Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design

by Matti Leisola

Recall that, with all our advances in microscopy, chemistry, and molecular biology, leading synthetic chemist James Tour can say of the origin-of-life question, “I have asked all of my colleagues—National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners—I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, if your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

geneticist Michael Denton can aptly describe even the smallest bacterial cell as “a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”

Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real,” commented Nobel Laureate Charles Townes. “This is a very special universe: it’s remarkable that it came out just this way.”11

Nobel Laureate, astrophysicist Arno Penzias: “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.”12

As Copernicus explained, he was seeking to uncover “the mechanism of the universe, wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly creator.”16 Kepler went even further. The laws of nature “are within the grasp of the human mind,” he wrote, because “God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”17

Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin frankly admits this. “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs… in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism,” he writes (emphasis in original).

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.18

The renowned NASA astronomer and agnostic Robert Jastrow understood as much. He wrote that for the unbelieving scientist, confronted by the evidence of fine-tuning and a cosmic beginning, “the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”19