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God tells us in Genesis One that in "the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." (Gen. 1:1.) God tells us He created successively plants, birds, mammals and then Man. From a Christian perspective, science every day is unintentionally and by force of evidence adding proof upon proof of these propositions.
From our perspective as Christians earnest for evangelism, all we care about is to show the compatibility of the Bible with science. Modern science, stripped of any agenda to prove God-did-it, is the most reliable to convince anyone who is a skeptic that God-did-it because then modern science was not deliberately trying to prove that God-did-it when quite unintentionally they prove God-did-it. In other words, modern science which has been committed to finding naturalistic explanations (whether rightly or wrongly as an agenda) can therefore be relied upon by honest skeptics when it reluctantly discovers evidence of divine intervention.
This clearly has already happened outside the life-sciences with the Big Bang. Forty years ago, Hoyle mockingly called this theory while in its infancy the 'Big Bang' because he said that any notion of a beginning of time and matter was one step removed from proving the uncaused beginner -- GOD -- as a necessary 'cause-and-effect' to explain tne Universe's origin. Thus, when the current consensus arose, best expressed by Hawking, that indeed time and matter came into existence suddenly in the Big Bang, the Bible scored a huge victory. This event as Hawking explains it exactly is compatible with the words of Genesis 1:1. For Christians and Jews, this was a major cause for celebration.
The next important victory on the horizon is that life sciences while they are predominantly on an agenda to confirm evolutionism by natural means (praise God for they objectively and unwittingly prove often the opposite!) are constantly confronted and thwarted by the characteritics of DNA. God is using their skepticism to improve the believability of their discoveries!
For example, Crick, the discoverer of DNA, even concluded that the idea DNA could evolve in the geological environment of Earth at any time is an impossible idea. It is physicall impossible! Only a miracle on Earth could create it. Those are his words. There are many scientific reasons for this, such as oxgen's presence in the atmosphere or water which in any amount is lethal to DNA unless a highly complex and lengthy-coded sequence directed formation of a protein in the cell to counter oxgen's lethal effect and this protein was present in the very first DNA. Crick confesses the extreme implausiblity of any such idea. Hence, at no point and in no place on earth could DNA ever evolve! Crick says so! Thus, Crick said the only naturalistic explanation is that DNA arose outside of earth, perhaps on another planet, and then a meteorite dropped it off.
I have a Christian response to this: His unknown god of creation from a meterorite is really a weak effort not to see the God of the Bible!
Thus, we should realize that it is the best possible thing that science is predominantly controlled by the atheist or agnostic at this time. This is because as this evidence matures, and the realization sets in that the life sciences have proven the necessity of an original designer of DNA, and all its subsequent major transitional changes (by miracles of God's hand), then no one can claim this evidence was set forth by someone with an agenda to prove intelligent design.
And thus in the very same way cosmologists were forced to the Big Bang -- issuing statements entirely compatible if not identical to the statements in the Bible -- life science experts will eventually be forced to say very similar things due to discoveries on DNA.
Richard Dawkins is the world's foremost defender of orthodox Darwinian evolution.
Dawkins recently said in a radio interview on NPR in 2007 and again in a video interview captured in Ben Stein's Expelled (2008) that it is a proper scientific endeavor to detect whether life originated on earth by a designer as long as we posit/assume this designer (or designers) evolved elsewhere. With that objective and that assumption, the investigation of design-features in life on earth, etc., would be a purely scientific venture. It would also fit within Darwinian theory. That theory assumes and proves, Dawkins claims, the ability to create consciousness from pure matter by means of trial and error. Thus, as long as all assumptions are materialistic, Dawkins says science can investigate intelligent design as the root cause for life on earth.
I accept Dr. Dawkins' honesty and his intention behind what some mockingly call the Alien Design Theory. As long as I vigorously assume I am investigating an alien non-terrestrial culture, and I do not ascribe to it supernatural powers to solve knotty problems of causation, I am engaging in a legitimate scientific endeavor. But even so, this eventually will lead us to no conclusion possible other than that life was ingeniously designed, and so was the universe.
Hence, I will reverse engineeer the steps involved in various puzzles to show how an ingenious design is absolutely necessary for various phenomena in Nature. I will prove they were established by an ingenious design harnessing the known laws of physics. Such a pursuit is what Dawkins concedes is legitimate, and this is what every scientist should accept as a legitimate scientific inquiry.
As a result, my inquiry is bounded on two sides so that it cannot be used to establish a religious belief. Creation is not pointing to miracles, but rather that the end-product required ingenious design of the starting conditions or operations of creation. Such scientiific inquiry is not claim we know about the origin of the creator (or creators, if an atheist insists we speak thusly), but of his presence and role, there can be no doubt. Therefore, I envision one day this theory of Ingenious Design could be legally taught in a classroom because it only proves the necessity of design by an ingenious source using powers to control the natural world that we only dream of harnessing.
