The standard objections to Darwinism have not changed since 1859. Biologists accept Darwinism because, having become acquainted with a lot of relevant evidence, they think these objections can be answered. Still, the biologists could be wrong; we should take nothing for granted. I will now deal quickly with all the objections to Darwinism you are likely to encounter.

Objection #1: There Hasn’t Been Sufficient Time

Darwin’s theory requires many millions of years. Is the Earth that old? By 1800 all geologists, though they were Creationists, accepted that the Earth was many millions of years old. This conclusion was forced upon them by the evidence of the rocks. To mention just one factor, it became clear that in some locations, there had been enormous changes, such as long periods with a totally different climate.

But there was a huge problem. Physicists said that the Earth just could not be older than twenty or thirty million years. In any greater period of time, the Sun would burn out and the Earth would freeze. There was no known type of combustion that could keep burning for a hundred million years, and the idea of any such unknown type of combustion would have been considered utterly fantastic. Early critics could truthfully declare that both Darwin’s theory and geology contradicted elementary physics, and stood condemned by ‘established scientific fact’.

Then, in 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen made an x-ray photograph of the bones in his wife’s hand. Physics soon woke up to the existence of nuclear radiation and nuclear energy. It became clear that there was indeed a type of combustion that could keep a star like the Sun burning for many millions, or even billions, of years—nuclear fusion. Geology was saved and Darwinism was saved. Or, looking at it another way, physics was saved.

Objection #2: We Don’t See Evolution Occurring Today

Perhaps the most common objection among people who have never opened a book on evolutionary biology is that ‘we don’t see evolution going on today’. The Darwinist will reply that we do indeed witness evolution going on today. An example would be a strain of bacteria which acquires immunity to an antibiotic, or rats who acquire immunity to a particular type of rat poison. There are numerous examples of this kind of thing.

The skeptic about Darwinism will say that this isn’t at all what he was getting at. What he means is that we don’t see apes turning into men, we don’t see fish turning into land animals, we don’t see animals which have never flown taking to the air.

The simple answer to this is that such transformations take place gradually over millions of years. Darwinism tells us that we must not expect to witness any such major transformations, from start to finish, because we’re just looking at a few decades, or if we consult historical records, a few thousand years.

Objection #3: We Don’t See Half-Evolved Features of Living Organisms

This, however, misunderstands evolution. There never were any half-evolved features and there never will be. If we were transported back in time to the Earth thirty million years ago, and our memories of modern living organisms erased, what we would see would not look ‘half-evolved’. Everything would look just as complete and finished as things do today, though different.

The paleomastodon, ancestor of the elephant, had a long nose but nothing as spectacular as an elephant’s trunk. The paleomastodon would look quite ‘finished’, and if we were then shown a picture of an elephant, with its amazingly long and versatile trunk, and told that this was where the paleomastodon was headed, we would probably feel that such a preposterous beast as this ‘elephant’ was a bizarre product of opium-induced fantasy.

But, some objectors will say, if we have eyes, there must have been a time when our ancestors had half-eyes. Why don’t we ever see anything like that? First, the eye does not have to be reinvented for every kind of animal. Humans inherit the basic model of the eye from our ape ancestors. All mammals inherit the eye from reptiles, and all reptiles inherit the eye from fish.

Second, there are many living organisms still around today that do indeed have ‘half-eyes’, or even ‘one-tenth eyes’, that’s to say, they have eyes that are a lot more primitive than ours, for example lacking a lens and lacking eyelids (and having only a single eye, rather than two working together). Are these evolving more advanced eyes? Quite possibly some of them are, but we can’t say for sure.

Objection #4: Dogs Don’t Turn into Cats

A standard feature of Creationist thinking is that the ‘kinds’ of living things are fixed. Dogs don’t become cats and giraffes don’t turn into elephants.

This sounds very straightforward, but it’s actually a bit tricky for the Creationists. Creationists cannot deny that some modification of a living population is possible. Creationists will usually accept that basset hounds, beagles, and dandy dinmonts have all been bred from the same original stock of wolves domesticated by humans thousands of years ago. Among many marvels of selective breeding in agriculture, we now have seedless fruits (propagated by humans, who take cuttings of the trees) and cows with such an immense capacity to produce milk that they would soon get sick and die if humans were not there to milk them regularly. So we know that there is nothing keeping a population of living things exactly the same: it can change over the generations.

If all humans today are the descendants of eight individuals who boarded Noah’s Ark somewhere between four thousand and nine thousand years ago, then there must have been quite rapid transformations to produce all the modern races of humankind. The barrel-shaped body of the Eskimo, the lithe physique of the Nilotic tribes, the tiny stature of the pygmies, the abundant body hair of the Caucasian—such physical differences are minor compared with the overall similarity of humans by contrast with other species, yet they are remarkably divergent if we are to suppose that they all evolved from eight people within the last four to nine thousand years. And to make room for all kinds of animal on Noah’s Ark, ‘kinds’ of animal has to be defined very broadly. All the hundreds of thousands of land-dwelling animal species must have evolved from a comparatively few ‘kinds’ within a few thousand years.

