By Design: Science and the Search for God

This book is a good and fair survey and history of the Intelligent Design movement. Included is coverage of the Discovery Institute out of Seattle, which is promoting a critical examination of Darwinism/evolution as is taught in our schools. The author is even-handed and presents information and views of opponents as well as proponents. The book is readable, well-written. I especially recommend it to anyone who thinks the intelligent design movement is just a bunch of kooky, right wing, young earth types.

Early in his career, award winning science writer Larry Witham examined the (sometimes ponderous and often dogmatic) ideas of the positivistic-leaning old school of "normal science" -- to borrow Kuhn's characterization. Although an entrenched orthodoxy, science underwritten by a rigid philosophical materialism has been encountering increased difficulty in verifying its more important predictions and its assumed creed, the so-called Mediocrity Principle (the doctrine that our universe, Earth, life, and humankind are not special). Witham seems to have now carved himself an important niche, writing about the issues at the interface of science and religion. He continues to interview the 'old school' of course, and presents those (often virulently anti-theistic) arguments honestly and evenhandedly, but more scientists are now recognizing the difficulties of materialism's mediocrity doctrine than the standing paradigm would have the nonscientific community believe. In a modest 200 pages, Witham gives us a considerable range of interviews and arguments from most of the major voices in this dialog today. The result is a very engaging discourse on the history of the ID hypothesis, beginning with MP Schutzenberger's mathematical dismissal of the neo-Darwinian "synthesis" in the very midst of Darwinism's would-be victory celebration in Chicago in 1959. I had a hard time putting the book down. Everyone knows where Steven Weinberg stands, and where William Dempski stands (and one could fill out a list in both categories), but what do we hear from such interested 'bystanders' as Alan Sandage, George Ellis, Paul Davies, Simon Conway Morris, and others? You might be surprised. The reader who assumes Weinberg's view -- that the dialog is inherently 'wrong' and should not be permitted a hearing -- may not care for this volume. And that's too bad, Witham is no dogmatist (most theist's wouldn't subtitle their book "the Search for God"), he's a dispassionate journalist intent on giving both general views a fair hearing. He does exactly that, restricting a philosophical battle that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks (Epicurus versus Plato, we might say), to the scientific developments of the past four decades, although reaching back to Hubble's 1929 discovery for foundation. If you are interested only in one pole's case against the other, this may not be the volume you're looking for. There will be certain materialists who will derisively call Witham a fundamentalist merely because he allows ID scientists their view. If you are one who can approach these issues with an honest curiosity, you will greatly enjoy this book.

When I started reading this book I was a little disappointed because it focused on the development of the Intelligent Design(ID) movement, and did not cover much of the science behind Intelligent Design. Nevertheless, after finishing the book I was very surprised and pleased with the content of the book. Beginning with the Darwinian centennial of 1959, Witham begins by showing how science exuded confidence and hubris over the fact that science was apparently on the verge of solving the mystery of life's origins. Yet, even before the centennial celebration cracks in Darwinian theory were already beginning to appear; From Francis Crick's discovery of the complex double helix structure of DNA, to new findings in molecular biology, to the anthropic principle in astronomy, new discoveries seem to be casting doubt on the principle that we live in a purposeless universe and that man is nothing more than a cosmic accident residing in a backwater location in the universe. Moreover, Witham covers the growth and development of the ID movement from the Templeton foundation to various academic establishments attempting to break into mainstream science. All of the major players are mentioned including: Behe, Johnson, Dembski, Polkinhorne and others. It is quite sad that these men remain on the outside looking in in regards to the scientific establishment because they have a lot to say and raise some interesting questions. Yet, as Witham notes the scientific establishment gets to make it's own rules and disregard anyone who doesn't abide by their rules, and the Darwinian majority seems to be wed to Darwinian theory because they are afraid or unwilling to consider purposeful design. They are like the medieval astronomers who continued to accept Ptolemaic astronomy even though it had developed into a great monster. Hopefully, the ID movement will continue to press on and make inroads into mainstream science where their theories and ideas can be evaluated critically and not rejected outright as fundamentalist creationism.

This overview of the intelligent design movement is guaranteed to drive certain people crazy. Foremost among them will be fans of Richard Dawkins's "The Blind Watchmaker" and other acolytes of the modern religion of Scientism. Not science, mind you, which requires an open, inquisitive approach to data, but Scientism, the slavish devotion to the god Theory. Darwin handed down his discoveries, the earth shook, the sky trembled, don't try to teach anything else in OUR public schools.The problem, as Witham demonstrates in his work, is that there are a great many questions left unanswered by Darwin, most of them revolving around what Michael Behe calls "irreducible complexity." There is no need to resort to the thought experiment of finding a watch in a field, as Dawkins does in his attempt to prove that random selection is the only force capable of or sufficent to explaining the world around us.Behe, cited by Witham, makes things much easier: a simple mousetrap, with only five working parts, cannot have come together over billions of years by any natural process known or suspected. Half a mousetrap is useless, as is four-fifths. Only the complete mechanism will function, and the odds of a mousetrap "evolving" are astronomically, vanishingly small.(Which begs an interesting question: Does Dawkins, and by extension his fans the Priests of Darwin, actually believe that a mechanism as complex as a pocketwatch will appear before their eyes if they sit in a field waiting for sufficient eons?)Witham approaches this fascinating area of inquiry as an intelligent layman, surveying the experts in the field with an eye to offering the reader as complete an exposition of the intelligent design question as possible.Highly recommended, but only to those willing to have their eyes, and minds, opened wide.

This book is an intriguing look into one of the most significant debates of our time: God and Science. Except that Witham shows it to be not so much an argument as a conversation. He shows how the stranglehold of Darwinism (the last of the three great 19th century intellectual pillars standing after the fall of Freudianism and Marxism) on our intellectual world has begun to weaken as men and women of science have found evidence of "design" not explained by the Darwinian paradigm. This book provides a look at one of the cutting edges of contemporary science which happens to be about the possibility of a Creator. Highly recommended.