Scientists Find Evidence of God

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 19, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

The Darwinist hegemony in the natural sciences may be threatened by a cutting-edge, revolutionary movement that sees intelligent design in nature -- and a Designer.

Chemist Charles Thaxton was amazed 15 years ago when The Mystery of Life's Origin, a book he coauthored on chemical evolution with two other scientists, provoked a very positive response from scientists around the country. Thaxton, a visiting assistant professor at Charles University in Prague, expected a negative reaction, if indeed the book (which since has come to be regarded as one of the opening salvos in what is called the Intelligent Design Movement) even was so much as noticed.

After all, The Mystery of Life's Origin, which became a best-selling college text, tentatively proposed the case for intelligent design in nature and pointed out serious flaws in Darwinism. Such views were regarded as unthinkable and most definitely unscientific by the vast majority of scientists at the time, not only because Intelligent Design suggested that evolution wasn't the random, chaotic process most biologists believed it to be but (even more unacceptably) indicated the probable existence of a designer -- God, perhaps -- who was responsible for the design. The notion that a designer might be at work behind nature was a concept no self-respecting scientist wanted to bring into the scientific scheme of things.

"I didn't think anyone would accept the book. When we wrote it, it was like being a lone wolf out there," Thaxton tells Insight. "Hard-core materialists aren't going to tolerate intelligence in nature," he says. "Then I got lots of calls from scientists and mathematicians who did" -- men and women in a variety of scientific fields who were coming to the same conclusions that Thaxton had described in The Mystery of Life's Origin. They (like Thaxton and his coauthors) daily were coming across data in their laboratories and scientific pursuits that no longer could be explained by the standard model of Darwinian evolution. Such data could be better -- and more scientifically -- understood by arguing that certain highly complex entities in nature -- the DNA molecule, for example -- had been designed to do what they do and hadn't evolved randomly, by accident, which is how Darwinian evolution says they came about.

William Dembski was one of those who got in touch with Thaxton. Dembski, a young man with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, a second Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master's degree in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, had a strong conviction that Thaxton not only was right but onto something that was going to revolutionize the way man looks at nature and the way biologists approach their field. He wanted to be part of that revolution.

Dembski recently published his own addition to the ever-growing Intelligent Design Movement, a closely argued book that he calls The Design Inference, in which Dembski (whose impressive list of degrees led one friend to describe him as "the perpetual student") brings to bear his knowledge of symbolic logic and mathematics to argue in favor of design in nature. Dembski's book is one of the latest and most impressive contributions that grace Design studies (the name its adherents like to call it), which is a new branch of science that has grown increasingly sophisticated since Thaxton's contribution 15 years ago.

Between Thaxton's coauthored book and Dembski's very recent contribution, the Intelligent Design Movement has traveled quite a distance, and more developments are on the way, its adherents promise. Intelligent Design now has its own professional journal, Origins & Design. Many of its advocates belong to a think tank, the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, though many of those associated with the center are located elsewhere: Dembski, for example, is in Dallas, and Thaxton remains in Prague. And the movement has its own magazine for nonscientists, the glossy quarterly Cosmic Pursuit, in which scientists such as Thaxton and Dembski present their ideas for the general reader.

What, then, are those ideas? First, they argue that their defense of Design arises directly out of the empirical data they have observed as scientists, rather than from any theological or philosophical notions they may hold. "Discoveries in mathematics and biology are making way for Design and a Designer," says Thaxton. And Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemist who is author of one of the Intelligent Design Movement's most important texts, Darwin's Black Box (1996), tells Insight, "Intelligent Design flows directly out of the data that now are available."

What makes this claim significant is that it makes Intelligent Design a phenomenon to be dealt with and studied scientifically rather than a topic left to religion or other pursuits. It's a claim that leads directly to the other principal argument made by Intelligent Design adherents: that science as it now is constituted isn't adequate to deal with the discovery of intelligent design in nature because science is too closely wed to materialistic and naturalistic interpretations of what nature is.