The Case for a Creator (3 page)

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.
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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
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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.

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. Johnson
²

R
ewind history to 1966. The big hit on the radio was Paul McCartney crooning “Michelle.” On a television show called
I 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.
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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.”
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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 Miller’s 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.”
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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.”
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It’s the most famous fossil in the world: the
archaeopteryx
, 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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DARWIN VERSUS GOD