The Case for a Creator (5 page)

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 startling 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.

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

T
here 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 System’s 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 Bible’s 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, 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 Institute’s 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 Hodge’s 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 & 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
.