Why intelligent design will change everything

Last year, the intelligent design movement burst onto the national scene, causing all manner of outrage from the guardians of science and right thinking. All the major media covered this upstart idea challenging Darwinian evolution's theory of the origin of life. Everybody has been piling on, even conservative pundits like George Will and Charles Krauthammer. The cultural elites were appalled when the yahoos on the Kansas Board of Education voted to "teach the controversy" to high-school students. In Dover, Pa., a judge outlawed the mere mention of I.D. theory in school science classes. Like a fierce game of whack-a-mole, wherever I.D.'s politically incorrect head pops up, its opponents rush to smack it back down.

I am enjoying all this tremendously. What makes it so much fun to watch is that so far not one of the critics understands it. Without exception, they simply dismiss I.D. theory as nothing more than stealth religion – creationism by another name. They say that all I.D. does is insert God to explain what science has not yet figured out. While they all lose their collective minds about it, warning darkly that the fundamentalists are coming, support for I.D. theory will continue to grow because it is good science. I want to explain why, so that when you hear the intelligentsia loudly denouncing it, you, too, can have a good laugh. Even better, you will understand why intelligent design theory is going to become a major force for good in the battle to rescue our collapsing culture – because the way we think about origins affects the way we think about nearly everything. (More on that later.)

Meanwhile, the debate rages on, all the while opponents keep insisting there is no debate.

Despite its pretensions to objectivity, science has always been political. That's why scientific revolutions have often met initially with resistance and ridicule, because the old order stands to lose if the new becomes accepted. But the great thing about science is that eventually the weight of evidence breaks through. Think Galileo (opposed not only by the church but by fellow academics), or Lister (ridiculed for disinfecting surgical rooms to prevent infection), or the Wright Brothers (man will never fly). So all this hand wringing about intelligent design is a good sign that the revolution is under way. The old order is being challenged, and they are freaking out.

First, what I.D. theory is not: It is not creationism. Full disclosure here: I am a creationist. As a Christian, I believe God is the author of life. But I.D. theory is a science-driven enterprise. It is not a deduction from Scripture but an inference from observation. It says that the intricate design found in living things and in the universe itself is best explained by an intelligent cause. Darwinism, on the other hand, says that undirected natural processes led life to arise spontaneously; then evolution by natural selection (survival of the fittest) resulted in living things that appear to be designed, but really aren't. The question boils down to this: When considered objectively, where does the evidence actually lead?

Drawing heavily on Nancy Pearcey's great apologetic book "Total Truth," I'm going to focus on two of the most powerful arguments for intelligent design. Her book contains many more. I wish every Christian (and every thinking person) would read her masterful defense of Christianity as total truth about all of reality. But just reading this column will make you far more knowledgeable about I.D. than nearly all of its opponents.

It's true that by far the dominant theory of origins is the evolutionary one. It goes something like this: It all began billions of years ago in some sort of chemical soup (a "warm little pond," as Darwin put it) which, when zapped with an energy source, led to the chance formation of amino acids. These acids somehow self-organized into proteins and then morphed into the first living cell. All living things descended from that first cell, evolving from simple into increasingly complex organisms, all the way up to man.

In Darwin's time this was easier to imagine, because it was thought that cells were mere blobs of protoplasm. It fit in nicely with his idea that life could have first appeared as a simple cell. There's just one problem. We now know that there is no such thing as a "simple" cell. Recent advances in microbiology have demonstrated that the cell is literally a miniature factory town, with its own chemical library containing blueprints that are copied and transported to molecular assembly lines that manufacture everything the cell needs. Nancy Pearcey compares it to "… a large and complex model train layout, with tracks crisscrossing everywhere, its switches and signals perfectly timed so that no trains collide and the cargo reaches its destination precisely when needed."

Just one cell is vastly more complex than anything ever created by human engineering. And your body contains 300 trillion of them, each one "knowing" exactly what it is supposed to do within itself and in relation to all the other cells.

Microbiologist Michael Behe has coined the term "irreducible complexity" to describe this. That is, the cell consists of coordinated, interlocking parts that must all be in place simultaneously, or it won't function at all. You can't improve the cell through one random mutation at a time because if you change any one aspect, the whole thing will crash. For evolutionary change to occur, every single piece of its Rube Goldberg-like factory would have to mutate at exactly the same time, and each single mutation would have to be beneficial, or the cell would just die.

"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."

