Friday 3 July, 2009

Special Report

Dr Stephen C Meyer, geophysicist and University of Cambridge-trained philosopher of science, is a leading light in the Intelligent Design movement.

By Andrew Halloway

Nearly 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a new poll shows the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinism.

Instead, Americans believe intelligent design theory gives a better explanation of life; and the Zogby poll is the first to show that ID has become the majority opinion in the US.

When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” the normal definition of modern Darwinism, only 33 per cent of the public agreed. That means that two-thirds rejected it.

By contrast, 52 per cent agreed with the statement that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.” That assertion leaves open the possibility that God used evolution to develop life, but rules out any idea that evolution could produce life on its own by purely physical processes, and it is a positive affirmation that life shows every sign of being designed.

The independent survey was commissioned by the Centre for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, the organisation that funds research into ID. The centre’s director, leading ID scientist Dr Stephen Meyer, says: “In the year of Darwin, these figures must represent a terrible disappointment to Darwinian advocates. Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was supposed to be the refutation of intelligent design, yet more than a century later the public has grown increasingly disenchanted with his claims.”

And this is despite the overwhelming media air-time given to atheistic Darwinists by contrast to the small exposure ID gets. It seems the more that Darwinists deride and mock anyone who questions evolution, the more the public smells a rat.

Critics of ID accuse it of being a ‘God of the gaps’ theory – based on gaps in scientific knowledge, for which believers in God can say: ‘There’s no scientific explanation for that, so it must have been God who did it.’ In that case, as scientific knowledge grows, God gets squeezed out of the gaps until he is an explanation for nothing.

However, Dr Meyer explodes that type of thinking. ID is based not on what we don’t know about science, but on what we do know. ID is about the positive evidence for design about which science is revealing more and more. It is evolution that is an ‘evolution of the gaps’ theory, because wherever scientists can’t explain how Darwinism accounts for certain things, they just assume that science will one day provide a Darwinian explanation. But the reverse is true: the more that is known about life, the less neo-Darwinism seems to explain.

Dr Meyer reveals more of the latest evidence for design in his new book on genetics: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design published by HarperOne. He says: “It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code. Having advanced to this level of digital technology ourselves, in computer science, we can at last begin to appreciate what is going on inside the cell: the nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval and storage systems, the whole operating system in the genome. The cell is doing the same thing a computer’s operating system does, but with far, far greater efficiency.”

And where does a computer’s software and hardware come from? An intelligent human designer. In the same way, the far more complex genetic code and cell mechanics indicate a Designer of the natural world.

Dr Meyer believes it is no coincidence that standard evolutionary theories are being rejected by the US public. It is the result of scientists revealing more about the complexity of DNA and the impossibility of its origin by chance: “Undirected evolutionary processes cannot explain what science is revealing. Intelligent design can. Americans are catching onto this.”

While in Britain, the home of Darwin, ID is only a fledgling science, it is amazing that polls of British public opinion are on a similar trajectory to America – all recent surveys have indicated a dissatisfaction with evolution along with a growing interest in ID and creationism.
Most people instinctively realise that the wonder and majesty of our world cries out for a supernatural explanation. It is the blind faith of atheistic evolutionists that pushes science into ever more ridiculous explanations for evolutionary history while desperately claiming that “although the world looks every inch designed, it isn’t really.”

I have had the pleasure of meeting Dr Meyer on two occasions, and find his logic and scientific rigour impressive. Atheists often accuse ID of being ‘creation in disguise’, yet a look at Dr Meyer’s books and published research quickly dispels that myth.

Creationism begins with the Bible (or the Koran, in the case of Muslim creationists), and then looks at science to see what evidence it can provide in support of the Bible.

By contrast, ID begins with science – looking at the evidence and then concluding that it points to design. It makes no claim about who the Designer is, as that is a philosophical or religious discussion that falls outside of science.

That said, it is true that Dr Meyer is himself a Christian, and he is completely open about that, but his religious beliefs cannot be used as an excuse to avoid his scientific arguments. If they are, then many evolutionists should also be excluded from the debate because their atheistic views mean that they are already prejudiced in favour of finding a non-God explanation for life.

ID may not prove the account of creation given in the Bible, but it is at least consistent with it. Believers could then go on from ID to look at whether creationist science has any further evidence of how God created. And it’s this compatibility with the Christian explanation for life that has got the atheistic evolutionists rattled about ID.

After all, design is not a new theory. It was the generally accepted view of science long before evolution, when most scientists believed in God. But today’s ID theory is new because it has arisen from the evidence of biological complexity that has only been discovered in the last 30 years, and provides new scientific methods for identifying design in the natural world. These are essentially ‘irreducible complexity’, whose most famous exponent is Prof Michael Behe, and the ‘filter’ for identifying ‘specified complexity’, originated by Dr William Dembski.

Only time will tell if ID will be accepted by the majority of the scientific community, but one thing it has certainly already achieved: purely random processes are no longer credible as an explanation for the design of life on earth.

Photo: Used with Permission