The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [44]
Meyer immediately fired back. “I think the shoe is exactly on the other foot,” he said.
“How so?”
“Let’s take the issue of origins, for example,” he said. “The question that’s asked is, ‘How did the cell arise on earth?’ If you say, ‘We’re only going to let you consider answers that involve materialistic processes,’ then that shuts down inquiry, because one of the possible causal explanations for the origin of life is that intelligence could have played a role.”
“So,” I said, “you believe that ruling out the possibility of intelligent design stifles intellectual and scientific inquiry.”
“That’s exactly right,” he replied. “And I’ve seen it happen far too often.”
I pointed at him. “You want to change the rules of the game, don’t you?” I said, my tone suggesting I had just caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.
“In a sense, yes,” he conceded. “I don’t think it’s right to invoke a self-serving rule that says only naturalistic explanations can be considered by science. Let’s have a new period in the history of science where we have methodological rules that actually foster the unfettered seeking of truth. Scientists should be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it leads—even if it leads to a conclusion that makes some people uncomfortable.”
SEEING EYE TO EYE
My fourth objection concerned a topic called “disteleology,” which refers to apparent poor design in the biological and physical world. “To adopt the explanation of design, we are forced to attribute a host of flaws and imperfections to the Designer,” Miller wrote. 22 The implication is that an imperfect design disproves the existence of a perfect God.
One example Miller cited is the vertebrate eye. “We would have to wonder why an intelligent designer placed the neural wiring of the retina on the side facing the incoming light,” he wrote. “This arrangement scatters the light, making our vision less detailed than it might be, and even produces a blind spot at the point that the wiring is pulled through the light-sensitive retina to produce the optic nerve that carries visual images to the brain.” 23
Other Darwinists, including Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, also have decried the eye’s poor structure, with George Williams going so far as to declare it “stupidly” designed because “the retina is upside down.” 24
This seemed to be a compelling counter-argument to intelligent design. “If there is a designer,” I said to Meyer, “doesn’t the botched eye design prove he’s not really intelligent?”
He pounced on the issue. “There’s an important physiological reason as to why the retina has to be inverted in the eye,” he said. “Within the overall design of the system, it’s a tradeoff that allows the eye to process the vast amount of oxygen it needs in vertebrates. Yes, this creates a slight blind spot, but that’s not a problem because people have two eyes and the two blind spots don’t overlap. Actually, the eye is an incredible design.”
With that, Meyer stood and walked to the other side of the room, where his briefcase was leaning against a desk. He rifled through some papers and finally withdrew a photocopy of an article.
“In fact,” he said as he handed it to me, “biologist George Ayoub wrote this piece to refute the claim that the eye was badly created.” I glanced at the technical article, in which Ayoub, a professor whose expertise is the cellular physiology of the retina, concludes:
The vertebrate retina provides an excellent example of functional—though non-intuitive—design. The design of the retina is responsible for its high acuity and sensitivity. It is simply untrue that the retina is demonstrably suboptimal, nor is it easy to conceive how it might be modified without significantly decreasing its function. 25
Feeling a little chagrined, I put down the article. “Okay,” I conceded, “maybe that’s not a good example of disteleology, but there are a lot of others.”
Meyer interrupted. “Don’t move on too quickly,” he said. “There’s a good lesson here. People make a lot of claims about bad biological design, but sometimes the entire