The Case for a Creator (36 page)

THE ARROW OF PROGRESS

Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity is at once a negative and a positive argument. First, he has taken Darwin at his own word and demonstrated how these interconnected biological systems could not have been created through the numerous, successive, slight modifications that his theory demands. The result has been a staggering—some say lethal—blow to Darwinism.

Second, Behe has pointed out that there is an alternative that does sufficiently explain how complex biological machines could have been created. Once again, as with the previous experts I had interviewed on cosmology, physics, and astronomy, the evidence conspires to point toward a transcendent Creator.

“My conclusion can be summed up in a single word:
design
,” Behe said as we came to the end of our interview. “I say that based on science. I believe that irreducibly complex systems are strong evidence of a purposeful, intentional design by an intelligent agent. No other theory succeeds; certainly not Darwinism.

“Based on the empirical evidence—which is continuing to mount—I’d agree with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that ‘the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. . . . [They] point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before.’ ”
¹⁹

“Your book has been out for several years now,” I said. “How well do you think it has endured so far?”

“I’m very pleased with how things stand,” he said, leaning back in his chair and casually folding his arms over his chest. “It has attracted a lot of attention from people who have tried to knock it down, but they haven’t been able to do it. Complex biological systems have yet to be explained by naturalistic means. That’s a fact. Even Darwinists admit that in their candid moments. And as science advances, we’re continuing to find more and more complexity in the cellular world. This, Lee, is the arrow of progress.

“I do hear occasional complaints that science needs to pretend that everything works by natural law and that intelligent design is ‘giving up.’ I’ve never seen the logic of that. The purpose of science, it seems to me, is to find out how things got here and how they work. Science should be the search for truth, not merely the search for materialistic explanations. The great scientists of history—Newton and Einstein, for instance—never thought science’s job was to come up with some sort of self-sufficient explanation for nature. This is a recent innovation, and not a good one—especially in light of discoveries during the last fifty years that have pointed in the exact opposite direction.”

Behe and I continued to talk for a while, then we shook hands and parted ways. As I lingered in the hallway, peering through the glass into various laboratories where scientists were hard at work, I thought of the concession by microbiologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago in his review of Behe’s book: “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
²⁰

Shapiro might not be amenable to Behe’s ultimate conclusions, but personally I wasn’t ready to bank on wishful speculations. Connecting the dots from my interviews with William Lane Craig, Robin Collins, Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Richards, and now Michael Behe, I was coming up with a picture that was squarely at odds with the icons that had once led me into atheism. In the words of Allan Sandage, one of the most highly respected scientists of our age:

The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle—an architect for believers, a mystery to be solved by science (even as to
why
) sometime in the indefinite future for materialist reductionalists.
²¹

That mystery was going to take me even deeper inside the awe-inspiring, microscopic realm of the cell. As I started my rental car and began to drive down the asphalt road from Lehigh’s Mountaintop Campus, I remembered that Stephen Meyer, the philosopher of science I had already interviewed about the relationship between science and faith, has written extensively on DNA. This seemed like a good time for a new chat about where the arrow of genetics might be pointing.

For Further Evidence

More Resources on This Topic

Behe, Michael J.
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
. New York: Touchstone, 1996.

——. “Darwin’s Breakdown: Irreducible Complexity and Design at the Foundation of Life.” In
Signs of Intelligence
, eds. William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner. Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos, 2001.

——. “Evidence for Design at the Foundation of Life” and “Answering Scientific Criticisms of Intelligent Design.” In
Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe
, eds. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000.

——. “Intelligent Design Theory as a Tool for Analyzing Biochemical Systems.” In
Mere Creation
, ed. William A. Dembski. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998.

9
THE EVIDENCE OF BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION:
THE CHALLENGE OF DNA AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when seen in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces.

George Sim Johnson
¹

Einstein said, “God does not play dice.” He was right. God plays Scrabble.

Philip Gold
²

I
n 1953, when Francis Crick told his wife Odile that he and a colleague had discovered the secret of life—the chemical structure of DNA, where the instructions for building proteins were encoded—she didn’t believe him. Years later, she confessed to her husband: “You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it.”
³

This time, he wasn’t exaggerating. He and James D. Watson would win the Nobel Prize for discovering the now-famous double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid, where the “language of life” is stored.

