Feb 22 2022 30 mins
Episode 148 – Truth and Proof – Part 8 – Purpose and Design
Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.
Script:
That’s the whole story. Here now is my final conclusion: Fear God and obey his commands, for this is everyone’s duty. God will judge us for everything we do, including every secret thing, whether good or bad.
Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12, verses 13 and 14, New Living Translation
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Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re excited to be with you as we continue our series we’ve called “Truth and Proof.” This series is all about helping our listeners think carefully about their faith. Specifically, we want people to understand that the Christian faith is not a belief system that requires its followers to abandon their brains when they surrender their hearts to Jesus. Far from it. Jesus told his followers that they were supposed to love God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind. Yet, all too often today we are told that we must choose between faith and reason or between faith and science. But that’s a false dichotomy. And today to help us explore the solid foundation of logic and reason that supports Christianity we have RD Fierro in the studio. RD is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. RD, on Anchored by Truth, we often cover the fact that the world’s demand is not only unnecessary but it is also unreasonable, don’t we?
RD: We certainly do and the reason we do is because that demand gets circulated almost continuously in the popular culture and media. And even many Christians are taken in by it. The idea that people must abandon their confidence in logic, reason, and science if they want to be faithful Christians is practically a pillar of every show that purports to discuss issues that pertain to the origin of the world and cosmos. It’s become such a staple of modern philosophy that it serves as a great illustration of the old aphorism that if you tell a lie often enough people will begin to accept the lie as the truth. Our culture has completely lost sight of the fact that some of the greatest minds of the last 2,000 years – including scientists who founded major branches of modern science were devout Christians. Gottfried Leibnitz and Sir Isaac Newton who invented calculus were Christians. So, was Johann Kepler who articulated the major laws of planetary motion. Ditto for Robert Boyle who is regarded as the first modern chemist and the founder of modern chemistry. And Carolus Linnaeus who is credited with establishing the modern taxonomic system was also a Biblical creationist. The list goes on and on.
VK: The point is that many people today regard Christians as being almost simple minded. But nothing could be further from the truth.
RD: I agree. 10, 20, or 30 years ago we lived in a culture that readily accepted Christianity even if some individuals did not. 50 years ago you would even find some support for the Christian world view taught in grade schools and high schools because the truth of Christianity was widely accepted. But those days are long behind us. Our broader culture is not only not receptive to Christianity, but also it is outright intolerant of it. And some elements of our society are vehemently hostile. We have entered one of those periods of history where Christians can no longer be complacent. The opposition to Christianity enters every home, every day if in no other way through the internet and the so-called mainstream media outlets. Arguments against the validity of Christianity are all around us. If we do not actively prepare to counter them, first within our homes and then in our communities, the fabric of our society will continue to erode.
VK: But the good news is that it does not have to be that way, does it? We have the truth on our side. But we must equip ourselves to be able to present that truth. It is not up to us to change anyone’s heart. That’s God’s job. Our job is just to be able to witness to the truth in gentle and respectful ways.
RD: Yes. The good news is that the truth is on our side – and that’s what we have been reviewing in this series. We called this series “Truth and Proof” because the first task we undertook was to demonstrate that absolute truth exists. And then we have proceeded to show the lines of reasoning that support the proof of that truth.
VK: And many of the ideas that we have been discussing fall within the larger umbrella of what is termed apologetics. Simply put, apologetics is a defense of the Christian faith. And thus far in our series we have gone over two apologetic approaches: a metaphysical approach to apologetics and a cosmological approach to apologetics. And anyone who would like to review those approaches in detail can simply listen to earlier versions of the “Truth and Proof” series on their favorite podcast app. Today’s lesson is the 8th in this series and we anticipate that there will be two more episodes in this series after todays. That will make a total of 10 episodes in the Truth and Proof series. So, today we want to move on to another apologetic approach – the teleological approach.
RD: Right. In our last couple of lessons we discussed the cosmological argument for the existence of God. It’s the first of the commonly used arguments, but probably not the one used the most in the media, in books, or in casual conversation. The argument most likely to be used is the Teleological Argument – better known as the argument from “Intelligent Design.” “Teleological” comes from the Greek word telos, meaning “end, or purpose.” “In brief, the teleological argument reasons from design to an intelligent Designer:
• All designs imply a designer.
