generated under reducing atmospheric conditions did not accurately mimic the environment of the early earth. And yet today these experiments continue to feature prominently in biology text books as does Darwin's tree of life. As Wells points out, rather than revealing an unbroken chain of intermediates linking all of life to a few early forms as Darwin's tree required, the fossil record shows a sudden 'explosion' of life approximately 550 million years ago during which most of the major animal taxa appeared in a five million year time frame without any preceding intermediates. Equally troubling is the finding that embryologist Ernst Haeckel modified his now famous drawings of vertebrate embryos so that they would fit within preconceived ideas of an evolutionary continuum. Wells' criticism of the disjunction that exists between apparently homologous structures in vertebrates- that is, those structures that are considered to reveal common ancestry- and the genes responsible for their formation, different as they are in different animal species, shows just how much of what we know today contradicts the basic tenets of Darwinism.

During Strobel's journey, philosopher Stephen Meyer makes his case for an intelligently-designed universe on the grounds that the information-rich instruction code of DNA that comprises life directly parallels information-rich code that we know has been generated by intelligent agents. Meyer asserts how it is the irreducibly complexity of many of the 'machines' of the cellular world, with their requirement for all their components to be present before their function can be achieved, that most clearly defies the expectations of the Darwinian framework. As Meyer argues, since natural selection can only begin to select systems that have reached a minimal level of functionality and since this functionality is only attained when all the components of these systems are present, their initial assembly must have been directed by some guiding process. That is, they must have been intelligently designed. Biochemistry Professor Michael Behe, also on Strobel's long list of visits, was the initial proponent of irreducible complexity in biology. Behe has provided several examples of irreducibly complex biological systems notably the blood clotting cascade, the structure of the bacterial flagellum and the makeup of tiny hairs called cilia citing them as evidence for an intelligently-designed biological world.

A vast body of data is accumulating outside of the realm of biology in support of the design inference and many scientists are now realizing how uniquely fit for the existence of life our own earth appears to be. We now know that not only is our earth ideally positioned in our solar system so as to meet the survival needs of animals and plants but that it is also very well placed for humans to make important scientific discoveries about our cosmos. Strobel's interview with philosopher Jay Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez provides a catalog of such 'biocentricities'. Everything from the protective influence of the larger planets in our solar system to the consistent warmth and energy from our sun, from the effect of the moon on the tilt of the earth's axis to the overall mass of the earth, from the influence of the earth's own internal heat on the earth's environment to the orbit of our solar system within the strict confines of a 'habitability zone' around our galaxy draws us to the inevitable conclusion that ours is in every sense a unique world, designed as it is for our own enjoyment. As Strobel's discussions with physicist Robin Collins make all too clear, the physical characteristics of the elements that make up matter throughout the cosmos fall precisely within the narrow range of values that are permissible if life is to exist. The magnitude of the gravitational force, the size of the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations of general relativity, the difference in size between the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei and the size of the strong and weak atomic forces that hold atoms together are so exactly placed in this permissible range that we can only conclude that an intelligence has been at work in the design of our cosmos. Theologian William Lane Craig likewise presents his arguments for a single, finely-tuned and controlled cosmic origin approximately 14 billion years ago from which our universe has subsequently expanded.

One of Strobel's final interviews is with philosopher J.P Moreland to discuss the subject of human and animal consciousness. While many contend that consciousness in humans is nothing more than the by-product of accumulating brain power, others such as Moreland conclude that it reveals something much deeper. Indeed observations on human behavior point to what psychologists call 'dualism'- a state in which consciousness and the mind exist separate from the rest of the brain. Our awareness of our selves- own thoughts, our own emotions, our desires and our own decisions- points to an entity one might call the 'soul' that exists outside of the electrical firings of the brain mass inside our heads. This 'inner and private mind' of man, asserts philosopher Alvin Platinga, is that one part of man that appears inaccessible to a naturalistic explanation. What we know about the mind of man, Moreland argues, directly agrees with the Christian world view of an omnipresent God who exists everywhere and manifests his presence in humanity through the soul. In the end Strobel's case also leads him to the identification of the God of Christianity as the designer whose works have fashioned all that we see around us. But metaphysical assertions aside, the scientific evidence that Strobel accumulates in his book provide a strong case against the purely naturalistic assertions of modern day Darwinism. Indeed one can only imagine how things would have turned out for the inhabitants of Kanawha County and the rest of West Virginia if they had been aware of this evidence back in 1974. They would have had a case to defend that was based on a very compelling scientific story.