Creationists find themselves compelled by the logic of their own Biblical argument to accept that a whole lot of very rapid evolution has occurred. But they also have to claim that there are limits to this process. While a wolf can be turned into a poodle, and a single human family can quickly evolve all the present-day human races, there is some barrier that prevents a wolf or a poodle from being turned into a cat, or an ape into a man, or a fish into a reptile.

Until about 150 years ago, the basic mechanism of heredity had not been discovered, and the precise chemical mechanism was not discovered until around fifty years ago. We now know that there is no barrier keeping evolutionary change within any specific limits. A gene is a gene is a gene. A rat, a limpet, a pineapple, and an Escherichia coli bacterium have exactly the same basic method of reproduction. It’s purely a matter of chemistry, and nothing has been discovered—no ‘barrier’ exists—which would prevent any one of these from being gradually transformed into any other, given immense periods of time.

The mere fact that all organisms share the same hereditary mechanism is itself a startling and brilliant corroboration of Darwinism. If God had separately created various kinds of living organisms, he need not have given plants, animals, and bacteria the same reproductive mechanism. Furthermore, by looking at the DNA of various animals and plants, we can see how closely related they are—and this information meshes well with the evidence from fossils.

Objection #5: New Forms Would Be Swamped

A more subtle and difficult objection to Darwinism is to ask how segments of a single population could diverge at all. If the elephant and the hippopotamus have a common ancestor (as they do), how could that population of common ancestors have split into two populations, one proto-elephant, the other proto-hippopotamus? Surely, as they started to evolve distinctive differences, these differences would promptly be diluted away by interbreeding.

The quick answer is: geographical separation. If two parts of a single population are somehow prevented from interbreeding, they may evolve in different directions. The most obvious candidate for such a prevention of interbreeding is geographical separation. Two populations become separated geographically. Later, the descendants of these two populations may meet again. But possibly, in the interim, they will have become sufficiently different that they no longer readily interbreed. Now that they are again occupying the same territory, but not interbreeding, this actually accentuates the pressure for them to become more dissimilar, for each to specialize in a mode of life that the other population is less favored at.

Biologists now believe that the divergence of one population into two separate species can sometimes occur without geographical separation. But geographical separation is a process, easy to grasp, which sufficiently answers the objection that no such divergence would be possible.

Objection #6: Apes Are Still Here

Larry King has stated on his TV show that evolution is doubtful because we still have monkeys around today. The implication is that if some monkeys—actually apes ¹⁶—evolved into humans, then all apes should have done so. What’s holding them back?

Darwinism certainly tells us that present-day apes could evolve into humans, or could be artificially bred into humans. If we were to take a population of apes, sterilize the ones with the least human-like characteristics and multiply the offspring of those with more human-like characteristics, we could eventually turn them into humans. It would probably take us many thousands of years, but if Darwinism is correct, we could do it—even despite the fact that no modern ape is the same as the population of apes from which humans evolved. This doesn’t mean, though, that surviving populations of wild apes today have the slightest tendency to become more human.

Larry King was probably assuming that the theory of evolution presupposes some inbuilt tendency for advancement or progress, and that therefore there is something in apes that tends to make them more human. There is nothing in evolution that automatically makes a population ‘better’ or ‘more advanced’, though this is not ruled out, either. The great majority of individual living organisms today are bacteria, and no doubt in the distant future, bacteria will survive long after all mammals have become extinct. The great majority of species (as opposed to individual members of species) are insects. By any crude measure, bacteria and insects are immensely more ‘successful’ than humans will ever be, and this is no surprise to a Darwinist.

If you could go back in a time machine a few million years and look at the Australopithecines like ‘Lucy’, comparing them with apes, you would not be struck by any dramatic sign that the Australopithecines were on a fast track to greatness. The Australopithecines were walking upright, but their brains were small, and they were no more intelligent than apes. Australopithecines and apes had diverged, they were different, but one was not ‘superior’ to the other. Very likely at that time there were far more chimpanzee-like animals than Australopithecines, so by that crude measure of ‘success’, our ancestors weren’t terribly successful.

Objection #7: There Are Gaps in the Fossil Record

Fossils found since Darwin’s time strongly bear out what Darwin claimed. Many fossils of animals intermediate between apes and humans have been found, as well as animals intermediate between reptiles and birds, and between fish and land vertebrates.

Darwin’s theory that humans are descended from apes gave rise to the cliché expression, ‘the missing link’, an animal midway between an ape and a human. This expression has fallen out of use, because paleontologists, digging in East Africa and elsewhere, have found several different kinds of ‘missing link’. There’s continuing debate about precisely which of these animals, if any, is the direct ancestor of humans, but there’s no question (among those acquainted with these old bones) that, from six to two million years ago, populations of animals existed which were physically intermediate between apes and humans.