• There is great design in the universe.
• Therefore, there must be a Great Designer of the universe.
In his Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics Norman Geisler put it this way: “Any time we have seen a complex design, we know by previous experience that it came from the mind of a designer. Watches imply watchmakers; buildings imply architects; paintings imply artists; and coded messages imply an intelligent sender.
VK: Geisler went on to say, “the greater the design, the greater the designer. Beavers make log dams, but they have never constructed anything like the Golden Gate Bridge. A thousand monkeys sitting at typewriters for millions of years would never produce Hamlet by accident. Shakespeare did it on the first try. The more complex the design, the greater the intelligence required to produce it.”
RD: Well, having written a few things myself I’m not sure if Shakespeare necessarily did it on the first try but it certainly didn’t take him millions, thousands, or hundreds of years. The point is that only an intelligent being can form letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into books, books into libraries. Yet, the complexity of Hamlet is miniscule when compared to the genetic code. The genetic code, which is really the genetic message, contained in one amoeba equals the information in 1,000 sets of encyclopedias. There is no such thing as simple life! We see evidence of incredibly sophisticated and complicated design in the micro-universe of the genetic code, but we also see it in the macro-universe of the solar system, the stars, and the galaxies.
VK: There is a principle that is sometimes referred to as the anthropic principle. The Greek word, “anthropos, means human being. The anthropic principle states that the universe was fitted from the very first moment of its existence for the emergence of life in general and human life in particular. If there were even the slightest variation in the conditions of the universe, even to a small degree, no life of any kind would exist. In order for life to be present there is an incredibly restrictive set of demands that must be present in the universe – and they are. All of our empirical observations tell us this. Not only does the scientific evidence point to a beginning of the cosmos, but it points to a very sophisticated high tuning of the universe from the very beginning that makes human life possible. For life to be present today, an incredibly restrictive set of demands must have been present in the early universe.
RD: And this evidence of design is well recognized by scientists. Astrophysicist Robert Dicke said “that in fact it may be necessary for the universe to have the enormous size and complexity which modern astronomy has revealed, in order for the earth to be a possible habitation for living beings.” Astronomer Alan Sandage states that “the world is too complicated in all of its parts to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? The more one learns . . . the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some kind of organizing principle – an architect.”
Likewise, the mass, the entropy level of the universe, the stability of the proton, and innumerable other things must be just right to make life possible.
VK: Even Stephen Hawking who was not a friend of Christianity said “There may only be a small number of laws, which are self-consistent and which lead to complicated beings like ourselves who can ask the question: What is the nature of God?” And Albert Einstein seems to have almost anticipated Hawking’s question when he wrote “The harmony of natural law . . . reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
RD: And writer, broadcaster, professor, “astrobiologist,” cosmologist, and physicist Paul Davies – who typically indicates his religious belief as “undecided” – wrote in 1989, “There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . . It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . . The impression of design is overwhelming.”
VK: But understandably and predictably just because the universe contains an abundance of evidence of being designed there are those who don’t accept the testimony of the evidence. The arguments against intelligent design come from those who don’t believe in an intelligent designer. For them the answer to the question of how things came to be as they are is, of course, evolution. One point of Charles Darwin’s work was to establish that random purposeless natural processes can substitute for intelligent design. Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species that he was convinced that natural selection was the main mechanism responsible for the evolution of life from simple forms to complex forms.
RD: And writer and Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins begins his book The Blind Watchmaker with the statement “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” His book’s title challenged the work of William Paley (1743-1805) who used the analogy of a watchmaker to support the teleological argument for the existence of God which argues from the evidence of design to the necessity of a designer. Paley built on the arguments of Socrates, Plato, Philo, and Aquinas, and believed that the complexity of the world implies a great designer. Paley studied the physical world for evidence of purpose. He concluded that a designing intelligence was responsible for the features of the natural world, and he identified this intelligence with the God of Christianity. His argument for design was published in 1802 as Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, and his work remains a foundational pillar of the debate over “Intelligent Design.”
