A Conversation on Science and Faith

Behe: I went to Catholic schools for grade school and high school. I was taught that God was the creator of the universe and of life but exactly how He did it was a matter for science to determine, and that the best bet that anybody has come up with so far is Darwin's theory. That all sounded just fine to me, so I'd never thought much about evolution. Throughout my studies in college as well, I didn't really talk or think much about the subject.

It was around 1986 or ‘87, when I was an associate professor at Lehigh, I read a book called Evolution: Theory and Crisis by Michael Denton, who was an Australian bioscientist. He pointed out a number of problems with the scientific aspects of Darwin's theory that I had never heard before. At that point I started to get mad - here was the fundamental theory of biology and there were clearly large problems with it that not only had I not thought of on my own but none of my professors had ever pointed out to me.

I am a biochemist, so when you go to graduate school you are exposed to the little machines and the systems that keep the cell running, the biochemical systems. They are extraordinarily complex. But throughout my study professors glibly assured everyone that "Well, yes, evolution produced these things." After I read Denton's book I went to the science journals, thinking if anybody had explained how these things came about, you should be able to find the papers. And they weren't there. At that point I started to become very, very interested in evolution.

I think any biochemist - or anybody who has ever seen the blood clotting system or intracellular transport or anything like that - sees how enormously complex they are. Instinctively they realize here is a big problem for gradualistic Darwinian evolution. After I became disenchanted, I started to try to put my finger on it. I eventually came up with the idea of irreducible complexity. I think this is the main problem of Darwin's theory.

One thing I have learned from this is that a Christian scientist is freer to examine the evidence in this domain than a materialist who is a scientist. The materialist simply has to believe that Darwinism or something similar to that is true, whereas a Christian knows there is a source - there is something else out there besides atoms, molecules and motion that could be the reason for life or the universe. God might have created by natural law; maybe He didn't. And so we have to look at the evidence, and we decide on the basis of the evidence. That led me to where I am now.

Duduit: What has been the response among your colleagues and others to this book and to the positions you have been taking?

Behe: Some people think it is really neat and, of course, some people just hate it. At Lehigh, in my own department, about a third of the faculty more or less agrees with me. They tend to be the younger, molecular types. About a third of the faculty doesn't care. It's not in their line of research, and they are not really interested in the issue. About a third of them are evolutionary biologists who don't like this idea of intelligent design at all. When you speak with them, it is clear that they haven't the foggiest idea how these systems could have been produced by natural selection. But they are philosophically committed to the idea that science has to explain life at least by non-intelligent, natural law processes. The disagreement is on a more fundamental level than just looking at the data.

The reviews of my book by scientists have been mixed, too. There have been a number of scientists who have been tolerant of the book. There are a number who just have gone apoplectic and can't tolerate the suggestion of intelligent design and will ascribe to you dark motives and such things. I've gotten a lot of e-mails and letters from scientists very supportive of the book and saying things like, "Yes, I had thought this all along, too." The official word is that naturalism is by definition what science has to use. But there is a large undercurrent of scientists who are dissatisfied with that. I think the momentum is with the intelligent design side. With the progress of science in the next decade - it’s just accelerating so fast - I think it will become obvious even to reluctant people that something is very wrong with Darwinism and that intelligent design will look more and more attractive.

Huggins: Have you heard from any of the gurus of gradualism or the potentates of punctuated equilibrium that might respond to your challenge here?

Behe: I haven't heard directly from Stephen J. Gould or Richard Dawkins [two well-known scientists who advocate Darwinian evolution], but I’ve heard that Dawkins has been plagued by questions about my book at his speaking engagements. I got a call from a television show called "Think Tank." Richard Dawkins was going to tour the U.S. to promote his latest book last year, and the host invited me to be on with Dawkins and talk about this. I said, "Sure." Dawkins absolutely refused to appear on the television show if I was going to be on it, too. So, they disinvited me and they did the show with him. I were annoyed at first, but the moderator asked him some tough questions so I was pleased.

The host asked him what he thought of the book. Dawkins admitted he is not a molecular biologist or biochemist. He doesn’t have any response for these arguments but nonetheless it’s wrong because - just because science doesn't work like that. He said I'm cowardly, and I'm lazy, and if I could think for myself I would go out there and show how Darwinian evolution would produce, say, the bacterial flagellum or other structures like that.

So if I thought for myself, I would agree with him. Clearly he didn’t have a substantial response.

Gould has been asked about the book too, and he says he doesn't have the expertise to address this. People with the expertise, biochemists, all of them have admitted the problems that I've pointed out are unsolved and the systems are horrendously complex. The responses have been, "We'll figure these out in the future." One, Darwinian naturalism will figure them out in the future. Two, some other naturalistic theory besides Darwinism might figure them out in the future. Or three, Behe is a jerk! Those are the three main lines of argument, not necessarily in that order!

The book was reviewed in Nature; it's been reviewed in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and a number of places where it’s been reviewed by members of the National Academy of Sciences and people who know what they are doing. Nobody has been able to say, "Well, he missed this paper here where it clearly explains how this system could be evolved." No one has even said, "There’s this body of literature working on the problem and making some progress." That would encourage us to think that it would be solved in the future. Mostly it's been appeals to philosophy - science can't control intelligent design because of some philosophical consideration. Again I think that's at least one place where Christian scientists aren't in the same straight jacket that naturalists are. They can have their philosophy. Who am I to tell God what to do? What's the evidence? If the evidence does not look like Darwinian evolution is up to the task, then a Christian scientist has no special obligation to think that - to pigeon-hole it into that position, whereas a materialist does.