Although there are some examples of living things that have barely changed in many millions of years, still, many of today’s living things did not exist sixty million years ago, and many of the living things of sixty million years ago have died out. The fossil record, for example, completely bears out the Darwinian theory that all land vertebrates (animals with backbones) are descended from fish, and that mammals and birds are both descended from reptiles. In other words, we find fish in early strata where there are no land vertebrates. Then later we find land vertebrates as well as fish. In rocks of just the right age, we find animals transitional between fish and land vertebrates. And we find reptiles and amphibians before we find mammals or birds. Later we find both mammals and birds, alongside reptiles and amphibians.

If we were to find fossils of animals with backbones living on land, older than the earliest fossils of fish, or if we were to find mammals and birds in strata earlier than reptiles, or if we were to find whales in strata earlier than land mammals, these would be major shocks to biological theory. They would probably not lead to the abandonment of evolution itself, but would upset some very well-established views about the specific course evolution has taken. If fossils of living things were found randomly in all ages of rocks, with rabbits, birds, and flowering plants in the earliest strata, evolution itself would have to be abandoned as an account of how the different kinds of living organisms came into existence.

Creationists often say that there are gaps in the fossil record, and that therefore the fossil record does not bear out the Darwinian theory that all adaptations arose very gradually. Creationists very frequently go further, and make outrageously false claims. In just a few seconds I found these statements on Creationist websites: “not a single transitional form has been uncovered” and “The gaps in the fossil record are today actually worse than in Darwin’s time.”

Hundreds of transitional forms have been discovered, just as Darwin predicted, including animals intermediate between apes and modern humans, fish and amphibians, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, and land animals and whales. And these fossils are always in the appropriate layer of rock.

But when the false claims of Creationists have been disposed of, there’s a residue of truth in these allegations about ‘gaps’. Only a handful out of many millions of living organisms are fossilized. To be fossilized, and for the fossils to remain intact through subsequent disturbances, and to be in a place likely to be found by paleontologists, is a freakish accident. For example, less than a dozen specimens of Archeopteryx (an animal intermediate between reptiles and birds) have been found, and only two of these are complete. Yet various species of Archeopteryx must have lived over at least hundreds of thousands, and more likely millions, of years. Some living organisms are known by only one fossil specimen, and we can be sure that millions of species have left no fossils that have been found or ever will be found.

Critics of Darwinism often point out that, although we do see, with many types of animals and plants, a gradual change of forms in the geological record, this gradual change is jerky, not smooth. What we often see is a succession of similar forms, each one slightly different to its predecessor, but still, if looked at in close detail, decidedly different. But this is what we might expect to see, for a couple of reasons.

First is the rarity of fossilization and fossil preservation just mentioned. The other reason is that rapid evolution is most likely to occur in fairly small populations. If one of these small populations (probably a geographically isolated variety of a much bigger population) hits upon some very successful innovation so that this population expands to compete with its more numerous relatives, it is exceptionally unlikely that the original location of that small population will have left any fossils. What will appear in the fossil record, if we’re lucky, is one or two specimens of that expanding smaller population as it invades a larger territory.

Because of the rarity of fossilization and the vastness of geological time, what occurs in just a few thousand years is invisible. To a paleontologist, fifty thousand years is like a single instant, and yet distinct though slight differences in anatomy can easily appear in fifty thousand years.

Can the jerkiness of the fossil record be explained by everything I have just said? Biologists are not all agreed on this. Some theorists of evolution believe that the usual scenario is for populations to stay roughly the same for very long periods. Dramatic evolution, involving major anatomical changes, takes place in rapid spurts—though remember that ‘rapid’ means anything from fifty thousand to a few hundred thousand years.

If someone objects to Darwinism because there is no smooth transition in the fossil record we can ask this person what they think is going on. (To test any theory, we compare it with a rival theory.) Either there is some natural force in evolution that makes populations take a little jump every now and then, or some Intelligent Designer is intervening by giving these populations a little push in ‘the right’ direction—thought ‘the right direction’ is one which will soon be terminated by extinction. Working out a good theory for either of these, the one without God or the one with God, seems like a daunting task, and the people who object to Darwinism don’t seem at all interested in taking up this task.

By the way, paleontologists are expert at reconstructing an entire animal from one or a few bones. A paleontologist may be able to infer from one leg bone or jawbone what an entire skeleton most probably looked like. Some pictures in books on evolution are the results of such reconstructions. Paleontologists have sometimes drawn pictures of what certain animals would have looked like when alive, based on a large amount of deduction from very few bones, combined with some guesswork. In some cases, such pictures have had to be drastically revised, when the later discovery of a more complete skeleton has refuted the assumptions made by the paleontologist-artist who drew those pictures.

