The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [14]
Viewers of the popular 2001 PBS series weren’t told that, either. In fact, its one-sided depiction of evolution spurred a backlash from many scientists. A detailed, 151-page critique claimed it “failed to present accurately and fairly the scientific problems with the evidence for Darwinian evolution” and even systematically ignored “disagreements among evolutionary biologists themselves.” 5
In my quest to determine if contemporary science points toward or away from God, I knew I had to first examine the claims of evolution in order to conclude once and for all whether Darwinism creates a reasonable foundation for atheism. That’s because if the materialism of Darwinian evolution is a fact, then the atheistic conclusions I reached as a student might still be valid. Only after resolving this issue could I move ahead to assessing whether there is persuasive affirmative evidence for a Creator.
So I decided to return, in effect, to my days as a student by reexamining those images of evolution—the Miller experiment, Darwin’s tree of life, Haeckel’s embryos, and the archaeopteryx missing link—which had convinced me that undirected and purposeless evolutionary processes accounted for the origin and complexity of life.
Those symbols are hardly outdated. In fact, to this day those very same icons are still featured in many biology textbooks and are being seared into the minds of students around the country. But are they accurate in what they convey? What do they really tell us about the trustworthiness of Darwinism?
I was thinking about this late one night while I was hunched over my computer keyboard, surfing the Internet for airline tickets. Leslie strolled into my office and peered over my shoulder.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Seattle,” I replied. I swiveled in my chair to face her. “There’s a scientist up there who can make sense of those images of evolution that influenced me. I think I can relate to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “he studied evolution as a college student—and guess what happened?”
Leslie looked puzzled. “What?” she asked.
“He became an atheist.”
INTERVIEW #1: JONATHAN WELLS, PHD, PHD
Science classes weren’t heavily steeped in Darwinism when Jonathan Wells was a high school student in the late 1950s, but when he began studying geology at Princeton University, he found that everything was viewed through evolutionary lenses. Though he had grown up in the Presbyterian church, by the time Wells was halfway through college he considered himself to be an atheist.
“Was your atheism influenced by the Darwinian paradigm?” I asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “The evolutionary story simply replaced the religious imagery I had grown up with. I didn’t need the spiritual anymore—except this vague, Gandhian, search-for-truth feeling I had.”
I was sitting with Wells in an office at the Discovery Institute, located on the fourth floor of an obscure office building in downtown Seattle. Wells serves as a senior fellow with the Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, an organization that neatly blends his dual passions for both hard science and the issue of science’s influence on the broader society.
His undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley was in geology and physics, with a minor in biology. At Yale Graduate School, where he earned a doctorate in religious studies, Wells specialized in the nineteenth-century controversies surrounding Darwin. His book, Charles Hodge’s Critique of Darwinism, was published in 1988. 6
In 1994, Wells received a doctorate in molecular and cell biology from Berkeley, where he focused primarily on vertebrate embryology and evolution. He later worked at Berkeley as a post-doctorate research biologist. Wells has written on the scientific and cultural aspects of evolution in such journals as Origins & Design, The Scientist, Touchstone, The American Biology Teacher,