Your Turn Letters to the Editor

Wrong together, at church

I don’t want to get into all the details that George Belden failed to understand in his op-ed piece, “Darwinism: Philosophy or Science.” I am sure The CT will get plenty of letters picking apart the many fallacies of his argument: i.e., ignoring creationism is censorship; “Any American with a single open-minded nerve cell will recognize that intelligent design as a scientific theory wields a great wealth of merit”; you test accepted scientific theories by comparing them to made-up ones (that’s just a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method); and “Darwinists submit their innermost being to random chance” (what does that even mean?).

Rather, I want to focus on his key error, upon which he based his entire argument: “I would argue that in the same way that intelligent design is nothing more than a watered-down form of creationism, the theory of evolution is nothing more than Darwinism in disguise. To put it analogously: Intelligent design is to creationism as evolution is to Darwinism.”

In response, it must be pointed out that religionists changed the term creationism to intelligent design to facilitate a political agenda. Somehow in their minds, the change in nomenclature made conjecture influenced by biblical studies more scientific, though I don’t see how. I have yet to hear the “unified scientific theory of creationism/intelligent design.” On the other hand, Darwinism evolved into evolution through the scientific process. Darwinism was the starting point for much of our understanding about genetics, species diversification, etc., and evolution is the theory that explains much of it.

Darwinism isn’t a religion just because you say it is. Taking a quote from evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, “Darwinism is not a simple theory that is either true or false but is rather a highly complex research program that is being continuously modified and improved.”

Religionists insist on comparing apples and oranges. But evolution is science and creationism is religion. The word bridge built to get from one to the other is just an aspect of the Christian worldview you espouse that would never permit you to be wrong about anything. It is the evangelical nature to try to change everyone else’s minds before looking into your own understanding of the world. Though you claim that you want children to hear “both sides of the story,” it seems clear to me that you would prefer we all be wrong together, at church.

Jack Lavelle

The science of intelligent design

There is a lot of confusion about intelligent design. I hope to be able to help clear some things up.

To begin with, the theory of intelligent design is indeed a scientific one. Darwinists claim, as did a letter to the editor in Monday’s paper, that it is not scientific because it does not conform to the scientific method (which requires repeatability, naturalistic explanations, etc.). But the scientific method applies only to empirical sciences, not to historical sciences.

Empirical sciences, like chemistry and biology, look at how things function by nature (and thus are repeatable and look only to naturalistic explanations). Historical sciences, like archaeology and forensic science, look at particular past events and ask: “How did this arise?” (allowing for both natural and intelligent causes and reconstructing rather than repeating the historical event).

When we ask how life came about, we are asking a question about a particular past event, not about how things operate now that they are here. Thus, the question of the origin of life is not a question for the empirical sciences but for the historical sciences. So we do not limit our explanations to naturalistic ones any more than the archaeologist limits his explanation for hieroglyphics to wind erosion, nor are we required to repeat the origin of life any more than the forensic scientist repeats the murder he is investigating. Rather, we seek to discover the nature of the cause that brought life about, whether it be natural or intelligent, by reconstructing the event as best we can from the evidence left behind.

One great piece of evidence that has been left behind is that of irreducible complexity. As the name suggests, irreducible complexity refers to any system that contains several interdependent parts that work together for a common purpose. If one of these pieces is missing, the system loses all functionality. An example of an irreducibly complex system is a motor, which needs a number of parts for the motor to function at all. Our experience and our common sense tell us that motors, with all their interdependent parts, only come about by someone designing them. Interestingly, there are many motors that exist within biological systems (this is common knowledge within biology). The existence of the bacterial flagellum and many other such biological motors serve as a great hallmark of design.

But doesn’t natural selection explain, you may ask, how irreducibly complex systems come about by natural processes rather than by design? Darwin rightly observed that natural selection had the selecting power to favor the stronger members of a species. But from here he wrongly assumed that it also had the creative power to bring those species about in the first place.

Here’s why it doesn’t: Natural selection only favors those step-by-step changes that are beneficial. But the interdependent parts of an irreducibly complex system are not beneficial at all until every one of them is already in place. Thus, natural selection cannot bring them about in a step-by-step fashion. This is why we intuitively recognize that motors, for example, must have a designer.

A second piece of evidence that argues powerfully for design is DNA evidence. DNA is a code, a message, an instruction manual telling the cell how to operate. That was the observation made by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, an observation that today is universally accepted.

The fact that information resides in all living cells is a dead giveaway that life was designed. Information theory, also universally accepted, tells us that messages never arise from the medium that contains them. For example, a novel does not arise from the paper and ink that contains the story. Rather, messages arise from intelligence – without exception. So, the DNA molecule could not have arisen by the properties of matter (the Darwinist assumption), since matter is the medium which contains the message, but rather must have arisen by some sort of intelligence. Though this principle from information theory is self-evident and non-controversial, it is curiously not applied to the message contained in the DNA molecule by the Darwinist.

The theory of intelligent design is indeed a scientific one, and a good one at that! It also has huge metaphysical implications. It means, among other things, that the entire human race has one and the same designer. Thus, we are not free to believe and live as we wish but rather are responsible to believe and live as our designer wishes us to believe and live. It also means that we should be skeptical of our skepticism against divine intervention. If a designer intervened in our world by designing life, it is not unreasonable to assume that he might also intervene in other ways, such as inspiring the pages of Scripture, taking on human flesh in the incarnation of Jesus or raising Jesus from the dead to give new life to those who call on him.

Chris Daniel
RUF Campus Minister
Virginia Commonwealth University