The Joshua Letter

Chapter 10

CONCLUSION

Having surveyed the fossil record, biochemistry, subatomic physics, astrophysics, and the human mind, we are in a position to ask: If naturalism is true, then where is the evidence that it is true? Have we - has anyone - discovered anything for which there is a plausible non-personal ultimate cause?

Much of what naturalists appeal to as evidence is really no evidence at all. The regularity of physical causation (or the rarity of miracles, which is the same thing), for instance, can be explained just as easily by appeal to the purposes of a rational Creator, as by appeal to an impersonal, mechanistic universe. It is only when one presupposes naturalistic causation that such evidence seems to confirm it.

And apart from the regularity of physical causation, the only evidence we have found for naturalism is the evidence for natural selection, summarized above. But the positive evidence for natural selection is quite weak; even if the negative evidence were insubstantial (and it is not), the careful investigator would acknowledge that it would be premature to declare that natural selection is capable of causing either the origin of life or speciation - and that is to say nothing of declaring that it has actually done so. The evidence for natural selection consists in the progressivity of the fossil record, similarities among organisms, and a few organisms which bear resemblances to more than one group of organisms between which there otherwise are large gaps; and all of these circumstances are at least equally well-accounted for by design theory.

And that is it. When we leave paleontology, there is nothing to support naturalism. And there is substantial negative evidence. Relativity and quantum mechanics demonstrate that whatever the universe may be, it would be premature to declare either that it did, or that it did not, arise naturalistically. These discoveries (considered separately from biochemistry and cosmology) show that presently the nature of the material universe is simply unknown.

And when we turn to biochemistry and cosmology, we find compelling evidence that there is nothing which exists which did not arise as a result of active intelligence. That evidence is extensive, varied and apparently incontrovertible.

The complexity of the simplest living things clearly justifies the inference that their origin through any impersonal cause appears to be impossible. This complexity has three qualities which militate against its genesis apart from the purposeful activity of an intelligent agent. First, the degree of complexity in itself is so great that the probability of the necessary number of elements being present at the same time and place so nearly approaches zero that, even if it is multiplied by the age of the universe, it remains virtually at zero. Second, the kind of complexity which living things exhibit - irreducible complexity, in the words of Michael Behe - suggests that there are many biochemical systems of which it can be said that no pathway can exist from another system which is only slightly less complex. Finally, the complexity in living things is the specified complexity of information, and information is always associated with active intelligence - with only one exception, namely, the refusal of naturalists engaged in origins research to make that connection, and they have offered no justification for their refusal.

Until the seventeenth Century, mankind thought that the sun and stars revolved around the earth. Copernicus and Galileo showed that the earth revolves around the sun; and since their time our planet has seemed less and less significant, circling an unremarkable star in a remote arm of a common, spiral galaxy in a lost region of space at a random, chance time in the history of an ageless, impersonal cosmos. But since about the time of the Hubble Space Telescope, we have been in the midst of a counter-Copernican revolution: we have begun to learn that perhaps our planet is at the center of the universe in a very important sense after all: not at the physical center, but at the center of God's intentions. We live at that unique time and place in the history and vastness of the cosmos when and where the physical constants specified by the Creator would make this planet in this arm of this galaxy comfortable at this time for a race of men and women which He would create in His own image: intelligent, purposeful, ethical, creative through their own information-intensive words and deeds. These notions are, I submit, fair inferences which the data we have considered clearly justify.

About 3,000 years ago, a Hebrew king wrote a poem which evokes some of the scientific findings we have just considered:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

Psalm 19: 1-2. (KJV.)
A thousand years later, the Apostle Paul affirmed:

The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.

Romans 1: 20. (KJV.)
His power and divinity, says Paul, are evident in nature. It would be difficult, on the other hand, to discern His identity there. If there is satisfactory evidence in nature for a personal God, then Who is He? The Hebrew and Christian scriptures offer one answer. To determine whether the biblical answer is true, it would be necessary to consider the Bible's claims and its intrinsic and extrinsic evidences - that is, its textual consistency and its historical accuracy - a task beyond the scope of this paper.1 But it is hardly imaginable that anyone who has read this far, and who is now aware of the evidence for intelligent design of the cosmos and of living things, will be satisfied any longer with the stock fables of naturalistic science.

ENDNOTES

1Those wishing to explore these subjects may wish to follow these links.

© 2002 Thomas O. Alderman