Scientists Find Evidence of God

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

This is a very revolutionary claim. What's at the basis of the argument, says Dembski, is a controversy over "the nature of nature." Dembski finds naturalistic science "impoverished" when it comes to handling intelligent design. How impoverished? Because materialism and naturalism assume that natural explanations will suffice to answer every question that arises in science, and this simply won't do when it comes to dealing with the phenomenon of Design. (Indeed, any Intelligent Design Movement advocate will tell you that understanding how to deal with design in nature scientifically is one of the chief problems facing the movement.)

Intelligent Design does not argue any specific theology. "The word `Designer' doesn't necessarily mean the God of Genesis," says Thaxton (though it doesn't exclude Him). "My view is that from the empirical data we have we cannot make affirmation of a deity. It is the possibility [of a deity] that we arrive at." Thaxton explains that it is a "generic design that we talk about in Intelligent Design. When people want to go beyond that, that's where their particular views [about God] come in."

What makes the Intelligent Design Movement so revolutionary is that it goes full force against the perceived wisdom of science, and particularly biology. Darwinism pervades every aspect of Western civilization, Dembski notes. And Darwinists argue that there is no design in nature, none at all that would suggest a designer. Everything in nature, say the Darwinists, is the result of random evolution, with no design that would suggest direction or planning.

Here is how one of the world's foremost Darwinists, Oxford University's Richard Dawkins, described this worldview in his 1995 book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, a direct attack on the possibility of design in nature: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

The Darwinian position was put in even starker words by Peter Atkins in his book The Second Law, which appeared in 1984, the same year that Thaxton and his coauthors published The Mystery of Life's Origin: "We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the universe."

Against this dominant Darwinian view, Thaxton's argument for Intelligent Design, reduced to simplest terms, runs like this: The DNA molecule, the basis of life, is a message, he says. It is information coded in a double helix. It's not like a message; it is the message. The molecule itself is an elaborate, complex design that is a message.

We humans know from experience that, when there's a message, an intelligence created that message, Thaxton says. No other explanation will suffice to account for the existence of the message. We don't receive letters from a random, undirected source, for example. Thus the implication is clear that DNA, a message, was produced by intelligent design. "We know from experience that when there is a design, there is a designer."