Faith-affirming science on intelligent design

Stephen Meyer is a senior fellow at the Discovery institute, and he’s the founder and director of the institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He’s also the author of two influential books on intelligent design, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt. Meyer’s books have generated scorn from evolutionary biologists, but they have not been ignored. Signature in the Cell was named one of The Times of London’s books of the year in 2009. On the strength of that book, WORLD named Meyer its 2009 Daniel of the Year. I interviewed Meyer in the offices of the Discovery Institute in downtown Seattle.

Say a little about intelligent design and your particular center within the Discovery Institute. The program I direct is called the Center for Science and Culture, and we’re looking at the way in which science has influenced culture, and, in particular, issues of origins, which have been really primary in shaping worldview. Every worldview has to answer the question, “What is the thing, or the entity, or the process from which everything else came?” Since the 19th century … probably the dominant view in science has been that matter alone, undirected material processes, have shaped and created everything that we see around us.We’re challenging that view. We think that there’s evidence of a purpose of intelligence at work in the history of the universe and in the history of life. We think that you can actually detect the activity of that purpose of intelligence. That’s another way of talking about the theory of intelligent design.

To put intelligent design, and your position in particular, in this larger context of origins, on one end is pure Darwinism, evolutionary biology. Then on the other end of the spectrum is young earth creationism, the idea that God created the entire universe in six 24-hour days. In between those two extremes are old earth creationism, people who still believe in the biblical account but are not wedded to the idea that it happened in six days, and theistic evolution, which acknowledges the role of God but still primarily believes in evolution. Is it fair to say intelligent design is in the middle? In some ways, intelligent design transcends the taxonomy. … The issue, up until about the 1970s, was a Bible-science debate. It’s the Bible versus science. The Darwinists were, of course, staunch materialists, and they believed that a purely undirected, material process produced everything. So that obviously put them at odds with the biblical text. Old earth, young earth, and theistic evolutionists are essentially different views of how the Bible relates to science.

What we’ve done is reframed the debate, not as a Bible-versus-science debate, but, in a sense, a science-versus-science debate. We’re focusing on the central scientific proposition that is at issue in both classical and contemporary Darwinism. That issue is the issue of design. Richard Dawkins actually helps us out a lot here; he brings some clarity to the debate. He says that “biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” The key word for Dawkins, and all the Darwinians, is precisely this word “appearance.”

For them, living organisms look like they were designed for a purpose, but that appearance is an illusion because, they assert, there is an unguided, undirected process—namely, natural selection—acting on random variations and mutations, which can produce the appearance or illusion of design without that process itself being designed or guided in any way. … We think that we don’t have apparent design, not just the illusion of design, but actual design, that there’s evidence of actual design in biological systems, and indeed in the universe itself.

I was recently at an event in New York City hosted by BioLogos, and WORLD Magazine wrote a series of articles and a cover story that was fairly critical of BioLogos. I think, in the mind of many evangelicals, the Discovery Institute and the BioLogos are kind of duking it out for the heart and soul of the evangelical church. Is that a fair characterization of what's going on? From our point of view, it’s not quite accurate. We never really set out to be in any kind of intramural squabble with any of the different positions in the Christian world. What we’re trying to do, our sights are set squarely on … challenging this materialist view that has dominated biology, dominated science. It’s the design–no design question. We found, however, that as we were advocating for the theory of intelligent design and challenging on scientific grounds the adequacy of contemporary Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, and material theories on the origin of life, for example, that we suddenly had a new set of adversaries. People that wanted to critique us very vigorously and say that our work really wasn’t legitimate.

When Signature in the Cell came out in 2009, there were, I think, four or five separate negative reviews of the book at the BioLogos website, one by a prominent evolutionary biologist named Francisco Ayala, who got the title of the book wrong, the topic of the book wrong, and misrepresented the argument of the book in one review. There were multiple reviews, and suddenly we found, without having intended to have an intramural discussion with other people who were friendly to faith, that we were on the receiving end of an awful lot of criticism. Now, once that’s happened, of course we responded, and we do have some concerns about the position that they’ve outlined.

Their position is sometimes called “theistic evolution.” “Evolutionary creation” is their new thing.

