August 10, 2005
Column #1,250
The Case for Intelligent Design
(Second of a Two-Part Series)
TIME magazine's cover story, "Evolution Wars," asserts that "The push
to teach `intelligent design' raises a question: Does God have a place in
science class?"
The magazine may be asking the wrong question. Many advocates of
intelligent design I've interviewed do not want to put God in the
classroom. These scientists are making a more "modest claim," according to
Jonathan Wells, author of "Icons of Evolution."
"We infer from the evidence that some features of the natural world are
better explained as the result of an intelligent design rather than an
unguided natural process," which is advocated by Darwinists. "Intelligent
design works from the evidence not from Scripture."
"Not everything is the result of intelligent design. For example, the
breeding of domestic animals has been around for thousands of years, in
which existing species changed over the years." For example, cows which
produce more milk are chosen for reproduction, not those with little output.
In this case, it is the intelligence of man which is doing the designing.
Darwinists claim that entire new species evolved from earlier species
by natural selection. The anti-Darwinists argue that the scientific evidence
points in a different direction. For example, Wells cites bacterial
flagellum, "which could not have been produced by Darwin's thesis of gradual
change."
He is speaking of a protrusion of bacteria that performs like a rotary
propeller, says Michael Behe, a biochemist. The flagellum is long and
whip-like, that "can spin at ten thousand revolutions per minute." It is an
example of "irreducible complexity," a highly complex biological machine,
that simply could not have evolved, as Darwinists allege. The world's most
efficient motor is tiny, about 1/20,000 of an inch, most of which is the
flagellum.
It has sensory systems that tell the flagellum when to turn on or off,
so that it guides the cell to food, light or whatever it is seeking.
Darwin himself wrote in his "Origin of the Species," "If it could be
demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have
been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would
absolutely break down."
Let's consider two other examples which appear to refute Darwinism:
1. The Big Bang is how the universe began, according to most
cosmologists, scientists who study this issue. However, the assumption of
scientists for centuries was that the universe is an unchanging eternal
entity. The discovery that this was an error first came from Albert Einstein
who was shocked to find that his theory of relativity did not allow for a
static universe. In 1929 Edward Hubble concluded that the galaxies are
moving away from us at enormous velocities.
Even atheistic scientists concede the universe had a beginning, such
as Kai Nielson who adds, "It's a stunning confirmation of the millennia-old
Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing."
The first words of Genesis are, "In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth."
But advocates of intelligent design put it this way. "A cause of space
and time must be an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless,
immaterial, personal being endowed with the freedom of will and enormous
power. And that is a core concept of God," says William Lane Craig.
2. DNA: Every cell has the now-famous double helix of deoxyribonecleic
acid, where the "language of life" is stored. For 50 years, scientists have
studied "the six feet of DNA that is tightly coiled inside of every one of
our body's one hundred trillion cells," writes Lee Strobel in his
best-seller, "The Case for a Creator."
However, some scientists who do believe in evolution, also see God's
hand in it.
Francis Collins who announced he had mapped the three billion letters
of our own DNA instruction book, is quoted by TIME as saying, "I see no
conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me
about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of
Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook, but a powerful and poetic
description of God's intention in creating the universe.
"The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all
powerful... chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who
are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan?
"Science's tolls will never prove or disprove God's existence. For me
the fundamental answers about the meaning of life come not from science but
from a consideration of the origins of our uniquely human sense of right and
wrong, and from the historical record of Christ's life on earth," Collins
concludes.
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