An Intelligent Designer | A Thinking Faith

I have a credit card in my wallet which shows a section of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome. It’s the part of the painting where God’s finger is reaching down to touch Man’s. I’ve had the credit card for 10 years since my wife and I went to Italy for our 25th anniversary. When we were sitting or standing in the Sistine Chapel looking up at the fresco on the ceiling, we did not say “it’s amazing how those colors were randomly splattered there and what an amazing design they make.” Of course not, we were in silent awe at Michelangelo’s genius painting over 4 years while he was laying on his back on scaffolding!

It’s the same way I often feel in nature. Like last night on a walk the light of the setting sun gave the trees, grass, and running water a golden tinge of color as I looked over a little valley near our house. My response when seeing such scenes and life in nature is “GOD MAKES COOL STUFF!” I cannot ignore the presence of Design and the Designer. That is why I cannot be an atheist . . . because it looks to me like all we see was designed, not the product of random events or mutations over billions of years.

I have spent many hours reading and thinking about Intelligent Design Theory or Creation as we Christians would call it. I have also spoken to our church’s high school and junior high groups several times on the topic. The first time I spoke, the youth pastor commented he had never seen a speaker bring a 50 page Power Point presentation to youth group! Obviously too much information! Since then I have slimmed down the presentation…but there is a ton of information backed by science on this topic of Intelligent Design.

So here’s a quick list of the strongest arguments I see out there why Darwinian Evolution may not be supported by science. Rather than get bogged down in a ton of details I am writing this from memory and sharing a supporting book or video after if you are interested in the topic.

The universe, our galaxy, our solar system and planet Earth all seem designed to support life. We are not talking about a few differences between other planets and solar systems. Oxygen levels, strength of gravity, Earth’s moon, the Earth’s tilt, Earth’s position in the solar system and size of the planets, the composition of Earth’s core and atmosphere, large ocean areas, type of light to allow photosynthesis . . . the list is much longer than I could understand or remember. But there are many crucial factors that, if tweaked one way or the other by a few percentage points, life could not exist on planet Earth. (The Privileged Planet book and video online by Gonzalez and Richards)
There millions or perhaps billions of examples of living creatures and plants whereby ALL the parts need to be in the proper place for them to function. For instance, our eyes have about 20 key elements that individually are not helpful but collectively allow the miracle of sight. It’s like going to an auto parts store, seeing all the parts on the shelves but they won’t be of any use until placed in the right spot on your car by a smart, mechanical person. Michael Behe, a molecular biologist, calls this concept “irreducible complexity.” (Darwin’s Black Box book and video online by Behe)
When he proposed his Theory of Evolution in Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin expected the fossil record would eventually support his theory in that we would see a very gradual progression of life from simple to complex in the fossil record. In the 165 years since, the fossil evidence unearthed actually reveals large gaps in the fossil record between species. Paleontologists also see what is best described as an “explosion of life forms” at one point in geologic time which is better described by a creation event than by gradual evolution over long time spans. (Billions of Missing Links by Simmons and Darwin’s Doubt by Meyer).
I remember riding with my dad in high school and he was talking about his friend John Brumbaugh, a Geneticist at the University of Nebraska. John helped develop and patent a DNA Sequencer which determines the nucleic acid sequence of DNA. My simple mind recalls the general point of the conversation being that DNA must be “assembled” in exactly the right order of components and it is one of the building blocks of life. My dad and John Brumbaugh both being PhD’s in their respective fields understood the idea of statistics and probabilities that would make it impossible for functional DNA to arise out of random mutation as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution suggests.
As hard as scientists may try, experiments have not yielded living from non-living in the laboratory under the same conditions when life was supposed to have formed in the Theory of Evolution. If life has not randomly occurred with human intervention helping things along, then it seems a huge leap of faith it could occur randomly from the bubbling ooze scientists describe as the conditions on early Earth. (Icons of Evolution by Wells)
A key problem in this Creation vs. Evolution discussion is a confusion between evolution within the same species and evolutionary leaps between species. What Darwin saw when he visited the Gallapagos Islands were genetic variations of finches, penguins, giant tortoises and iguanas. But these were all within those four same species, not between them. A term for this is “Micro Evolution” and we see this everywhere in human beings, dogs, horses, birds, fish, flowering plants, etc. But it’s a huge, unsupported scientific leap from “Micro Evolution” within one species to changes between species to form more complex life or what is called “Macro Evolution.” If we keep our eyes open for this logical error when reading textbooks or the popular press, it’s easier to understand how we have all been misled.
What allows these scientific problems with the Theory of Evolution to exist for so many years? There appears to be “group think” in the scientific community which discourages thinking outside the box of Evolution. For many scientists, this may be motivated by a bias against any possibility which allows for an Intelligent Designer or Creator. In 1966, the cover of Time magazine had the words “Is God Dead” and an article including how modern science seemed to have had eliminated the need for religion to explain the natural world. Today, the scales are tipping the other direction as more and more scientific evidence questioning The Theory of Evolution is discovered. Yet in large part the scientific community refuses to acknowledge the existence of such evidence as science, but came up with the lame term “pseudo-science” to cast shadows on the whole Intelligent Design movement. (Is Atheism Dead by Metaxas; I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Geisler & Turek)

I will say a few more points in closing.

The scientific arguments presented above do not specifically prove the Creation account in the book of Genesis. My personal belief is we need to be comfortable with the first 5 words of the Bible, “In the beginning God created,” to be a follower of Christ. John’s Gospel, Chapter 1 is an amazing passage and verse 3 makes clear the idea of Father God and Jesus (The Word) being the Creative force: “Through Him all things were made, without Him nothing was made that has been made.”
I recall riding bikes with a Geologist friend and asking how old he felt the Earth to be. Based on his years of college and practice in the field, he said “4 Billion years old.” Most scientists and a quick Google search will say something similar. There is no clear answer to how old the Earth actually is, but it does not take away from there being a Creator. It shouldn’t be a “hold up” point in anyone’s faith journey.
If one wants to read a book that “puts the cookies on the bottom shelf” on this topic, then Lee Strobel’s The Case For A Creator is recommended. For students, It Couldn’t Just Happen by Richards and Have You Considered by Von Vett and Malone are both recommended.