In a nutshell, what are your concerns with theistic evolution? Why is that not a plausible position for a Bible-believing Christian to hold? First of all, we have scientific concerns. Neo-Darwinism, which they are attempting now to promote to the religious world, is dead. It is dead as a theory of biological origins. One of the ways you know that is by looking in the biological literature. In the peer-reviewed publications in evolutionary biology, there are very few neo-Darwinists left.

Your book Darwin’s Doubt talks about the fact that he had doubts about his own theories. Now that the science has progressed, it’s almost impossible to hold some of the core ideas that Darwin held. I know it sounds very shocking and jarring, and it’s provocative to say this, but if you get into the peer-reviewed literature in evolutionary biology, you have numerous, very high-ranking people expressing doubts about the creative power of the mutation-natural selection mechanism—the very undirected, unguided mechanism that allegedly has supplanted the role of a designer in the history of life. The designer-substitute mechanism is being questioned by leading people in evolutionary theory at just the time when leading evolutionary biologists are saying, “We need a new theory.”

In Darwin’s Doubt, I look at six or seven attempts by the secular, materialist, evolutionary theorist to come up with new mechanisms and new theories. At just that time, we have those folks in the Christian world coming out of mainly Christian colleges saying, “We need to get the church to accept Darwinian evolution, otherwise the witness of the Christian church will lack intellectual credibility.” I think that’s just completely behind the times as to what’s going on scientifically.

There are committed evangelical Christians reading this. They are earnest in their desire to follow God, and to develop an understanding of origins that is consistent with Scripture. They’re confused by, “Should I believe intelligent design? Should I believe six-day creation? Should I believe old-earth creationism? Should I believe theistic evolution?” What would you say to that person, other than, “Accept my position,” to help guide them? There’s a wonderful journal that's published out of New York called First Things, and I think C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay called “First and Second Things.” I think it’s important to distinguish first things from second things, so the first question, I think, the most important question, is, “Design, or no design?” If there is no evidence of design, and materialistic processes can account for everything we see, then the simplest metaphysical explanation of the reality around us, the scientific reality, is the materialistic worldview: Matter and energy are eternal, self-existent, self-creating, and perfectly capable of producing everything we see around us.

If, instead, we see evidence of a designing mind, then I think that evidence has faith-affirming implications because the most logical candidate for the designing mind is obviously God. There are some who have suggested, “Well, maybe there was a designing intelligence that’s imminent in the cosmos, some sort of space alien on Andromeda galaxy or something.” I find that implausible. I think the biological evidence establishes a designing intelligence of some kind, but when you look at a wider ensemble of evidences, you see evidence of the design of the entire universe, what the physicists are talking about, the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics.

The very fabric of the universe itself shows evidence of design from the beginning. We see evidence of a definite beginning in the history of the universe with the new cosmology. I think there’s a lot of evidence that has theistic implications, faith-affirming implications, and for me, for that reason it’s an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist, and also a person of faith. Because the science and the worldview affirmed by the Bible are extremely consonant with one another.

I think the first question is this question of design or no design, materialism or theism. What does the science seem to favor? Which of those two worldviews does it favor? Then after that, I think there are a lot of questions of biblical interpretation that people can rightly sink their teeth into. What do the “days” of Genesis mean, and what does the geology or the astronomy tell us about the age of the rocks or the universe? Those are interesting questions, but we’ve tried to, in a sense, separate those out and say, “Let’s look at this fundamental question.” We’re at a time when the materialists have been dominating the culture, in the universities, the law schools, the court, and in the scientific labs, and certainly in the scientific popular press with people like Bill Nye and Richard Dawkins, and yet they have an exceedingly weak hand, scientifically.

What I’ve tried to do in the two books I’ve done, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, is to show just how weak the materialist’s hand is in explaining the key events in the history of life. … We would encourage people to roll up their sleeves, do their homework on this. It’s a fascinating subject, they key ideas and arguments are very understandable to lay people who are willing to put a little time into it, and they’re hugely consequential questions.

What could be more interesting than finding out where we really came from, and which worldview is most likely to be true?

Listen to Warren Cole Smith and Stephen Meyer’s full conversation on Listening In: