The Case for a Creator (32 page)

After earning degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, O’Keefe went on to become a renowned astronomer and pioneer in space research. The late Eugene Shoemaker called him “the godfather of astrogeology.” He was awarded many honors, including the Goddard Space Flight Center’s highest award, and is credited with numerous breakthrough discoveries in his scientific research at NASA.
⁴⁵

It was the discoveries of astronomy that bolstered O’Keefe’s faith in God. He once ran calculations estimating the likelihood of the right conditions for life existing elsewhere. He concluded that if his assumptions were correct, then based on the mathematical probabilities “only one planet in the universe is likely to bear intelligent life. We know of one—the Earth—but it is not certain that there are many others, and perhaps there are no others.”
⁴⁶

O’Keefe said he would have no theological problem if, indeed, other civilizations existed. That’s the position of many Christians.
⁴⁷
God certainly could have created other life-populated planets that the Bible doesn’t reveal. But it was the sheer improbability of the coincidences that conspired to create life on Earth that led O’Keefe to this conclusion:

We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cossetted, cherished group of creatures; our Darwinian claim to have done it all ourselves is as ridiculous and as charming as a baby’s brave efforts to stand on its own feet and refuse his mother’s hand. If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence.
It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in
.
⁴⁸

And for humankind to explore. The findings of Gonzalez and Richards that the cosmos was designed for discovery have added a compelling new dimension to the evidence for a Creator. And frankly, their analysis makes sense.

If God so precisely and carefully and lovingly and amazingly constructed a mind-boggling habitat for his creatures, then it would be natural for him to want them to explore it, to measure it, to investigate it, to appreciate it, to be inspired by it—and ultimately, and most importantly, to find him through it.

For Further Evidence

More Resources on This Topic

Denton, Michael.
Nature’s Destiny
. New York: The Free Press, 1998.

Gonzalez, Guillermo and Jay Wesley Richards.
The Privileged Planet
. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004.

Jastrow, Robert.
God and the Astronomers
. New York: W. W. Norton, second edition, 1992.

Sampson, Philip.
Six Modern Myths
. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000.

Ward, Peter and Donald Brownlee.
Rare Earth
. New York: Copernicus, 2000.

8
THE EVIDENCE OF BIOCHEMISTRY: THE COMPLEXITY OF MOLECULAR MACHINES

We have always underestimated the cell. . . . The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. . . . Why do we call [them] machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.

Bruce Alberts, President, National Academy of Sciences
¹

We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity; but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations.

Biochemist Franklin M. Harold
²

M
ichael Behe was taught in parochial school that God had set up the universe, knew what was going to happen, and intended for life to come into existence, but from our perspective the entire process unfolded through Darwinian evolution. And that pretty much satisfied the young Behe.

Later as a student in biochemistry, when Behe would encounter enormously complicated biological systems, his response was to scratch his head and say, “Gee, I wonder how evolution created that? Well,
somebody
must know!” He always moved on, assuming someone did.

Then one day, while doing post-doctorate research on DNA at the National Institutes of Health, he and a colleague were pondering what it would take for life to begin by naturalistic processes. As they enumerated the components that would be needed—proteins, a genetic code, a membrane, and so on—they looked at each other and said, “Naaaaahhhhhh!” They knew there was no way life could have sprung into existence unaided. Seeds of skepticism were planted.

Subsequently, he read geneticist Michael Denton’s ground-breaking book
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
. For the first time, Behe was exposed to a well-reasoned scientific critique of Darwinism—and he was astounded. Until then, he only knew of “religious nuts” who doubted Darwin. Now, here was a thoughtful, agnostic scientist who was powerfully challenging whether Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection could really explain how life started and developed through the ages.

Spurred on by Denton’s book, Behe began scouring the scientific literature in search of the detailed Darwinian explanations he had always assumed were there. Time after time, he found scientists describing complex, interlocking biological systems and basically saying, “Isn’t it wonderful how natural selection put this together?” The
how
was always missing.

That’s when Behe realized that as a biochemist, he was perfectly situated to investigate whether the evidence points toward Darwinism or God as the source for living organisms. After all, life is essentially a molecular phenomenon. If Darwinian evolution is going to work, it has to succeed at the microscopic level of amino acids, proteins, and DNA. On the other hand, if there really was a designer of the world, then his fingerprints were going to be all over the cell.

And the cell is Behe’s world—an incredible, intricate, Lilliputian world where a typical cell takes ten million million atoms to build. One scientist described a single-cell organism as a high-tech factory, complete with

artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction . . . [and] a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.
³

Shaking off his preconceptions as best he could, Behe began to scrutinize the molecular evidence with new eyes. Ultimately, he would summarize his stunning conclusions in what the
National Review
would call one of the most important non-fiction books of the twentieth century.

INTERVIEW #6: MICHAEL J. BEHE, PHD

Lehigh University’s “Mountaintop Campus,” a seventy-two-acre, eight-building research complex overlooking the hardscrabble city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was littered with brown, brittle leaves when I arrived one autumn afternoon in my search for Michael Behe.

After parking in front of Iacocca Hall, a modern, tan-and-green glass building, I walked up to the second floor. I strolled down a long hallway with laboratories on both sides—the Complex Carbohydrate Research Lab, the Core Chromatography/Electrophoresis Lab, the Molecular Microbiology Research Lab, the Neuroendocrinology Lab, the Core DNA Lab, and the ominous-sounding Virology Lab, with an orange biohazard sign plastered on its door.

The hallway’s wall featured scintillating reading—an oversized reproduction of a technical article by two Lehigh scientists, asking the provocative question: “How Does Testosterone Affect Hippocampal Plasticity in Black-Capped Chickadees?”

I knocked on the door of a nondescript office and was greeted cheerfully by Behe, dressed in blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He’s enthusiastic, energetic, and engaging, with a quick smile and a crackling sense of humor. He always seems to be moving; even when perched on his swivel chair, he would roll back and forth ever so slightly. Wiry and balding, with wispy gray hair, a beard, and round glasses, he has a gentle and self-effacing manner that tends to put visitors at ease.

Behe credits his casual manner to being the father of eight (at the time, going on nine) children, who keep him from taking himself too seriously. He laughed when I asked if he had any hobbies. “Mostly, I drive kids places,” he said.

Behe grew up on the other side of Pennsylvania. He received a degree in chemistry with honors from Drexel University and a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. After post-doctorate research at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institutes of Health, he joined Lehigh’s faculty in 1985. He also has served on the Molecular Biochemistry Review Panel of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at the National Science Foundation.

He has authored forty articles for such scientific journals as
DNA Sequence
,
The Journal of Molecular Biology
,
Nucleic Acids Research
,
Biopolymers
,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
,
Biophysics
, and
Biochemistry
. He has lectured at the Mayo Clinic and dozens of schools, including Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Aberdeen, Temple, Colgate, Notre Dame, and Princeton. He is a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and other professional organizations.

Behe has contributed to several books, including
Mere Creation
,
Signs of Intelligence
, and
Creation and Evolution
. He was catapulted into the national spotlight, however, by his enigmatically titled and award-winning best-seller,
Darwin’s Black Box
. According to David Berlinski, author of
A Tour of the Calculus
, Behe’s book “makes an overwhelming case against Darwin on the biochemical level” through an argument “of great originality, elegance, and intellectual power.” Added Berlinski: “No one has done this before.”
⁴

In fact, it was this book that lured me to Lehigh. I knew that Behe’s theories could provide strong support for the idea that a designer created the tiny but complex molecular machines that drive the cellular world—that is,
if
his arguments could withstand the objections of skeptical Darwinists.

PEERING INSIDE THE BLACK BOX

The “black box” in the title of Behe’s book is a term scientists use when describing a system or machine that they find interesting but they don’t know how it works. As an example, Behe gestured toward the Dell computer on his desk. “A computer is a black box for most people,” he explained. “You type on the keyboard and you can do word processing or play electronic games, but most of us don’t have the foggiest idea of how the computer actually works.”

“And to Darwin, the cell was a black box,” I commented.

“That’s right,” he replied. “In Darwin’s day, scientists could see the cell under a microscope, but it looked like a little glob of Jello, with a dark spot as the nucleus. The cell could do interesting things—it could divide, it could move around—but they didn’t know
how
it did anything.”

“There must have been speculation,” I said.

“Of course,” Behe said. “Electricity was a big deal back then, and some believed that all you had to do was to zap some gelatinous material and it would come alive. Most scientists speculated that the deeper they delved into the cell, the more simplicity they would find. But the opposite happened.

“Now we’ve probed to the bottom of life, so to speak—we’re at the level of molecules—and there’s complexity all the way down. We’ve learned the cell is horrendously complicated, and that it’s actually run by micromachines of the right shape, the right strength, and the right interactions. The existence of these machines challenges a test that Darwin himself provided.”

“A test?” I asked.

“Darwin said in his
Origin of Species
, ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’
⁵
And that was the basis for my concept of irreducible complexity.

“You see, a system or device is irreducibly complex if it has a number of different components that all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if you were to remove one of the components, the system would no longer function. An irreducibly complex system is highly unlikely to be built piece-by-piece through Darwinian processes, because the system has to be fully present in order for it to function. The illustration I like to use is a mousetrap.”

I chuckled. “Do you have problems with mice at your house?”

“Actually, yes, we do,” he said with a laugh. “But a mousetrap has turned out to be a great example.”

He stood and walked over to a filing cabinet, removing a run-of-the-mill mousetrap and putting it down on the desk next to me. “You can see the interdependence of the parts for yourself,” he said, pointing to each component as he described them.