Creationists have gotten wind of the fact that such imaginative reconstruction sometimes goes on, and they often mention this in their arguments for Creationism. They claim that many of the pictures of extinct life forms found in biology textbooks are made up and therefore ‘fraudulent’.

So it’s worth mentioning that, with some of these intermediate forms there are several whole specimens of complete fossilized skeletons. This is true of Archeopteryx and it’s true of Tiktaalik. These animals are not imaginative reconstructions by paleontologists, but animals whose entire skeletons have been excellently preserved in several different specimens. These critters really did live and breathe, and they certainly are intermediate ‘links’ between broad ‘kinds’ of living things.

Objection #8: Irreducible Complexity Cannot Arise by Gradual Stages

Intelligent Design (ID) became a watchword and—in non-fundamentalist circles—a scareword, in the early 1990s. I’m looking at arguments for and against the existence of God, so I’m strictly concerned with ID only to the extent that it yields an argument for the God hypothesis.

ID proponents themselves insist that there’s no talk about God in the theory of ID. They contend that the best scientific explanation for some features of living things is that these were ‘intelligently designed’. At that point, Intelligent Design says no more: if someone wants to take the conclusions of ID further and argue for a God, they are stepping beyond ID theory itself. If living things have been designed, we may still debate whether the designer or designers has to amount to God, but at least Darwinism would be false.

Once we strip ID of its political and religious associations, ID is nothing more nor less than one of the old standard objections to Darwinism, dating back to 1859. The objection is as follows:

There are some adaptations in living things which could not possibly have come about by natural selection, because all the parts would have to be in place before any of them could be advantageous to the organism.

ID advocates call such a state of affairs “Irreducible Complexity.” Just suppose, for example, that some essential organ of a living thing consists of five parts, and removal of any one of those parts would cause that organ to cease to function, and the organism to die. Since all five parts are indispensable to the operation of that organ, no one of them could evolve until the other four were in place. In that case, then, the organ could not have

Sidebar: It Doesn’t Matter Much Whether Creationism Is Science

Creationists like to say that they are scientific, and Darwinists dispute this. But from the point of view of the factual issues (rather than the politics of public education), it doesn’t matter much whether Creationism is science or not.

In one sense, that of science as a social institution, Creationism is not science: if you look at Creationist publications you don’t find reports of Creationist research generating new knowledge about living things, or even proposals for any such research. Creationist writers display little interest in extending our knowledge of the world of living organisms. All you find in Creationist publications are criticisms of evolution. The detailed evidence is taken entirely from the work of evolutionists.

However, I don’t see scientists as a new priesthood, to be protected from criticism by non-scientists. Science as an actual institution can go off the rails, as Soviet biology did in the Lysenko affair or as several branches of science did under National Socialism. People who criticize the current conclusions in a branch of science are perfectly entitled to do so, and the fact that they do so from outside that branch of science is no guarantee that they are wrong. Nor does the fact that they do so from religious motives discredit them. One’s motives are immaterial to the strength of one’s arguments, and religiously motivated people have often made outstanding contributions to human knowledge (as when Kepler identified the elliptical orbits of planets, Maxwell discovered magnetic fields, or Lemaître proposed the Big Bang). Science is never sharply separated from the broader culture, and science has always taken some of its hypotheses from outside the institutional arena of science.

We humans find ourselves engaged, willy-nilly, in the vast intergenerational project of discovering truths about the universe and our place in it. This project always takes the form of disputes or debates. The first rule of this project is that no opinions or conjectures are to be ruled out of court or excluded from the general public debate (though, as a matter of economizing on time and other resources, they may reasonably be excluded, provisionally and subject to review, from specialized professional journals or scholarly venues).

The best response to Creationism is not to label it pejoratively or exclude it from discussion, but to argue against it by explaining the evidence that leads biologists to accept the truth of Darwinism.

evolved at all, because the appearance of that organ would require all five parts to be gradually evolving for a long period before the organ could work. If each of the five parts depends for its effectiveness on the existence of the other four parts, then it’s impossible for those five parts to have evolved gradually. It’s essential to Darwinism that evolution cannot look ahead and generate some change because there will be a pay-off later.

This argument doesn’t work. Just because removal of any one of the five parts would now be fatal doesn’t show that this was the case in the past, in the ancestry of that organism. It could be that the contribution of Part #5, for instance, was made in the past by a different part, call it Part #5a. Then Part #5 evolved, in association with Part #5a. Then Part #5a disappeared, leaving only Part #5. And in its turn Part #5a could have originally evolved to serve another function before it became a part of the organ in question. So at least one of Parts #1 through #4 could have evolved before Part #5 appeared. And what holds for Part #5 holds for each of the other four parts.

