Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

In my book Signature in the Cell, I develop this argument further and respond in detail to various objections to the case for intelligent design as sketched briefly in this chapter. I address the objections that intelligent design is religion, is not science, is not testable, is based on flawed analogical reasoning, is a fallacious argument from ignorance, and others. I also provide extensive documentation of the scientific discussion provided here. But the evidence and the logic supporting intelligent design can be grasped without all that technical detail.

As the historian of science Frederic Burnham observed, the God hypothesis “is now a more respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last one hundred years.”29 Or as astronomer Allan Sandage commented in 1985, “If God did not exist, science would have to . . . invent the concept to explain what it is discovering.”

Again, this does not prove God’s existence, since superior explanatory power does not constitute deductive certainty. It does show, however, that the natural sciences now provide strong epistemic support for the existence of God as conceived by Judeo-Christian and other traditional theists.

John Walton, from St. Andrews University, also wrote to the TLS challenging Fletcher’s specific scientific claims. Walton noted (1) that “intense laboratory research has failed to produce even one nucleotide (RNA component) under geologically plausible conditions”; and (2) that scientists had encountered “insuperable problems” in explaining the origin of the information that would need to be present in “the chains of nucleotides required for the RNA world.”

I did and still do suspect that much of the genetic information necessary to account for the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian animals arose in the Cambrian period. (Recent genetic analyses have confirmed my view.) But I acknowledged that the genes necessary to build the Cambrian animals might have arisen earlier without in any way solving the fundamental problem. I noted that positing preexisting genetic information (e.g., for building animal exoskeleton proteins) left unanswered the question of the earlier origin of that genetic information.36 To that, Marshall replied, “Fair enough.” In so doing, in my view, he effectively acknowledged the reality of the problem of the ultimate origin of genetic information.

I began this book by describing my March 2016 debate with Lawrence Krauss at the University of Toronto. Krauss, and later Richard Dawkins in defense of Krauss, claimed that my critique misrepresented the evolutionary mechanism as a purely random process. Instead, both Krauss and Dawkins insisted, in Dawkins’s words, that “natural selection is a nonrandom process,” implying that it presumably could succeed in finding the extremely rare functional arrangements of nucleotide bases and amino acids within the space of possible arrangements in available evolutionary time.

I was pleased that Dawkins had decided to weigh in. He had previously declined an invitation from the president of our institute to debate me, stating, “Your people haven’t earned it.” So his direct engagement not only represented a concession of sorts; it also yielded an opportunity to test the strength of my case against an objection from a prominent critic of intelligent design. As it turned out, in their attempts to circumvent the information problem, both Dawkins and Krauss had to misrepresent how the neo-Darwinian mechanism works. Natural selection itself is arguably a “nonrandom process,” as Dawkins insisted.

All this means that natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base (or amino-acid) sequences, that is, new genetic information. It can only preserve such sequences (if they confer a functional advantage) once they have originated. Adaptive advantage accrues only after the generation of new functional genes and proteins—after the fact, that is, of some presumably successful random mutational search. Thus, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends upon an ineliminable element of randomness—a point that even other evolutionary biologists acknowledged after the debate in Toronto. Laurence Moran and P. Z. Myers, both outspoken atheists, criticized Krauss and Dawkins for mischaracterizing the neo-Darwinian mechanism as wholly nonrandom, and Moran specifically blamed Krauss’s uncritical reliance upon Dawkins as the source of his misinformation.

Why a formidable challenge? Again, because random mutations alone must produce exceedingly rare functional sequences among a vast combinatorial sea before natural selection can play any significant role. As I discussed in Chapter 10, every replication event in the entire multibillion-year history of life on earth could not generate or “search” but a minuscule fraction (one ten trillion trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein fold.

The critical question is not “Which materialistic or naturalistic hypothesis best explains the origin of life and the universe?” but rather, “What actually caused life, the universe, and its fine tuning to arise?” Seen in this light, the GOTG objection fades into insignificance.

But as I’ve shown in Chapters 4 through 19, this is exactly what scientific materialists have failed to do—and, indeed, look unlikely to do. Indeed, if scientific materialists had discovered materialistic processes with the demonstrated creative power to explain the origin of life and the universe, they would not need to use the God-of-the-gaps objection to counter intelligent design arguments or science-based arguments for the existence of God.

More succinctly, we cannot allow God as an explanation for events that leave gaps in our materialistic accounts of the origin of life and the universe, because we know that scientists will eventually develop adequate materialistic explanations of those events. How do we know that? Because the only alternatives to materialistic explanations commit the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. And around and around we go.

The Principia was a theologically inspired mathematical treatise in which Newton sought to bring glory to God by discovering, as its title indicates, the “mathematical principles” that governed the universe.

The problem of epistemology, the basis and justification of human knowledge, has commanded the attention of philosophers for centuries, many of whom doubted our perceptions and our ability to understand the workings of nature. Many philosophers have adopted various forms of skepticism or “antirealism” that deny the reliability of the human mind or our ability to form accurate representations of a mind-independent world around us. The Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume initiated much of this skepticism in the eighteenth century.

Plantinga notes that for a belief or belief-forming apparatus to affect the evolutionary process, it must affect our behavior in a way that would also influence our prospects for survival (or reproductive success). That’s because natural selection favors behaviors that enhance survival; it doesn’t favor or “care about” whether the beliefs associated with the behaviors are true or not.

Richard Dawkins has also acknowledged, if unintentionally, that survival value and true belief do not necessarily correlate given a naturalistic evolutionary account of our belief-forming faculties. For example, based on studies of the beneficial health effects of religion, Dawkins concedes that it’s “perfectly plausible” that religious belief “could indeed have highly beneficial effects upon health.”27 Yet he also argues that belief in God is false and delusional. Thus, he tacitly concedes that natural selection can preserve grotesquely false (from his point of view) beliefs.