Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe. (Book Review).

Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, San Francisco Ignatius Press, 2000, 234 pages, paperback, $19.95 (Cdn.)

The authors of this book are well-known American scientists. The message of the book is that the best theory concerning the origin of life here on earth is that it was planned by an intelligent being. The authors show that this is not a philosophical or theological conclusion but one based on the same kind of reasoning sciences very often use when predicating the most likely cause of past events.

For there to be life in the universe, there had to be very special conditions met in the nature of our galaxy, of our solar system, and of our sun. Even a slight difference in any one of these dozens of special conditions would have made life impossible. Meyer says that one of these conditions (the "original phase-space volume") had to be precise to an accuracy of one part in ten billion multiplied by itself 123 times, an amount so great that it outnumbers the number of particles in the universe.

Therefore the odds are heavily weighted in favour of there being an intelligent designer of the universe. Many scientists today accept this conclusion, but some atheistic or agnostic scientists refuse to do so. This may well be simply wishful thinking on their part.

Charles Darwin argued that life on earth developed out of non-living things by chance and gradually improved because chance modifications also sometimes proved beneficial to survival; the fittest survived, passing on the beneficial modifications to their offspring. But Darwin did not point out, or perhaps even know, that many parts of living things are very complex and that, in addition, many of these parts could not have developed at all unless every component of them had been present at the same time. The human eye, for example, gives no sight unless about twenty aspects of it are functioning. And, if it were to have developed by chance in a living being, all the aspects would have had to have developed by chance at the very same time, a theory which is so improbable as to be incomparably inferior to the theory that the eye was made by an intelligent being.

The authors do not argue that their theories are absolutely conclusive, but simply that they are greatly superior to any alternatives, just as the theory that the 17,000-year-old paintings in the caves in Altamira, Spain, were made by intelligent beings is greatly superior to any alternative theory.

Opponents of this book's thesis argue that, if there were billions and billions of universes and an infinite time, all these chance events could have happened, and happened simultaneously. But we know of only one universe and are aware that it is only a few billion years old. So this argument is unrealistic.

Now nearly all scientists have given up on explaining life as a chance happening, but some say that not chance but necessity brought about life in the universe from its basic components. However, the authors of this book reply that it is just as likely that the palace at Versailles would have developed out of the stones of which it is composed as it would be for the chemicals in a living cell to have produced the cell.

And some scientists who are materialists say that science can consider only material things, and that therefore it is unscientific to use an intelligent Creator to explain the origin of life. This position, however, is foolish: True science looks for the truth wherever it finds. it is doesn't handicap itself voluntarily just to "play a game according to rules convenient to philosophical materialists."

For many decades, many students have been taught that life developed by evolution. The term evolution was as often left undefined, but the idea frequently came across that blind chance accounted for life in the universe, even for human life. Now the best science is in favour of teaching that our earth was specially prepared by God for life and for human life.

Like so many science books, this one is not easy for the average reader, but is as easy as it can be, given its subject matter.