The reason Ingenious Design can be taught is that there is no religious content in Ingenious Design theory. The theory only proves an intelligence exists elsewhere, and created various items of our universe, including the universe itself. No one can say this scientific inquiry will prove necessarily the existence of God as classicly defined. It proves an intelligent origin -- nothing more and nothing less.
That is not to say that a person of faith will be discouraged by such evidence. They may claim such a designer or designers revealed by this investigation fit the characteristics of God. That the creator has supernatural powers, and thus we can call Him God. But those issues can only be addressed in a Metaphysics classroom. Science cannot study by definition the supernatural, even if it were intelligent. That's why such discussion will not be found within the Ingenious Design paradigm of scientific inquiry.
I am not merely being coy and quiet about who I think is the likely designer, as the current Intelligent Design movement was found in the Dover case to represent (whether rightly or wrongly).
Instead, I am agreeing to investigate a non-terrestrial intelligence as Dawkins agrees is a purely scientific endeavor. I am personally not a materialist, but a theist. Yet, my theism is irrelevant for this investigation. Instead, I will offer theories that are purely scientific of how an intelligence must have created mechanisms or a means to manipulate matter to form, for example, the Sloan Great Wall.
The Sloan Great Wall is a good illustration of what Ingenious Design represents. This structure was discovered in 1985 by Geller and Huchra while working as astrophysicists for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics.
The Sloan Great Wall is a large scale space structure 1 billion light years over our North Pole. It is made of 11,000 galaxies who individually serve as nodes in a honeycomb structure. Its overall exterior form is patterned, even in 3-D, to conform to the image of a little man with a head, two arms, a torso and two legs (known as the Homonculus).
In the chapter on the Great Wall, I will explain the origin of this structure wholly by showing that some intelligence employing the laws of physics in ingenious ways could levitate matter by electromagnetism and stabilize it to conform precisely to the Homonculus -- with every one of thousands of cells being comprised of hexagon-shaped / a honey-comb of spiral galaxies. By the same mechanism, an intelligent designer could maintain the interior structure using 11,000 galaxies where each galaxy one-by-one is fitted as nodes within thousands of hexagons. This is a feat that gravity alone could never do, but an ingenious mechanism can do, and is the only plausible and necessary explanation in Science for the Sloan Great Wall.
Thus, in the analysis of the Sloan Great Wall, I am not resorting to explaining the unknown by miracles. My explanation does not depend on the supernatural. Yet, at the same time, while I discuss this in terms of a non-terrestrial creator at least 1 billion light years from us, I am not committed that such powers are not, by our limited knowledge, a superior control over the physical processes that we are familiar with. If I went into a Metaphysics discussion of the same evidence, I will declare Eureka -- only God in the classic definition explains this superior knowledge and physical manipulation of 11,000 galaxies to shape them in hexagon's with each galaxy a node in the hexagon, and then overall shaped like the outline in 3-D of a Man, the Homonculus. In a Metaphysics course, I can propose non-scientific but no less truth-seeking theorems to analyze whether this intelligence is, in fact, God. But in science as I investigate the Sloan Great Wall, I find ingeniousness on a grand scale that unquestionably was intelligent. What caused it -- whether miracles or a superiour power that we are unfamiliar with but can be intelligently manipulated is beyond what science so far can detect. Only the ingeniousness of doing so is at this point capable of scientific investigation.
This book/webpage also seeks to establish the correct theorem to prove intelligent design. The correct theorem, I believe, is to prove simply an ingenious level of design. This is exhibited in a multitude of specific engineering marvels in our universe. If we are willing to challenge ourselves, and truly think hard, we can perceive GENIUS of an extraordinary magnitude in natural mechanisms that were not conceivably produced by trial and error or wholly unintelligent processes. This is true of DNA, fractals, protein folding, irridescence in butterfly wings, human eyesight, photosynthesis, and the Sloan Great Wall, etc., to just mention a few such phenemona. Only by employing all our greatest scientific minds to explain the engineering principles latent in biological and natural structures can we pay proper respect to the extra-terrestrial designer that Dawkins conceded may be the proper scientific explanation for a natural phenemonon.
Hence, in this book/webpage, science is the limits of inquiry. Thus, the immediate first-step is not to prove creation by a divine being. That is the next step in a study of what these conclusions mean in metaphysics and/or natural history. Religious discussion is beyond the scope of our initial scientific inquiry. Until we examine the science, and prove ingenious design, the issue of WHO is the designer is premature. By keeping these classroom walls between the two topics, we can finally reintroduce into modern science COMMON SENSE -- some things in nature are clearly and indubitably designed, e.g, DNA.
This is a book which is a work in progress. For the latest version, click here
Latest edit: June 23, 2008