VK: Dawkins and Tufts philosopher/sociologist Daniel Dennett are among the most visible, most vocal, and most angry of the atheists who have in the last few decades led an attack on the existence of God. Dawkins’ attitudes are summarized in this statement recorded in the April 9, 1989 New York Times: “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane.” Some people have observed that as a scientist Dawkins is mediocre but as an apologist for atheism he is unparalleled. So, that opens up the question why do so many prominent scientists resist and reject God?
RD: Simply put, scientists in our day and age have a profound bias toward materialism. In other words in their world view the only thing that exists is matter. Now this is not true of all scientists by any means. There are many fine, competent scientists who are not only outstanding scientists in their fields but also strong Biblical creationists. But, in this case, the exception identifies the rule. And one of the most amazing things about this situation is that science itself, that is the objective pursuit of the acquisition of knowledge about our universe through disciplined study, does not require that they be philosophical materialists. But most are either by individual bias or indoctrination through our education system. And even more amazingly many of them recognize this bias and the fact that is unnecessary for scientific purposes. Why don’t you read that quote from Harvard evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin:
VK: Lewontin wrote: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failures to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
RD: So, let’s compare Lewontin’s statement with the statement we heard earlier from the opening of Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins said “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” So, Dawkins acknowledges that the evidence for design exists in nature. He just doesn’t like the conclusion that the evidence leads to. So, Dawkins observes the evidence, acknowledges where it leads, but then changes direction because he doesn’t like the destination. Lewontin simply says out loud the forbidden truth that this change of direction isn’t necessary according to the rules of science. Rather, it comes about because the individual persons – or persons – just don’t like the thought that the presence of design also means the presence of a Designer. So, instead of acknowledging that Designer the materialist, the scientist, adopts conventions and rules that exclude, in Lewontin’s words, “a Divine Foot in the door.”
VK: Yikes. I don’t know whether that’s sad, scary, or both.
RD: Probably both, but at a minimum the one thing that such an a priori commitment is not is “scientific.” And a great many scientists have recognized this. For instance Michael Denton who is a British-Australian author and biochemist wrote a book in 1985 entitled Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis was published the year before Dawkins Blind Watchmaker. Well, those books set off a sort of chain reaction of other books where the debate about the presence of design in nature received a lot of attention. In effect, what we saw in several publications was an extended presentation of the teleological argument for the existence of God.
VK: For instance, in 1991 Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson wrote a book called Darwin on Trial. Johnson’s book was so compelling that the debate about design in nature and supernatural Designer was forever changed. Johnson wrote “In brief, what makes me a ‘critic of evolution’ is that I distinguish between naturalistic philosophy and empirical science, and oppose the former when it comes cloaked in the authority of the latter.” Johnson’s critics retreated into the defensive posture of “specialized scientific knowledge” inaccessible to a legal scholar, but many of these were the same champions of evolution who had previously argued for its simplicity. Johnson answered the critics in 1995 with Reason in the Balance, subtitled “The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education.”
RD: And Johnson quickly gained support from biochemist Michael Behe who wrote Darwin’s Black Box in 1996. Behe explained the intricate interactions of cellular components and molecular mechanisms, showing that biological systems are irreducibly complex. This means that systems are “composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to cease functioning.” Behe asserted that any irreducibly complex system cannot be produced by slight, successive modifications of a precursor, because any precursor to the system would be, by definition, non-functional.
