The Case For a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God

The first three chapters of Strobel’s The Case for a Creator establish both its tone and its structure. With regard to tone, the first two chapters set the book’s scientific and philosophical questions in the context of Strobel’s own life experiences, thus giving it a personal quality. This tenor will pervade the book: Not only do Strobel’s own experiences frame the narrative, but the personal backgrounds of his interviewees also help to shape perspectives on much of the evidence they share. This personal tone makes The Case for a Creator accessible as a work of Christian apologetics. Science and philosophy are not framed as dry, abstract topics. Rather, the real-world relevance of the book’s ideas is underscored by the personal context in which they are presented. Essentially, that personal tone indicates that these ideas are powerful enough to change someone’s life because they have already changed the lives of all the book’s interlocutors.

Strobel structures his book in two particular ways: with regard to the narrative, as a journalistic investigation, and with regard to the evidence, as a legal case. Since Strobel’s professional training is as an investigative journalist, this is the lens that he brings to his book. Like the others in his “Case for…” series, then, Strobel’s book is largely formatted as a series of interviews. This enables him to present even challenging ideas in a narrative fashion, as part of the story of a conversation between two (or more) interlocutors, and thus renders his book more broadly accessible than a straightforward rendering of the scientific and philosophical arguments would be. These opening chapters introduce the journalistic paradigm: two chapters that touch on Strobel’s background in journalism, and a third chapter that begins the pattern of interviews. While the legal paradigm of his approach is less evident in this section than it will be later in the book, the compiling of evidence is nonetheless presented as part of a comprehensive case for either materialism (the philosophical position that only matter exists) or theism.

Of the book’s major themes, one emerges as particularly important in this early section: The Complexity of Biological Systems Challenging Materialism. Strobel’s interview with Jonathan Wells underscores this theme, particularly in his discussions of the 1953 Miller experiment and Darwin’s tree of life. In both Miller’s and Darwin’s cases, the assumption was that the molecular and biological realities needed to explain the emergence of life were simpler on smaller scales, gradually becoming more complex at larger scales. Thus, Miller’s experiment, which managed to produce a few amino acids, was hailed as proof that life could emerge from nonliving chemicals. The progress of science in the decades following, however, demonstrated that the sheer complexity of making the building blocks of life is far beyond what Miller anticipated—the amino acids must be present in the right quantities, folded the right way, and structured into the right assemblages to form even the most basic biological molecules. This is a task so immensely complex that not only did Miller’s experiment not get close to it, but the solution that he produced also rendered molecular byproducts that would make it more difficult, according to Wells. 

The principle of unexpected complexity also surprised those scientists trained on Darwin’s tree of life, where Darwin’s assumption that smaller, simpler life forms could gradually complexify themselves into larger and more varied forms is evident. In reality, life at the smallest scales is quite complex (sometimes requiring longer sequences of encoded genetic information than much larger animals do), and the evidence that should demonstrate a clear pattern of transitional forms from simpler to more complex does not appear in the fossil record. By focusing on these points, Strobel begins to build a theme that will become a dominant arc throughout the middle portions of his book: The sheer scale of complexity woven into the universe appears to preclude a purely naturalistic course of development. 

However, it is important to note that while Strobel raises some counterarguments to Wells’s claims—for instance, the particular conditions required for fossilization as an explanation for gaps in the fossil record—he does not have the specific scientific expertise that would allow him to respond to his interviewees’ specific claims. The argument that emerges is thus one-sided, with Strobel’s rebuttals functioning more as straw man argumentation than debate. In a similar vein, the text presumes conflict between theism (particularly Christianity) and the Darwinian theory of evolution, but this is not a mainstream Christian position: Several major sects, including the Catholic church, regard Darwinian evolution as compatible with Christian teachings.

Another theme also makes its first appearance in the opening chapters, though in more muted form: The Scientific Method as a Means of Assessing Evidence for Supernatural Realities. Strobel will deal more fully with the epistemological ramifications of his method in subsequent interviews (epistemology being a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge), but the first three chapters make it clear that he regards scientific evidence as an instructive means by which to infer truths about the nature of reality—including, if it exists, supernatural reality. Whereas certain other philosophical models have attempted to keep scientific questions and religious questions in separate spheres (such as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s famous attempt to define science and religion as a matter of “non-overlapping magisteria”), Strobel takes the approach that truth is truth regardless of the domain of knowledge in which one finds it and that there may be clues in the natural domain that point to a supernatural influence being exerted upon it. Once again, however, it is worth noting that Strobel’s framing of his investigation as scientific is itself open to debate. For example, his use of the four images—all relatively old—to structure his conversation with Wells limits the scope of inquiry, bypassing many more recent and nuanced developments in evolutionary science.