This had been pointed out by Darwinists before the emergence of the ID movement. For example, in his classic popular discussion of the origin of life, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, first published in 1985, A.G. Cairns-Smith discusses what he calls “essential complexity,” precisely the same concept as ID’s later “irreducible complexity.” He gives the example of stones arranged to form an arch. It’s difficult to see how stones could become arranged like that by incremental trial and error, because the whole arch won’t hold up unless all the stones play their part. However, Cairns-Smith points out that it becomes easy to imagine such an outcome if we suppose that the stones forming the arch was first supported by other stones, which later disappeared.¹⁷ When we look at a product of evolution, we may be seeing something which originally had a scaffolding, even though the scaffolding has long gone. (The scaffolding was not in place because it was a scaffolding. It just happened to act as a scaffolding.)

To address just such a possibility, Behe (the leading proponent of ID) concedes that it would not be impossible for irreducible complexity to evolve “by an indirect circuitous route. However, as the complexity of an interacting system increases, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously” (Behe 2001, p. 94). This last assertion is surely false. One aspect which would make the “indirect circuitous route” more likely would be if organisms rely upon several different methods to achieve the same outcome, and perhaps such an aspect is more likely with the most highly complex systems. Living things do often achieve the same functions in several different ways simultaneously: something called redundancy. It’s like wearing both suspenders and a belt—on pants that already have elastic sewn in the waist.

Irreducible Complexity Is Not Paley’s Argument

Although it’s often stated that the Irreducible Complexity Argument is similar to Paley’s Design Argument, they are actually quite distinct. Some people may advance both arguments, or may even slip without noticing from one to the other, but they are different. Paley’s argument is that adaptations are too complex to have come about by chance. The ID argument is that some adaptations possess a special kind of complexity that could not have come about gradually. Notice that, following the logic of the ID argument, even an Intelligent Designer could not have brought about these adaptations by the accumulation of minute alterations, but only by an instantaneous ‘back to the drawing-board’ redesign (unless the minute alterations were accompanied by miraculous protection from competition, so that initially useless organs could develop).

Although ID supporters are reticent about this, and many in the lower ranks might repudiate it, the position taken by the intellectual leaders of ID (Behe and Dembski) implies that the vast majority of adaptations could have come about by Darwinian natural selection, and only a small minority require the intervention of a Designer. Behe, the movement’s most distinguished author, has said that he sees no reason to repudiate the descent of all living things from a single ancestor. Biblical Creationists have noticed this aspect of the ID movement and now regularly criticize it.

Paley died over fifty years before Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared. Paley could not comment on Darwin’s theory and although Paley’s argument is directed against pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, he never gets into the nuts and bolts of how evolution might occur. Because Paley wasn’t looking at Darwinism, he sees no great difference between a complex adaptation coming into being instantaneously and doing so by gradual stages: both appear to him equally unlikely. But the Irreducible Complexity Argument tries to show that some aspects of living things could not have come about by gradual stages. It is specifically a response to Darwinism.

Closer to Paley’s argument is the argument from Specified Complexity advanced by ID theorist William Dembski. Dembski’s argument is based on the sheer improbability of certain combinations coming about by chance, so it assumes that Behe’s argument from Irreducible Complexity is correct—that these combinations could not have emerged by natural selection.

Getting Here from There

Irreducible Complexity says that some adaptations exist for which there is no possible evolutionary route. ‘You can’t get here from there’. The whole question of whether you can get here from there has constantly preoccupied theorists of evolution.

If we start to wonder whether we could have gotten here from there by gradual evolution, three possibilities may occur to us:

1. It’s just impossible to get here from there.

2. It’s puzzling to see how we could have gotten here from there.

3. We don’t know the precise route by which we got here from there.

The ID movement has tended to announce what seems like #1, then slide to #2 or #3. There are many, many examples of #3 and quite a lot of examples of #2, but no demonstrated examples of #1.

The wings of an eagle are complex and superbly adapted to the eagle’s hunting habits. But there’s no suspicion of Irreducible Complexity in this case. There’s really no problem for us to conceive of wings developing from front legs, by gradual stages over immense periods of time. We know that there are some animals that cannot fly, but can glide to a greater or lesser extent. An animal that climbs high trees might have its life saved by even a very slight tendency to glide with the aid of its feet, and we do know of many animals with varying degrees of partial flying or gliding ability. So the wing doesn’t have to be complete before it can help a particular type of animal. There’s no part of a wing that’s indispensable to the process of flight. And once a wing has developed, there’s no problem about its developing into a highly specialized wing for a swooping predator.

An eagle’s wings might have been cited by Paley (though they weren’t). An eagle’s wings are more complex than a watch and they are obviously ‘for flying and hunting with’. But an eagle’s wings would never be cited as proof of design by an ID proponent, or by anyone after Darwin, because they clearly lack Irreducible Complexity. Similarly, there’s no Irreducible Complexity in Paley’s famous example, the human eye. The eye is not made up of components each of which just had to be in place before any of the others could work.