VK: So, when Behe [BEE-HEE] pointed out that irreducibly complex systems could not be produced by a series of minor changes in a biological organism he was effectively pointing out that Darwin criticism of his own theory was valid. In The Origin of Species Darwin wrote a chapter entitled “Difficulties of the Theory.” It happened to be chapter 6. In that chapter Darwin offered some comments on the evolution of the eye which have been widely quoted since he wrote them. Darwin said this about his own theory. Now, remember, this is Charles Darwin talking about his own conclusion that the eye could have evolved through a Darwinian type series of steps. Darwin wrote: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
RD: Darwin went on, of course, to give an explanation of how he thought it could have happened. But Behe took Darwin’s argument apart by showing that Darwin speculated on how the eye and vision might have happened but Darwin never considered the most fundamental question, i.e., how did vision happen? Darwin looked only at the anatomy – which was all he could look at because 19th century science had no knowledge of biochemistry as we have it today. But in his book Behe, went through the dozens of biochemical changes that are involved in a photon of light striking the retina and this enabling the brain to form an image. After walking us through the very complicated biochemistry of vision Behe says this:
“To Darwin, vision was a black box, but after the cumulative hard work of many biochemists, we are now approaching answers to the question of sight. . . . Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric. . . . Anatomy is, quite simply, irrelevant to the question of whether evolution could take place on the molecular level. So is the fossil record. Neither do the patterns of biogeography matter, nor those of population biology, nor the traditional theory for rudimentary organs or species abundance. . . Until recently, however, evolutionary biologists could be unconcerned with the molecular details of life because so little was known about them. Now the black box of the cell has been opened, and the infinitesimal world that stands revealed must be explained.”
VK: So, what Behe was pointing out was that the appearance of design in nature wasn’t just apparent in the anatomical structures that we can see, that Darwin could see, but in the very molecular chemistry that comprises those structures. Again, design isn’t just present in the big structures of the universe – the stars and galaxies – but in the very tiniest ones as well. And how can you have design anywhere at any level without a Designer? You can’t.
RD: Right. And if vision is a dramatic example of a biological system that can’t arise in the absence of design the clotting system that is present in blood is even more dramatic. For a clot to form over a cut and stop an animal from bleeding to death even more biomolecular steps are involved than in vision. But the clotting system only works a system. Miss one step and clots never form. The blood clotting system was designed. It had to be. It could not arise in an evolutionary fashion because any animal that didn’t have the entire system would die before it could randomly pass along any of its genes.
VK: Well, before we close for today let’s mention one more book that participated in the design debate. A mathematician and philosopher William Dembski published his book The Design Inference in 1998. Dembski saw a possible flaw in Behe’s work. So, he strengthened the concept of irreducible complexity to include a minimal complexity condition, stating that “this condition says that the system cannot be simplified and still retain the level of function needed for selective advantage.” Dembski defined intelligent design as the science that studies signs of design, and he notes that intelligence leaves behind a characteristic trademark or signature – what he calls specified complexity.
RD: Right. Dembski and others have looked for signs ranging from the microscopic to the telescopic. As we mentioned at the start of today’s episode, not only do biological systems show the signs of intelligent design, but also the universe in general displays the “anthropic principle” – that the cosmos is precisely designed for the emergence and sustenance of life, and especially human life, on earth. In the simplest terms, “the cosmos gives evidence of design.”
VK: The irresistible conclusion from this line of reasoning is that the evidence of design is present throughout the universe. It’s present in the cosmos. It’s present in the cell. It’s present in our consciousness. You cannot have design anywhere without a Designer. And in the universe doesn’t just have design in a few places. It has it everywhere.
RD: Right. Biochemist, atheist, and co-discoverer of DNA, the late Francis Crick, began studying biochemistry in the 1940’s as a way to disprove the existence of God. But, in fact, what he discovered was that there was an irreducibly complex information system at the heart of all life. Crick was a phenomenal scientist but he wrong about God. His materialistic presuppositions prevented him from acknowledging the very truth that his own work pointed out. But this shouldn’t surprise us. Romans, chapter 1, verse 20, has been pointing out this problem with human nature for 2,000 years.
VK: That verse says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Crick believed there is no God, but God has the final word. Psalm 14, verse 1 says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Well, we hope everyone will join us next time as we continue this fascinating discussion about the arguments and evidence that demonstrates that there is a firm basis in logic and reason for our Christian faith. This sounds like a time to go to God I prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer for all those around the world who suffer for their faith. We should all take time to regularly pray for God’s mercy and favor to be with them.
---- PRAYER FOR PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS
VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”
If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!”
(Bible Quote from the New Living Translation)
Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12, verses 13 and 14, New Living Translation