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

Consciousness refers to the experiential and phenomenological awareness that characterizes human life. Human consciousness—the subjective observation of events and the processing of those events in thoughts, emotions, and acts of will—is something that is difficult to explain from natural causation alone (some would say impossible). While the physical brain and the experience of consciousness are linked, the physical processes of the brain do not currently provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of consciousness. In philosophy, this difficulty is referred to as the mind/body problem or the “hard problem of consciousness.” If consciousness cannot be explained by physical processes, then this would be a powerful indicator that pure naturalism must be false. Philosophers differ on whether consciousness poses a true challenge to materialism and, if so, on what that challenge’s implications are. For Strobel, however, this problem serves not merely as an example of The Complexity of Biological Systems Challenging Materialism but also as evidence for a creator.

The Copernican Principle is the commonly taught idea that, contrary to what humanity once believed, the Earth is not at the center of the universe in either its physical placement or its overall significance. The Case for a Creator objects to the way the Copernican Principle is framed, noting that humans historically did not believe that the Earth was at the center of the universe (rather holding that it was the dregs of the cosmos throughout the classical and medieval periods). Further, interviewees such as Guillermo Gonzales argue that recent scientific discoveries of Earth’s placement in galactic and circumstellar habitable zones appear to flip the Copernican Principle on its head, suggesting that the Earth’s placement in the universe may, in fact, hold special significance.

“Darwinism,” rather than “evolution,” is Strobel’s term of choice for the hypothesis that life’s complexity gradually emerged from unguided natural processes. This usage is somewhat misleading in its implications. While anyone who believes in an omnipotent deity would, by definition, reject the notion that evolution is wholly “unguided,” many proponents of Darwinian evolution—including Darwin himself—have viewed the theory as compatible with theism. Evolution, in this view, is “guided” in the sense that it operates according to a creator’s purpose, but it does so through mechanisms that can be explained in wholly naturalistic terms (a position sometimes called theistic evolution or evolutionary creationism). Strobel’s definition of Darwinism, then, stands in contrast not to the idea of evolution as a slow and gradual process through which God created life, but rather to intelligent design: the belief that God “guides” evolution in a much more interventionist sense that cannot be explained through natural mechanisms.

Fine-tuning refers to the idea that the values on which the universe operates—the numbers associated with physical constants, for example—appear to be exactly set for the emergence of life. Those values, which have no known reason for being what they are rather than something else, would result in radically inhospitable environments if they were shifted even slightly up or slightly down. Proponents of fine-tuning as an argument for theism argue that such alternate values would not produce a different kind of life (as in one critique of the claim); rather, they would make all life impossible. As such, they argue, the coincidence of these values’ properties all aligning to the necessary parameters for human existence demands an explanation. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe as Evidence for Design is a key plank of Strobel’s case, although it, too, has received some criticism—for instance, for assuming that constants could in practical terms be other than what they are.

Based on the work of Guillermo Gonzalez, the idea of the “habitable zone” refers to the significance of Earth’s placement in the universe. Guillermo argues that based on Earth’s relation to its own sun, the solar system’s relation to its galaxy, and the galaxy’s relation to other galaxies, Earth appears to be in a uniquely advantageous place for the development of life. That is to say, Earth falls in both a circumstellar habitable zone and a galactic habitable zone, in a way that Guillermo contends the vast majority of planets in other solar systems across the universe would not. The extent to which this is true is a matter of scientific debate, but assuming that this representation of Earth’s position is accurate, Strobel suggests, it provides evidence of design.

Strobel uses the term “intelligent design” broadly to refer to the hypothesis that the best explanation for various features of the universe is that they were designed by an external intelligence. In popular usage, it often refers specifically to the idea that natural mechanisms are insufficient to explain evolution. Rather, God is understood to “intervene” in evolution—for instance, by creating structures or processes like the blood-clotting process all at once rather than through a gradual process like natural selection. Though sometimes contrasted with “creationism,” which typically takes a more literalist approach to the biblical story of creation, intelligent design thus incorporates elements of it. That intelligent design rose to prominence as creationist accounts of Earth’s history were being removed from US textbooks has further bolstered critics’ claims that it is essentially creationism packaged in a way that is meant to appeal to a broader audience. For these reasons and others, it is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

Strobel and several of his interviewees object to this characterization on various grounds; Michael Behe, for example, argues against the charge that intelligent design is “unfalsifiable,” noting that it could be falsified if someone were to prove that a natural mechanism could explain the cases of “irreducible complexity” that he describes. Intelligent design, as a theory, usually operates as an abductive argument based on cumulative evidence from multiple fields—that is, as a cumulative case that offers an inference to the best possible explanation.

Irreducible complexity, a key idea in Behe’s work, posits that certain molecular features essential to life are constructed in such a way that they could not possibly have come together through a gradual assemblage of slow, undirected steps (as, he says, classical Darwinism suggests). Behe contends that whereas in Darwin’s day it was thought that the biological operations became simpler on the smaller scales, this has since been shown to be false; even on the smallest scales, biological processes are mind-bogglingly complex, requiring vast storehouses of ordered information and remarkably complicated molecular machines. Some of these molecular machines—for instance, the bacterial flagellum—are so precisely ordered that their individual parts appear to give evidence of irreducible complexity, being essentially functionless at any lower step of assemblage. Behe’s claims have received significant criticism from the scientific community; for instance, Kenneth R. Miller, a professor emeritus of biology at Brown University, argues that various figures have proposed natural mechanisms through which such features could evolve (Miller, Kenneth R. “Review of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 19 Sep. 2008).

The kalam cosmological argument is one of the core ideas behind the work of philosopher William Lane Craig. This argument, adapted from classical and medieval philosophy, is a deductive argument that ostensibly proves that the universe must have had a cause beyond itself. Objections that the universe may have been caused by some other prior universe or multiverse do not effectively refute the argument; they merely push the question of causation one step further back into the past. Craig holds that once the premises and conclusion of the argument are granted, one can examine the idea of what could constitute a “cause” of the universe and thereby arrive at an idea that comes out looking like the classical Christian view of God.