The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [131]
“Can you give me an example?” I asked.
“Sure—think about cars or airplanes,” Meyer replied. “They also manifest a ‘top down’ pattern of appearance. In both cases, the major blueprint or plan appears fairly suddenly and remains essentially constant over history.
“For instance, all cars have a basic organizational plan that includes a motor, a drive shaft, two axles, four wheels, and so forth. After the basic invention came about, then variations have occurred on the theme over time. That’s an example of ‘top down’ change. The original blueprint was the product of intelligence, and the continuity through the years is explained by an idea being passed from generation to generation of automotive engineers.
“In a similar way, why couldn’t the body plans of the Cambrian animals have originated as an idea in the mind of a designer? This would explain why the major differences in form appear first and then subsequent small-scale variations only come later. In fact, intelligence is the only cause we know that produces the kind of ‘top down’ pattern we see in both the fossil record and in human technology, as illustrated by everything from cars and airplanes to guns and bicycles. 33
“Intelligence also explains the origin of the layers of information necessary to create the new body plans in the Cambrian animals. As I mentioned earlier, to build a new animal you need DNA to create the proteins and additional information to arrange the proteins into higher level structures. We find the same layering or hierarchical form of organization in human technologies, like a computer’s circuit board. Humans use intelligence to produce complex components, such as transistors and capacitors, as well as their specific arrangement and connection within an integrated circuit.
“Once you allow intelligent design as an option, you can quickly see how it accounts for the key features of the Cambrian phenomenon. No other entity explains the sudden appearance of such complex new creatures. No other entity produces ‘top down’ patterns. No other entity can create the complex and functionally specific information needed for new living forms. No other explanation suffices.”
“But intelligent design sounds like such an outmoded concept,” I said. “William Paley famously compared biological systems to the workings of a watch more than two hundred years ago. That’s old news.”
I had struck a nerve. Meyer uncrossed his legs, planted both feet on the floor, and spoke with conviction. “I think the opposite is true,” he insisted. “We’ve learned a lot about biology since the Civil War. Evolutionists are still trying to apply Darwin’s nineteenth-century thinking to a twenty-first century reality, and it’s not working. Explanations from the era of the steamboat are no longer adequate to explain the biological world of the information age.
“Darwinists say they’re under some sort of epistemological obligation to continue trying, because to invoke design would be to give up on science. Well, I say it’s time to redefine science. We should not be looking for only the best naturalistic explanation, but the best explanation, period. And intelligent design is the explanation that’s most in conformity with how the world works.”
A HALLMARK OF MIND
As our interview was drawing to a close, Meyer’s reference to the twenty-first century prompted one last line of inquiry. “Fast forward ten or twenty years,” I said. “What do you see?”
“I think the information revolution taking place in biology is sounding the death knell for Darwinism and chemical evolutionary theories,” he said as he removed his glasses and slipped them into his pocket.
“The attempt to explain the origin of life solely from chemical constituents is effectively dead now. Naturalism cannot answer the fundamental problem of how to get from matter and energy to biological function without the infusion of information from an intelligence.
“Information is not something derived from material