"An aggregate structure, like a pile of sand, can be built up gradually by simply adding a piece at a time. ... By contrast, an organized structure, like the inside of a computer, is built up according to a pre-existing blueprint."

Since living systems are organized wholes, they had to have been put together in the first place by a pre-existing design.

Darwinists cannot explain irreducible complexity. They keep saying that it poses no problem for evolution, as if repetition would make it so. They insist that just because we don't yet understand how evolution can work in light of this doesn't mean that we won't figure it out eventually. But they will never figure it out, because irreducible complexity makes evolutionary change at the cellular level logically impossible.

(Note: Natural selection clearly occurs within species as an adaptive mechanism. I.D. theory does not deny or even address this, nor does it address the question of whether natural selection could lead to the development of entirely new species. I.D. theory is concerned with the origin of life only.)

Even more powerful evidence comes from the genetic code. DNA is a kind of language consisting of four chemical "letters" that combine into an astonishing variety of sequences to spell out a message. It contains a mind-boggling amount of information. Where did it come from?

Darwinists say that DNA resulted from chance mutations operated on by natural selection. Really? As theologian Norm Geisler quipped:

"If you came into the kitchen and saw the alphabet cereal spilled out on the table, and it spelled out your name and address, would you think the cat knocked the cereal box over?"

In fact, chance events tend to scramble information, like typos in a page of text. Even if some kind of more complex molecule somehow did appear in the supposed chemical soup, the same random processes that produced it would continue to insert "typos," soon scrambling any coherent message that might have occurred. Again, it's not that we don't yet understand how chance could create complex information; it's that in principle this cannot happen.

If chance cannot do it, perhaps some yet-undiscovered physical law can. That's what scientists excited about complexity theory are hoping. They are studying self-organizing structures like snowflakes and crystals, searching for clues to how similar natural processes might also give rise to the complex information found in DNA. But they won't find any.

That prediction stems not from ignorance or hubris, but from the nature of physical laws, which by definition are regular and repeatable. Those properties enable the brilliant engineering students at MIT to enjoy shoving a piano off seven story high Baker House roof every year. They know that gravity makes things fall, every time.

But the information found in DNA is quite different. When you decode one section it tells you nothing about what comes next. The letters are free to combine into an unimaginably vast quantity of information. By contrast, the physical laws being explored in complexity theory are simple instructions, able to create complex patterns but not much information – certainly not enough to account for the fact that each cell in your body contains more information than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

This is not at all like saying man will never fly because God didn't give him wings. It's not that I.D. theorists can't imagine how a physical law could create information. It's because in principle, law-like processes cannot generate complex information. Some things really are impossible.

It turns out that life is not primarily about matter, but information. Commenting on the failed attempts to create life in the lab, astrophysicist Paul Davies writes:

"Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won't work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level."

Common sense tells us that information does not occur without an intelligence to organize it, any more than the hardware of a computer can create its own software. Even scientists know this. Otherwise, how could SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers ever hope to distinguish between radio signals generated by some natural process and those sent from the hoped-for aliens? Again, we see that the most plausible explanation for the information in DNA is an Intelligent Designer put it there.

But for Christians, we knew that, didn't we? "In the beginning was the Word (Logos)." Behind everything is the Logic, the Wisdom, the Intelligence of God.

Currently, only a minority of scientists holds to intelligent design theory, but the number is growing. To date, over 400 scientists have signed a document entitled "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." Many of these scientists are not Christian, and some are outright hostile to it, which is further evidence that I.D. is not religion. A scientific revolution is just beginning, but almost nobody recognizes it, least of all its opponents.

And not a moment too soon, since evolutionary theory did not stay in the scientific realm but oozed into all the sciences, the liberal arts and out into culture, with horribly destructive results. The biblical view of man as a spiritual being created in God's image has been replaced by the view that man is nothing more than a highly evolved animal struggling to survive in a meaningless universe. Scratch any social ill and you will find Darwinism underneath.

One of the worst consequences has been the devaluation of human life. It is no exaggeration to say that Darwinism has led to the killing of untold millions of human beings. To highlight just a few examples: eugenics (philosophical Darwinism) inspired Margaret Sanger to found Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion movement. Eugenics helped Hitler convince an entire country to follow him in his attempt to wipe out the "inferior" Jews, not to mention the toll in blood it took to stop him. These days Peter Singer, a Princeton professor of bioethics, advocates that parents be allowed to dispatch their imperfect infants up to 30 days after birth. The misguided "right to die" movement is rapidly becoming the "right to kill" movement, as last year we watched severely disabled (but not dying) Terri Schiavo starve to death by court order, while a large portion of the country approved of it. Meanwhile, more than a million babies continue to be aborted every year. None of these horrors could have occurred in a culture that understood each human life to be a unique creation of God, stamped with his image.

