The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [19]
Wells shrugged. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there’s no other materialistic explanation. And if you try to invoke another explanation—for instance, intelligent design—then the evolutionists claim you’re not a scientist.”
Wells’s explanation was consistent with another interview I had conducted with origin-of-life expert Walter Bradley, a former professor at Texas A&M University, who co-authored the landmark 1984 book The Mystery of Life’s Origin. 16
I questioned Bradley about the various theories advanced by scientists for how the first living cell could have been naturalistically generated—including random chance, chemical affinity, self-ordering tendencies, seeding from space, deep-sea ocean vents, and using clay to encourage prebiotic chemicals to assemble—and he demonstrated that not one of them can withstand scientific scrutiny. 17
Many other scientists have reached that same conclusion. “Science doesn’t have the slightest idea how life began,” journalist Gregg Easterbrook wrote about the origin-of-life field. “No generally accepted theory exists, and the steps leading from a barren primordial world to the fragile chemistry of life seem imponderable.” 18
Bradley not only shares that view, but he said that the mind-boggling difficulties in bridging the yawning gap between nonlife and life mean that there may very well be no potential of ever finding a theory for how life could have arisen spontaneously. That’s why he’s convinced that the “absolutely overwhelming evidence” points toward an intelligence behind life’s creation.
In fact, he said: “I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there’s an Intelligent Designer.” 19
Even those who look askance at religious faith have been forced to conclude that the odds against the spontaneous creation of life are so absurdly high that there must be more to the creation story than mere materialistic processes. They can’t help but invoke the only word that seems to realistically account for it all: miracle. It’s a label many scientists are loathe to use but which the circumstances seem to demand.
For instance, one of the country’s leading science journalists, John Horgan, who identifies himself as a “lapsed Catholic,” conceded in 2002 that scientists have no idea how the universe was created or “how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures.” Then came that word: “Science, you might say, has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle.” 20
Even biochemist and spiritual skeptic Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, cautiously invoked the word a few years ago. “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going,” he said. 21
Others are more adamant. “If there isn’t a natural explanation and there doesn’t seem to be the potential of finding one, then I believe it’s appropriate to look at a supernatural explanation,” said Bradley. “I think that’s the most reasonable inference based on the evidence.” 22
IMAGE #2: DARWIN’S TREE OF LIFE
It was time to advance to the next image of evolution. One of the most recognizable icons is the drawing Darwin sketched for The Origin of Species to illustrate his theory that all living creatures had a common ancestor and that natural selection drove the eventual development of the countless organisms we see in the modern world. To me, his sketch of the evolutionary tree encapsulated why Darwinian evolution was so compelling: it seemed to explain everything in natural history. The question, though, is whether the tree represents reality.
“We now have more than a century of fossil