Who Is Our "Intelligent Designer"? Part 1

At the end of the twentieth century, the academic world was hearing more and more about IDM—the Intelligent Design Movement. It was the proposition that the biological world could not have come into existence by mere undirected time and chance. Upon closer inspection, under the lenses of powerful microscopes hitherto unimaginable and irreducible, specified complexity came to light within the cells of living things.

Thus, Charles Darwin and his followers were in total error when they assumed that living cells were simple blobs of protoplasm that could easily “evolve” from lifeless chemicals floating in the earth’s ancient oceans. As one writer expressed it, the actual, incomprehensible, incomparable complexity of the cell was therefore a “black box” to Darwin! The Intelligent Design Movement claims many outstanding scientists and philosophers. They have discovered new ways of detecting signs of intelligence, just like detectives looking for clues or archaeologists searching for undeniably human artifacts. In fact, the federal government has even sponsored an expensive program—SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)—with the expectation that they can determine whether someone—rather than merely something—is really out there!

Of course, thousands of scientists and thinking people in general have seen intelligent design in all the living world. In fact, only a tiny minority of people have ever been consistent atheists! For centuries, it has been recognized that blind, purposeless, meaningless chance could never have produced human minds. If that were the case, then an atheist would have no reason to expect people to believe that what he says is really true! It really requires profound faith to be an evolutionist. No one has explained how the first speck of life could have evolved from lifeless chemicals. Nothing is evolving today. The famous second law of thermodynamics describes a universe that is everywhere and always going downward to cosmic collapse, not upward to higher complexity.

There are trillions of fossils of plants, marine creatures, insects, reptiles, and mammals in the earth’s crust, but no transitional forms connecting lower forms to higher forms have ever been found. Mutations are harmful, if not deadly. “Natural selection” can only select from living things that are here now; it cannot explain how the hundreds of thousands of living kinds got here in the first place. Complex body parts, such as legs and wings, require massive genetic information; but evolutionism has no concept of where such information came from.

Richard Dawkins, professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, perhaps the world’s most prominent atheistic evolutionist, admits that “living objects … look designed, they look overwhelmingly as if they were designed … Biology is the study of complicated things which give the impression of having been designed for a purpose.” To which John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, replied, “Such statements provoke the question: Why? After all, if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, why not call it a duck? Why are such scientists not prepared to draw the obvious inference, and say that living things look as if they are designed precisely because they are designed?” (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? [Oxford, England: Lion Hudson, 2007], p. 77).

Dr. John C. Whitcomb has been a professor of Old Testament and theology for more than 50 years and is widely recognized as a leading biblical scholar. He taught at Grace Theological Seminary (Winona Lake, IN) from 1951-1990 and gained much recognition for his work on The Genesis Flood (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company), which he co-authored with Dr. Henry Morris in 1961. That book has been credited as one of the major catalysts for the modern Biblical creationism movement. His ministry homepage is Whitcomb Ministries, and his sermons are available at SermonAudio.com.