Darwinism is also behind the sexual revolution (just doing what comes naturally), radical feminism, family breakdown and normalization of homosexuality (gender roles are social constructs we can discard as we "evolve" as a society). Darwinism removed the foundation for a transcendent moral Truth that stands outside of our personal preference. Now we make it up as we go, "re-imagining" everything. Even many Christians consider their faith to be purely personal. It's "true for me, but maybe not for you." No wonder assertions that Jesus is the only way to God meet with such outrage. And why so-called progressives are deeply offended when Christians try to bring into the public square what they view as nothing more than our particular rabbit's foot. Rejection of God is the root cause of our cultural degradation, but Darwinism has been its indispensable support, giving intellectual cover for all the evil we want to do.

But intelligent design is on the move, and this is a great gift to everyone, especially Christians. It's only a matter of time before it becomes accepted as a legitimate competing theory of origins, and as it does it will unleash enormous changes for good, not only in science but all of culture – because if people understand that there is (or at least could be) a Designer, then we can once more ask, what is the purpose of that design? What are things for?

For example, conservatives and Christians are having a difficult time making the case against homosexual marriage. Thousands of years of exclusively heterosexual marriage mean nothing to those with a Darwinist worldview. Why, they are far more evolved than those benighted cultures in the misty past. To them, tradition is oppressive; destroying it is progress. Why shouldn't people be able to "love" whomever they want? How will it hurt your marriage?

The truth is that homosexual marriage is wrong because it violates God's design and purpose for us, with inevitably negative consequences. But for an exercise in frustration, just try to discuss design with someone steeped in the evolutionary mindset. Point out the functional biological differences between male and female, and they will dodge, deny or change the subject. Press the issue, and they will become angry at your attempt to "impose" your personal values. What they will never do is engage the substance of your argument. They can't. Their worldview will not allow them to admit the obvious.

Multiple research studies documenting the need that children have for a mom and a dad are probably the best defense we've got, but in a nation full of divorced or never married single parents, and with a media quick to promote "gay" families, it's a tough slog. So far, a majority of the public opposes homosexual marriage, but it's mostly instinctive and traditional. People say things like, "I wasn't raised that way." But younger generations, raised on books like "Heather Has Two Mommies" and subjected to Darwinist dogma throughout their schooling, have no tradition left to hold them. And any common-sense instinct they might have to resist faces an incessant cultural onslaught that brands such thoughts as hateful prejudice.

For the older generations, watching defenders of marriage viciously attacked in the press is very confusing. Having never reasoned out something so basic as marriage, they, too, will begin to doubt themselves. Unless something dramatic changes, public opposition will eventually crumble, and we will see the destruction of marriage as one more nail in the cultural coffin we are building for ourselves.

This morning an absolutely stunning and improbable event happened to me. As I was paying for my morning bagel a dollar bill dropped from my outstreched hand. It fell to the floor.

And landed standing on it's side! Amazing! Seven witnesses, at the least. One guy wanted to go back to his desk and get a camera, but I didn't have time and great art, like time, is fleeting. I picked it up and completed the transaction.

You want to claim that Occam's razor (Whalid Al-Akham, the Moor, didn't need a razor as he was likely a heavily bearded deep thinker) cuts the ID hair and not the Natural Selection hair. Amazing razor if so.

One that ignores probabilities. What ID says is that evolution by Natural Selection (NS) has a statistically impossible barrier to climb. Instead ID proposes a sort of "tunneling" through that high statistical barrier to explain observed instances of evolution!

Both ID and NS explain evolution. ID relies on something like a weak force acting at what are practically unobservable ranges. Unobservable with respect to direct obseravtions, that is. Statistically the ensemble that is history and the universe sure do say something else again -- there the actions of the Creator and his Providence are plain as the chin of the shaven face.

Contrawise NS relies on magical thinking, multitudes in multiverses crossing their fingers, or maybe twisting their uncut beards in their fingers.

ID is better groomed, let's face it.

Christians, Jews and Wotan
What we still need to learn from Nazism.

BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, March 25, 2002 12:01 a.m.

