The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [7]
It was no accident that my admiration for scientific thinking was developing at the same time that my confidence in God was waning. In Sunday school and confirmation classes during my junior high school years, my “why” questions weren’t always welcomed. While many of the other students seemed to automatically accept the truth of the Bible, I needed reasons for trusting it. But more often than not, my quest for answers was rebuffed. Instead, I was required to read, memorize, and regurgitate Bible verses and the writings of Martin Luther and other seemingly irrelevant theologians from the distant past.
Who cared what these long-dead zealots believed? I had no use for the “soft” issues of faith and spirituality; rather, I was gravitating toward the “hard” facts of science. As Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education observed, “You can’t put an omnipotent deity in a test tube.” 4 If there wasn’t any scientific or rational evidence for believing in such an entity, then I wasn’t interested.
That’s when, on that pivotal day in biology class in 1966, I began to learn about scientific discoveries that, to borrow the words of British zoologist Richard Dawkins, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” 5
THE IMAGES OF EVOLUTION
I tend to be a visual thinker. Images stick in my mind for long periods of time. When I think back to those days as a high school student, what I learned in the classroom and through my eager consumption of outside books can be summed up in a series of pictures.
Image #1: The Tubes, Flasks, and Electrodes of the Stanley Miller Experiment
This was the most powerful picture of all—the laboratory apparatus that Stanley Miller, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, used in 1953 to artificially produce the building blocks of life. By reproducing the atmosphere of the primitive earth and then shooting electric sparks through it to simulate lightning, Miller managed to produce a red goo containing amino acids.
The moment I first learned of Miller’s success, my mind flashed to the logical implication: if the origin of life can be explained solely through natural processes, then God was out of a job! After all, there was no need for a deity if living organisms could emerge by themselves out of the primordial soup and then develop naturally over the eons into more and more complex creatures—a scenario that was illustrated by the next image of evolution.
Image #2: Darwin’s “Tree of Life”
The first time I read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, I was struck that there was only one illustration: a sketch in which he depicted the development of life as a tree, starting with an ancient ancestor at the bottom and then blossoming upward into limbs, branches, and twigs as life evolved with increasing diversity and complexity.
As a recent textbook explained, Darwinism teaches that all life forms are “related through descent from some unknown prototype that lived in the remote past.” 6
It seemed obvious to me that there’s such a phenomenon as micro-evolution, or variation within different kinds of animals. I could see this illustrated in my own neighborhood, where we had dozens of different varieties of dogs. But I was captivated by the more ambitious claim of macroevolution—that natural selection acting on random variation can explain how primitive cells morphed over long periods of time into every species of creatures, including human beings. In other words, fish were transformed into amphibians, amphibians into reptiles, and reptiles into birds and mammals, with humans having the same ancestor as apes.
So while Miller seemed to establish that life could have arisen spontaneously in the chemical oceans of long-ago Earth, Darwin’s theory accounted for how so many millions of species of organisms could slowly and gradually develop over huge expanses of time. Then came further confirmation of our common ancestry, illustrated by the next image.
Image #3: Ernst Haeckel