The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [117]
Behe and I continued to talk for a while, then we shook hands and parted ways. As I lingered in the hallway, peering through the glass into various laboratories where scientists were hard at work, I thought of the concession by microbiologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago in his review of Behe’s book: “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” 20
Shapiro might not be amenable to Behe’s ultimate conclusions, but personally I wasn’t ready to bank on wishful speculations. Connecting the dots from my interviews with William Lane Craig, Robin Collins, Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Richards, and now Michael Behe, I was coming up with a picture that was squarely at odds with the icons that had once led me into atheism. In the words of Allan Sandage, one of the most highly respected scientists of our age:
The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections 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? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle—an architect for believers, a mystery to be solved by science (even as to why) sometime in the indefinite future for materialist reductionalists. 21
That mystery was going to take me even deeper inside the awe-inspiring, microscopic realm of the cell. As I started my rental car and began to drive down the asphalt road from Lehigh’s Mountaintop Campus, I remembered that Stephen Meyer, the philosopher of science I had already interviewed about the relationship between science and faith, has written extensively on DNA. This seemed like a good time for a new chat about where the arrow of genetics might be pointing.
For Further Evidence
More Resources on This Topic
Behe, Michael J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
——. “Darwin’s Breakdown: Irreducible Complexity and Design at the Foundation of Life.” In Signs of Intelligence, eds. William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner. Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos, 2001.
——. “Evidence for Design at the Foundation of Life” and “Answering Scientific Criticisms of Intelligent Design.” In Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, eds. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000.
——. “Intelligent Design Theory as a Tool for Analyzing Biochemical Systems.” In Mere Creation, ed. William A. Dembski. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998.
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THE EVIDENCE OF BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION:
THE CHALLENGE OF DNA AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when seen in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces.
George Sim Johnson 1
Einstein said, “God does not play dice.” He was right. God plays Scrabble.
Philip Gold 2
In 1953, when Francis Crick told his wife Odile that he and a colleague had discovered the secret of life—the chemical structure of DNA, where the instructions for building proteins were encoded—she didn’t believe him. Years later, she confessed to her husband: “You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it.” 3
This time, he wasn’t exaggerating. He and James D. Watson would win the Nobel Prize for discovering the now-famous double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid, where the “language of life” is stored.
For more than fifty years, as scientists have studied the six feet of DNA that’s tightly coiled inside every one of our body