Holy Week is by no means all sweetness and light. This Friday Christians mark the crucifixion, a terrible event redeemed by the resurrection three days later. The Jews gather on Thursday for Passover, celebrating the Exodus from slavery as the angel of death skipped Jewish homes during Egypt's tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn.

So perhaps it's not an inappropriate time to discuss another terrible topic, the Holocaust, and in particular the divisive issue of Christian culpability in the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It is not the purpose here to dismiss the long history of anti-Semitism in Christian lands. By now most Christians agree this was a sin, and its legacy surely played an important role in laying a groundwork for the Nazis and in muting opposition to the "final solution."

It is the purpose, however, to stress one point that seldom receives due emphasis. To wit, the Nazi leaders and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan, some quite explicitly. For the rest, the ancient myths celebrated in Wagner became a pillar of their doctrine of Teutonic racial superiority.

Nazism was itself a "political religion," Cardiff University historian Michael Burleigh stresses in his magisterial "The Third Reich: A New History." It sought to displace the traditional church and command spiritual authority as well as temporal. Its special animus toward Jews was not religious but racial, and it "had one foot in the dark irrationalist world of Teutonic myth, where heroic doom was regarded positively, and where the stakes were all or nothing--national and racial redemption or perdition."

The Nazi attack on Christianity was widely understood at the end of World War II. William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" recounts the Nazi plan for the Christian churches: It included an intention to "exterminate irrevocably . . . the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800." Current denominations would be replaced by the National Church. Its altars would have only a copy of "Mein Kampf," with a sword to the left. The Christian Cross would be removed, replaced "by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika."

The Nazi's aggressive paganism is far less understood today. At one presidential prayer breakfast, Bill Clinton offered the opinion that "Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity." I remember a night with my own rabbi on matters Jewish, Seth Lipsky, then editor of the Forward and now embarked on the audacious enterprise of launching a new daily newspaper in New York. When I read Shirer's description, he exclaimed, "You'd better get that scoop in the newspaper."

Too, the Nuremberg Project of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Opinion made some headlines by publishing a 1945 document prepared by William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, "The Nazi Master Plan: the Persecution of the Christian Churches." (You can find it here.) Papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times thought it news that the Nazis had sought to suppress Christianity.

Among scholars, by contrast, the pagan roots are not controversial. In 1998, the Vatican issued a seminal statement, "We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah." It asserted, "The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity and, in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute her members also." The World Jewish Congress response affirmed this assertion, "It is true that the National Socialist regime adopted a pagan ideology which rejected the Church."

In the WJC response this is a passing comment amid complaints that the Vatican had not adequately addressed its statement's next sentence: "But it may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts. Did anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians make them less sensitive, or even indifferent, to the persecutions . . . ?"

Reading these two documents, I come away with the impression that the WJC complaints score points on the margin; the Vatican did not need to say that "many" Christians offered help to Jews, for example. But as a whole the Vatican statement is forthcoming, and surely the church is entitled to cite some of the sermons and statements responding to Nazism by condemning racism and affirming the church teaching of the unity of the human race.

I came to an interest in this issue via a circuitous route. Dow Jones & Co. is controlled by a family we call the Bancrofts, and one of its most interesting members was Mary Bancroft, who recorded her wartime adventures in a book, "Autobiography of a Spy." She spent the war in Switzerland as assistant to and mistress of OSS chief Allen Dulles. ("We can let the work cover the romance—and the romance cover the work," he told her.) She was also a patient of psychoanalytic pioneer Carl Gustav Jung, who published a 1936 article on the Nazis entitled "Wotan."

Jung believed in a collective unconscious, citing the similar symbols and motifs in mythologies around the world and their appearance in dreams. This position was instrumental in his split with Sigmund Freud. In the Nazis Jung saw an upwelling of the German collective unconscious, the resurgence of pagan gods. He saw the advent of the Nazis as powerful evidence on his side of the dispute with Freud. Because of this, his biographer Frank McLynn held, "Jung sometimes wrote about the upsurge of Wotan from the unconscious in triumphalist terms." This, along with cranky right-wing aristocratic views, left him with the image of a Nazi sympathizer.

One does not have to accept Jung's psychological apparatus, let alone his political views, to recognize that the Nazis represented something inescapably primitive at work in the heart of Europe. The Cambodian killing fields and Rwandan genocide show that the beast is still at large elsewhere in the world, and on the fringes of Europe "ethnic cleansing" has reappeared. Unarguably the Jewish Holocaust remains uniquely horrible, but if we fail to understand its pagan roots, we may miss what it teaches about the nature of us all.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

I very much enjoyed reading your post #370...now I still have a problem tho...some who support evolution, may feel that it links up with abiogenesus....but I dont think that the majority of those who support evolution necessarily feel that way...many may, but many may not...evolution is studied from the first cell of life, forward...it does not worry about, who or what put that first cell of life there...

I do agree with you tho, that since we at the present time, cannot know, who or what was the Creator of that first cell of life, cannot know scientifically about the Origins of life, that all views should have equal weight..and on that score, I would agree, whether the Origin of life, was begun with a Big Bang, or with God, or with whatever, each view deserves equal merit, so far as belief goes...but how can we test for these things, in a scientific manner?...

Believing something to be so, is different from being able to test for it, or against it in a scientific environment...how could one possibly test scientifically for the works of God?...I do wish that someone would tell me that...its not enough to say, look all around you, see the world, see how complex it is designed, and then from there, conclude that there must be an Intelligent Designer...that is not science, its belief, its religion, its an emotion, its a feeling, but its not science....

At least this is how I see it...again, I do enjoy your civil post, and see that altho we may disagree on this, we can still have a good, civil, informative conversation...

There's no doubt Adolph Hitler was an evil madman. Whether or not Hitler was "truly" a Christian is irrelevant and immaterial. He capitalized on centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Untold numbers of German Christians followed him and did monsterous things. Are we to say all of these people weren't "true" Christians, either? How far does this extend? All of the National Socialist Party? All of Germany?

Here's a notable quote.

I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen.

-- Adolph Hitler - Mein Kamph

Oh wait, that wasn't Hitler.

~~-- Adolph Hitler - Mein Kamph~~

-- Martin Luther - On the Jews and Their Lies

If you really want to learn more about the subject (more than the silliness you pasted on this thread) you might want to read Ian Kershaw's masterful two volume biography. Volume one is "Hubris," volume two is "Nemesis." Most historians agree this is the finest Hitler bio ever written and the standard by which all future Hitler bios will be judged. I could cite other works, but just that one utterly annihilates any notion of Hitler's supposed "Christianity."

Okay, I just worked my way through those two volumes, following the index entries for anything having to do with "Christian" or "Christianity". I didn't see anything which "utterly annihilates any notion of Hitler's supposed 'Christianity'"...

Perhaps you were thinking of some other book?

Kershaw's work *does* cover the frequent clashes between the Nazi government and Christian *churches*, but that's hardly the same thing. Kershaw makes clear that Hitler's cronies, and to a lesser extent Hitler himself, had to wrestle many times with what they called the "Church Question", but that was due to opposition to Hitler's policies by most of the churches as institutions.

Throughout Kershaw's book(s), he consistently mentions Hitler's cronies and Hitler himself fighting with the *churches* as institutions which opposed him, and with the Christian *clergy* (again, for opposing him), but in none of those discussions does Kershaw make a clear statement on Hitler's personal religious feelings. Consider for example the manner in which many Christian Freepers rail against other denominations and/or liberal churches and clergy, yet that doesn't mean that they're not themselves Christians. Hitler's fights with the Christian churches and clergy were *political* fights, not necessarily doctrinal fights or because Hitler himself did not consider himself a Christian.

For just one example, on page 509 of the second volume, Kerhsaw writes:

"He [Hitler] soon launched into one of his favourite obsessions -- vegetarianism. Much of the remainder of the 'discussion' consisted of a lecture on the dangers of meat-eating. In the war, Hitler remarked, there was little to be done about upturning eating methods. But he intended to see to the problem once the war was over. Similarly with the question of the Christian Churches -- one of Goebbels's pet themes, which he brought up once more: it was necessary for the time being, commented Hitler, not to react to the 'seditious' actions of the clergy; 'the showdown' would be saved for a 'more advantageous situation after the war' when he would have to come as the 'avenger'."

Here as in other passages, it's clearly the *political* clash between the Nazis and the "seditious" churches/clergy which would have to be "dealt with", not a clash over religious doctrine or beliefs per se.

I couldn't find any passage which clearly states that Hitler didn't consider himself a Christian of some type, much less "utterly annihilates" any "notion of Hitler's supposed 'Christianity.'". Perhaps it's elsehwere in the book under a more obscure index heading. Or perhaps it isn't.

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