There are examples where a quick glance evokes puzzlement. Some fish are able to deliver a powerful electric shock, which they employ as a weapon, either to stun their prey or as a defense against predators. It doesn’t look as if there is any way this weapon could possibly have developed gradually. A lot of complex apparatus has to be in place before an animal can deliver a powerful electric shock to its enemies, and, it seems, a very mild electric shock would be useless. This example might have been cited by Creationists (though I have not come across any such use of it).

However, there’s an easy solution to this one. Many fish use very weak electric currents as means of communication and others use them as a way of sensing features of their environment. There is no problem therefore about understanding how organs could develop to fulfill these functions, and then evolve to make the electric current somewhat stronger. It might then occur that an electric current used for communication or sensing could have the incidental effect of stunning or deterring another animal, and natural selection could take it from there.

Some kinds of bacteria have tails with which they can swim. These tails or ‘flagella’ have quite a complex structure. When ID began, this was Exhibit A in the case against Darwinism. Thirty proteins are involved in the creation of the flagellum and, the ID people argued, all thirty had to be in place before the flagellum could work.

No sooner was this claim made than it was refuted. It was discovered that ten of these thirty proteins were responsible for forming the secretory organ of some bacteria. So it’s not true that all thirty proteins had to be in place before any of them could be.¹⁸

What ID proponents wish would happen, and sometimes erroneously imply has happened, just could imaginably happen. Scientists looking at the evolution of complex systems might begin to be baffled by inexplicable examples of Irreducible Complexity, and might begin to consider the hypothesis of intervention by a Designer.

Some people have claimed that science cannot consider this possibility, but ID proponents have quite correctly pointed out that this is mistaken. Science does not exclude considerations of possible design. For example, SETI, the program looking for evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, analyzes signals to determine whether any of them signify intelligent life. SETI is trying to determine whether any signals show evidence of design. Hypothetically, it’s entirely possible that, for instance, metal objects might be found floating in space or resting on the ocean floor, and scientists would be called upon to decide whether these were natural formations or intelligently designed products of a sentient civilization.

What’s wrong with ID is not that science rules out in advance the possibility of an Intelligent Designer—science does no such thing—but that the evidence so far is against any such possibility.

The Designer’s Limitations

If we accept Intelligent Design theory, we accept the existence of an Intelligent Designer, or several intelligent designers, intervening on many thousands, or millions, of separate occasions, to help along the process of evolution. But this is where Charles Darwin came in.

Years before Darwin developed the notion of natural selection as a force capable of generating exquisitely complex adaptations, he was struck by the fact that, given the results of geological dating, Creationism required a Creator who intervened piecemeal and repeatedly, over many millions of years, with no indication of any overall plan, and creating many organisms only to see them become extinct. At first a Creationist, Darwin considered this kind of repeated and undirected intervention so dubious that a purely natural explanation began to seem more appealing to him, and this eventually led him to consider natural selection.

Intelligent Design theory makes no attempt to analyze the character of the Designer from the data of the Designer’s performance. It is merely concerned with accumulating examples suggesting that there is a Designer, and that Darwinism can be rejected—and there the theory of Intelligent Design stops.

There are many cases where we don’t know the path evolution actually might have taken. It’s always possible to point to some adaptation, assert that it could not possibly have come about by accumulated gradual adjustments, and reiterate this assertion for as long as biologists have not come up with any specific evolutionary pathway.

However, this is to look at only half the evidence relevant to the design hypothesis. We also have to consider those many aspects of living organisms which appear, from a design point of view, to be botched and incompetent. If the Designer is so Intelligent, how come he keeps screwing up?

Examples of outrageously bad ‘design’ can usually be explained by the path evolution has taken. There really are cases where ‘you can’t get here from there’, or at least it’s too improbable. Since natural selection cannot look ahead and try a radically different approach to solving a particular problem, but always has to move by slow increments from something which has worked in the recent past, there will sometimes be cases where the outcome is just hopelessly inefficient.

There are innumerable such examples. One is the fact that human babies naturally have to be born through the bone-enclosed pelvic opening. Untold billions of babies and their mothers have died in childbirth because of this elementary ‘design flaw’, which arose because humans are descended from animals that scampered on all fours. In many cases today, the birth opening which idiot nature failed to hit upon is provided by a surgeon, in a caesarian section. This saves the lives of millions, and in many more cases reduces brain damage to the infant or hours of discomfort to the mother. Any intelligent designer planning the human body from scratch would have installed a birth opening in the lower abdomen, where there is no tight constriction by bones. But natural selection could not accomplish this clear and obvious improvement, because there was no way to get ‘there from here’ by minute adjustments.

