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.