(Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 2.” Edited for publication. See our online store to order this entire series.)
Dr. John Ankerberg: Before we talk about what our DNA reveals about a designing intelligence, can you remind us of why leading scientific atheists think scientific discoveries undermine belief in God? You have debated most of them, so you know what they are talking about.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes, absolutely. The New Atheists are a group of scientists who have been arguing since about 2006, 2007, that science, properly understood, undermines belief in God. And for them a key issue is the issue of design. One of those key scientific atheists, Richard Dawkins, has said that “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there’s no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” And he goes on when he’s talking about biology to say that “biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” But for him, the key word is appearance.
And the reason that these New Atheists, or scientific atheists, are so confident in their position is they believe that the Darwinian explanation for the appearance of design is right. Because, according to Darwin, living things look as though they were designed for a purpose; they have the appearance of design; but they weren’t actually designed, because there’s an unguided, undirected process that produces that appearance. And that process is his idea of natural selection acting on random variations. And modern biologists would now talk about natural selection acting on random mutations.
And so, because there’s this unguided process that can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence, we don’t need to really think about an actual design. We don’t have evidence of actual design. And therefore: there’s no evidence of design, there’s no designer; there’s no designer, then belief in God becomes, as Dawkins puts it elsewhere, delusional. We might believe in it to give ourselves comfort, but we have no objective or public evidence of design, only the illusion of design in living things.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. But you’ve argued the major discoveries about the origin and fine tuning of the universe are not at all what we would expect given the Dawkins’ materialistic worldview that we just saw; it doesn’t show us just blind, pitiless, materialistic processes. But what about biology? Do living things have just the properties we should expect if nothing but blind, pitiless processes were at work?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, we have seen that the discovery that the universe had a beginning, that the universe has been finely tuned from the beginning, these were very shocking to scientific materialists or scientific atheists. But biology has also presented a whole host of new discoveries about, essentially the complexity of the cell, that were completely unexpected in Darwin’s time. And they’re causing even the New Atheists to register some shock as we’ll see as we talk more. But, let me take us back to the 19th century. There’s a famous quote from one of Darwin’s followers, the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. And this is in the 1870s. He said, “The cell is a simple homogenous globule of plasm.”
So in the 19th century, the concept of the fundamental, the smallest unit of life, was that it was a simple essentially blob of Jell-O. Now this is important because Darwin—many people don’t realize this—but Darwin never attempted to explain the origin of the first life. What he tried to do instead was explain how we got new living forms from one, or a very few, simple forms at the very beginning.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And we’ve all seen this Darwin’s Tree of Life in school, probably every student, everyone that’s gone to university, we’ve seen it twice, all right?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes. So Darwin’s picture was you start with a simple cell at the base of the tree.
Dr. John Ankerberg: But that’s the bottom. And the fact is, nobody at school ever told us that if you went right to the roots, where the roots are supposed to be at, there is no way for this tree to grow.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: We’ve got a big mystery. We’ve got a big mystery there, you know.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: So even if you accept Darwin’s theory as completely adequate—and we’ll talk in a subsequent episode about some reasons to doubt that—there’s now,… the whole question of the origin of life is a profound mystery; it was in Darwin’s time. But in Darwin’s time, people didn’t worry about it, because they thought the cell was so simple. They thought that a few simple chemical reactions would produce this substance they called protoplasm. And then, since that was the essence of life, a little enclosure around the protoplasm, and voila, we’ve got life. So they didn’t worry too much about it.
But as we’ve discovered more about what’s actually inside cells, about the complexity of the simplest living unit of life, we’ve discovered that the simple cell isn’t simple at all.
(Discussion will continue in Part 2)