The human body is an exhibition of engineering disasters.¹⁹ The routing of the optic nerve through the front of the retina, so that there is a ‘blind spot’ in each eye, and the routing of the male testis around the ureter, when it would be so much simpler and more efficient to take a direct route, are other instances.²⁰ These sorry failings do not contradict the proposition that many features of the human body display marvelous construction, sometimes far exceeding what could have been accomplished by human ingenuity. The two aspects exist side by side: dazzling sophistication and crude sloppiness. ID theory has no explanation to offer for the latter. Darwinism tells us to expect both. A striking example occurring in all mammals is the routing of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which instead of going directly from the brain to the larynx, makes a completely pointless detour to loop around a lung ligament. In the giraffe, whose neck lengthened in the course of evolution, this nerve is twenty feet long, instead of the required one foot.

Why can’t evolution itself take care of these problems? Why can’t evolution create a new birth canal in humans, reroute the optic nerve into the back of the retina, or shorten the routes of the male ureter and the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the giraffe’s neck? The answer is that once a highly complex ‘basic plan’ for an animal’s body is in place, there are some improvements that cannot be accomplished by slight changes, but only by a radical redesign. There are indeed cases where you can’t get here from there, and precisely in such cases, very obvious and simple improvements don’t come about in nature, exactly as Darwinism leads us to expect.

Aside from cases of bad design, there are also aspects of the actual process of evolution which are difficult to explain from a Design point of view. Why did life for at least a billion years consist of nothing but single-celled organisms such as bacteria? Why were all plants non-flowering until 130 million years ago, when flowering plants proliferated into thousands of diverse forms? This doesn’t give the impression of a Designer who had any idea where he was going. Facts like these are puzzling if we assume there’s a Designer. If there’s no Designer (or a designer of strictly limited powers), these facts fall naturally into place: they are what we would expect.

If there were some complex adaptations which could not be explained by natural selection, there would still be the possibility of some non-Design explanation. A few biologists believe that natural selection needs to be supplemented not by design but by self-organization. Some arrangements of matter spontaneously form themselves into organized shapes. For example, water vapor freezing in the atmosphere forms itself into intricate six-pointed crystals—snowflakes. Stuart Kauffman argues that self-organization tends to create complicated structures in living things, and that natural selection works on improving those structures. Kauffman’s intriguing theories have appealed to some scholars in several disciplines, but have not so far been adopted by mainstream biology.

Did God Create through Evolution?

As long as God is accorded a hands-off and self-effacing role, Darwinism doesn’t contradict God’s existence. People who believe in both God and Darwinism insist that theism and Darwinism can be reconciled but they usually don’t offer any distinctive reasons for believing in God.

The Christian biologist Kenneth Miller spends about two-thirds of his justly admired book, Finding Darwin’s God, arguing that Darwinism is true and that Creationism is untenable. Most of the remaining third is devoted to showing that Darwinism is compatible with theism. Very little indication is given as to why theism should be supposed to be true. Miller thinks that quantum indeterminism favors the existence of God, though his reasoning here is unclear. He also appeals to the Improbable Universe Argument, which we’ll be looking at in Chapter 5.

Theists who embrace Darwinism often retain the ten qualities of classical theism. So they usually believe that God could have directly created living things, but chose instead to set up a universe in which living things would probably emerge, in some tiny corner or other of that universe, after billions of years of the blind working out of the initial conditions. Such theists usually also retain the theory that God made the universe for the benefit of humans or other intelligent creatures. Miller specifically says that God had to leave it up to chance whether the intelligent creatures which would emerge would be human or something very different.

This theory naturally raises the question why God chose to create intelligent animals in such an indirect way. It seems more promising to speculate that God set up the universe to achieve some purposes unknown to us, and that the possible emergence of intelligent life is just a curious little bonus, or perhaps a contamination, like a yeast infection in a winery. But theists, and especially theologians, show no interest in that kind of thinking. A contemplative cockroach might conclude that the entire ensemble of human artifacts has been built solely for the benefit of cockroaches (or for the elect of cockroaches who will be saved), and theologians tend to think in that fashion.

When they discuss these issues, Darwinist theists often lapse into the tacit denial of God’s omnipotence. If God is omnipotent he could have brought about any of the results of evolution without evolution. Therefore any attempt to surmise that the reason God created by means of evolution was because of some of the good qualities emerging from evolution implies God’s lack of omnipotence. Often, theists apparently don’t notice this.

Francisco Ayala is a superstar of evolutionary biology who has retained the Roman Catholic beliefs of his childhood. In Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, he follows the same pattern as Miller: he explains the reasons why evolution by natural selection is true and Creationism false, without offering any arguments for God. Oddly, he describes the discovery of evolution as a relief, apparently because we don’t need to blame God for the evils of nature. However, the Catholic conception of God requires that (even if evolution were true) God could have created life, including humankind, without evolution. Thus, if such a God exists, he made the deliberate choice to have life evolve with all its evils, when he could have just as easily chosen to create equally diverse and wonderful life without such evils. The basis for Ayala’s sense of relief is hard to make out.