For more than fifty years, as scientists have studied the six feet of DNA that’s tightly coiled inside every one of our body’s one hundred trillion cells, they have marveled at how it provides the genetic information necessary to create all of the proteins out of which our bodies are built. In fact, each one of the thirty thousand genes that are embedded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes can yield as many as 20,500 different kinds of proteins.
⁴

The astounding capacity of microscopic DNA to harbor this mountain of information, carefully spelled out in a four-letter chemical alphabet, “vastly exceeds that of any other known system,” said geneticist Michael Denton.

In fact, he said the information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived—a number estimated to be approximately one thousand million—“could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written.”
⁵

DNA serves as the information storehouse for a finely choreographed manufacturing process in which the right amino acids are linked together with the right bonds in the right sequence to produce the right kind of proteins that fold in the right way to build biological systems. The documentary
Unlocking the Mystery of Life
,
which has aired on numerous PBS television stations, describes the elaborate operation this way:

In a process known as transcription, a molecular machine first unwinds a section of the DNA helix to expose the genetic instructions needed to assemble a specific protein molecule. Another machine then copies these instructions to form a molecule known as messenger RNA. When transcription is complete, the slender RNA strand carries the genetic information . . . out of the cell nucleus. The messenger RNA strand is directed to a two-part molecular factory called a ribosome. . . . Inside the ribosome, a molecular assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain of amino acids. These amino acids are transported from other parts of the cell and then linked into chains often hundreds of units long. Their sequential arrangement determines the type of protein manufactured. When the chain is finished, it is moved from the ribosome to a barrel-shaped machine that helps fold it into the precise shape critical to its function. After the chain is folded into a protein, it is then released and shepherded by another molecular machine to the exact location where it is needed.
⁶

It was this “absolutely mind-boggling” procedure that helped lead biology professor Dean Kenyon to repudiate the conclusions of his own book on the chemical origin of life and conclude instead that nothing short of an intelligence could have created this intricate cellular apparatus. “This new realm of molecular genetics [is] where we see the most compelling evidence of design on the Earth,” he said.
⁷

It seemed fitting that when scientists announced that they had finally mapped the three billion codes of the human genome—a project that filled the equivalent of 75,490 pages of
The New York Times
—divine references abounded. President Clinton said scientists were “learning the language in which God created life,” while geneticist Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, said DNA was “our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”
⁸

Are such public bows to a Creator merely a polite social custom, meant only as a nodding courtesy to a predominantly theistic country? Or does the bounty of information in DNA really warrant the conclusion that an intelligent designer must have infused genetic material with its protein-building instructions? Are there any naturalistic processes that can account for the appearance of biological data in the earliest cells?

I knew where to go to get answers. One of the country’s leading experts on origin-of-life issues, who has written extensively on the implications of the information in DNA, resides in Washington state. He and I had already discussed the intersection of faith and science for Chapter Four of this book; now it was time to sit down with him again, this time in his new quarters at the Discovery Institute in downtown Seattle.

INTERVIEW #7: STEPHEN C. MEYER, PHD

Since our last discussion, philosopher and scientist Stephen Meyer had moved with his wife and three children to the outskirts of Seattle so he could focus on his role as Director and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
⁹
He continues to keep one foot in academia, however, as professor of the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

Meyer earned his doctorate at Cambridge University, where he analyzed scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. For his master’s degree, also from Cambridge, he studied the history of molecular biology and evolutionary theory.

He has written about DNA and the problem of the origin of biological information for the books
Debating Design
, published by Cambridge University Press;
Darwinism, Design, and Public Education
, published by Michigan State University Press;
Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe
;
Signs of Intelligence
; and
Mere Creation
. Lately he has been finishing a book called
DNA by Design: The Signature in the Cell
,
which further expands on his analysis of biological information.

We got together on an unusually sultry summer day, had a pleasant lunch in an avant-garde Asian restaurant, and then settled into an office at the Discovery Institute. Meyer lowered his lanky frame into a plain wooden chair, his back to a half-opened window through which random traffic noises could be heard. It was nearly midafternoon before we got started with our discussion.

It was clear that Meyer likes the give-and-take of interviews. Although Meyer is typically more professorial than pugnacious, I’ve never heard of him shying away from tough questions or even rhetorically bloody debates with fervent Darwinists.

In fact, I once hosted the videotaping of an intellectual shoot-out between Meyer and an atheistic anthropologist on the legitimacy of intelligent-design theories, and I remember walking away amazed at Meyer’s finesse in deftly dismantling the professor’s case while at the same time forcefully presenting his own. Maybe that’s a throwback to Meyer’s earlier years when he trained as a boxer, learning to overcome fears of taking a punch and how to jab away at an opponent’s weaknesses.