John Haught advances an “evolutionary theology,” accepting Darwinism and a kind of process theology, in which Creation is unfinished. Again, there is a demonstration that theism and evolution are compatible without much in the way of arguments for theism. The only two I noticed are the Improbable Universe Argument and the Argument from Consciousness.

Where Did the First Life Come From?

Theists sometimes claim that, even if all life has evolved from simple organisms like bacteria, the beginning of life itself couldn’t have occurred naturally. Therefore, God was needed to kick off the whole process of evolution.

In recent decades there has been a transformation of our understanding of the very meaning of ‘life’. As recently as fifty years ago, it was common for theists to assert that living organisms are separated from non-living matter because they contain some ‘vital essence’ in addition to their physical structure. With advances in molecular biology, this claim has now been completely abandoned. No one now disputes that living things are alive purely because of their physical composition. Just get the right chemicals in the right arrangement, and you have something alive. In that sense, the ‘mystery of life’ has vanished.

The puzzle about the origin of life is to find what kinds of circumstances, that could have arisen on the early Earth, could have led to the right chemicals coming together in the right way. Several rival theories for the origin of the first life are proposed by different biologists, but none of them yet commands general acceptance.

Although I mentioned all existing life developing from “simple organisms like bacteria,” I meant “simple” by comparison with more elaborate organisms like centipedes or dandelions. Bacteria are actually very complicated (if we compare one of them with, say, an auto assembly plant). Evidence currently suggests that some of the bacteria that lived on Earth three billion years ago are closely similar to some of those around today.

All life that we know today reproduces by the same chemical method (using DNA), but this method is itself highly complex, and was therefore (if there was no designing intervention by a God, a godling, or a space-alien Johnny Appleseed) itself the end-product of a long process of evolution. The challenge for theorists of the origin of life is to reconstruct that process of evolution, by showing a possible route from the lifeless Earth as it existed four billion years ago to the emergence of ‘simple’ organisms like bacteria three billion years ago. It will then be possible to test such a theory in two ways: by finding actual fossil traces of simple pre-DNA life and by setting up artificial laboratory conditions as they were on Earth before DNA and watching for various stages of this pre-DNA evolution to occur.

The first thing we need for life to emerge is the existence of molecules which, in the right chemical environment, can make copies of themselves. Such molecules do exist in non-living matter (the process is called ‘autocatalysis’), and would have existed in abundance on the Earth before life emerged. Several stages are needed to get from simple autocatalysis to DNA, and the puzzle is to reconstruct those stages.²¹

The outlook for a convincing story of precisely what happened is currently less rosy than it seemed half a century ago. In 1953 Stanley Miller put together in a glass container the gases that were then thought to compose the atmosphere of the early Earth (mainly ammonia and methane), along with boiling water, and subjected this to electrical sparks. Amino acids (the basic building blocks of all proteins) and other complex organic chemicals spontaneously appeared within a week. Subsequent experiments also generated nucleic acids, the molecules that organize into DNA and RNA. Many people in the 1960s supposed that the details would soon be worked out and we would have an adequate theory of life’s origin. As it turned out, the evidence now suggests that conditions on the early Earth were less favorable: instead of an atmosphere of methane and ammonia, there was probably an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with some traces of oxygen (which would have been destructive to the first living things).

Experiments recreating these early conditions still generate amino acids. In fact all twenty amino acids actually found in today’s living organisms will spring into existence if the atmosphere of the early Earth is recreated in the laboratory, though not as readily as in Stanley Miller’s experiment. Some amino acids have even been detected in meteorites and in the dust in outer space. The theory that life itself came to Earth from outer space is currently not favored, but very likely some organic chemicals which would be part of the first living things did arrive in this way.

However, other difficulties have been noticed. Before living organisms had generated the present atmosphere, chemicals on Earth would have been subject to lethal doses of ultra-violet radiation. Some scientists have therefore suggested that life might have arisen, not on the surface, but in deep sea volcanic vents.

Is Life Just Too Improbable?

One argument for God’s existence is that the coming together of ‘the right chemicals’ is so improbable that it could never have happened by chance. Theists who advance this argument routinely make mistakes in their calculations.²² They assume that molecules found in today’s living organisms must have come together by chance, whereas scientists all agree that these are the results of a long evolutionary process. The earliest living thing would be simpler than anything still around today. Even within the present-day molecules, Creationists often wrongly assume that the chemicals we do find are the only ones that would work at all.

Creationists also usually assume, in calculating their probabilities, that there is only one sequence of trials. In effect, they assume that there is just one molecule and we are calculating the probability that this would develop in a specific way. But in fact there would be trillions upon trillions of such molecules—and the beginning of life only has to happen once.

It’s imaginable that biologists working in this area might one day find that all routes to the emergence of life by ordinary physical processes are fantastically improbable. If this happens, it will lend support to the hypothesis that some outside intervention was needed to start life on Earth. But (as far as I have been able to determine) not one of the biologists working in this area now expects that this is at all likely.