Wofford: I think for me, what Dr. Behe has done is formalize a lot of things that I have thought all along. I hadn't expressed them as eloquently and defined them as well as he has. But as I looked at the concept, I always ran into problems at the molecular level. That's where the big gaps were, and that's where the huge jumps in logic were. What Dr. Behe has done is given me a framework for organizing my thinking. That's been very helpful for me.

"The more you learn, the more you realize how intricately everything is interrelated..." Wayne Wofford, director for the Center for Scientific Studies and associate professor of biology.

Huggins: I have felt for some time that evolution is in trouble. I know that there are tremendous difficulties at the organismal level for the evolutionist. They are not as immense as the problems we see here, but they’ve been plaguing the scientific community for many, many years. So I applaud your effort. I think these roadblocks were something that we should have probably picked up on years ago.

Behe: I think everybody has recognized these problems at one level or another. It’s just not that hard to see. Once you know the biochemistry, it's pretty straightforward. I think the problem is sociological; we were in the grip of this theory held over from the last century and applied to the molecular level even when we weren’t sure that it would apply to the molecular level. It is just the progress of science. I couldn't have written a book like this 15 or 20 years ago because people would say not enough is known. They’d say, "Well, when we find out more then everything will dissolve into simplicity." It didn't dissolve into simplicity; it became more complex. It is still becoming more complex.

Wofford: In the 1950s there was a period of great optimism about science and its ability to solve all our problems; for example, people were thinking that computers would be very shortly interpreting human language. They thought it was a trivial effort to get a computer to beat a human in chess. I think there was just a general optimism that science was going to answer all of these problems. We have realized since then that these problems are immensely complex.

Behe: It’s fascinating. I sometimes hear people say science has been explaining things so that it leaves less and less room for religion. As science is explaining more and more, God is pushed further and further back. If you look at the 20th century, however, it has been science or scientism that has been pushed further and further back. In Darwin's day, the universe was thought to be eternal and unchanging. Life was thought to be produced easily from sea slime coming up from the ocean floor. In the 1950s with [experiments by scientist] Stanley Miller it was thought all you had to do was have an electric spark from gases and you were on your way to life. Instead, the case for intelligent design is becoming stronger and stronger as science has progressed, with the more we know. So I think these folks are whistling past the graveyard. The more science knows, the less it supports materialism or scientism and the more it shows that traditional modes of Christian thinking are coming much closer to the big picture than not.

Wofford: I think we do have to be very careful that we don't try to use science to address religious issues and we don't try to take the Bible to prove certain scientific observations. But it is not always easy to separate science and religion. There have been more and more attempts, I think, in recent years to blend some of these kinds of ideas. One of the things that I read was that someone was considering the idea of the Big Bang. Astrophysicists and people who work on this do their calculations and project what could have happened an hour after the Big Bang, two minutes after the Big Bang, however far you want to go. You can't go beyond the Big Bang scientifically, and some people have used that as an indication that since you don't know what happened before the Big Bang, that leaves room for there to be a God. So people are not always keeping those two realms separate. It's not always that easy to do.

Behe: I certainly do agree with you. Of course, on both sides of the issue, religious folks have sometimes extrapolated into the natural world - perhaps over-extrapolated. But a lot of aggressive scientists with an agenda have also extrapolated into theological questions. It’s certainly no secret that Carl Sagan would get on television and tell people that the universe is all there ever is or ever will be, making a theological statement. Religion and science do sometimes overlap.

If they make claims about the world, then clearly they are overlapping. Religion says the universe has a beginning, and science in the 19th century said the universe does not have a beginning. Then they are in conflict. They’re saying different things about the same universe. If science, as some scientists do now, says our emotions and our morality are simply the product of an evolutionary process and could have been different, and religion says that our moral principles are derived from God - that our emotions, our ability to think are not reducible to products of natural selection - then you have room for conflict. When you do, then you can have a side that is borne out to be correct and the other side is borne out to be not correct. That’s the risk you take when you make a statement about the world. I think the great untold story of the late 20th century is how much Christian claims about the world have been, in fact, borne out or supported by scientific advances.

Duduit: You do discriminate between microevolution - the tiny, incremental changes within a species - and macroevolution, or the great jumps of one species being transformed into a different species: the sea slime, to the lizard, to the monkey, to Carl Sagan. The latter category is the one in which there’s a lack of evidence.

Huggins: Microevolution is basically going to boil down to what we see as natural selection. Darwin has some very neat evidence for that. He found some great stuff on the Galapagos Islands. We did indeed see beak sizes of the finches - shapes, that sort of thing - change according to the niche that they began to occupy. But whenever we finished we still had a finch. And I really believe we must recognize that a finch is a finch is a finch. Personally, I believe that is creation just as God defines it, by kind. And so we do see certainly, even today, tremendous evidence for microevolution. When you look at it as a horizontal process you’re OK. When you go vertical - macroevolution - then you get into some real problems with proving and actually seeing transitional forms. Every year scientists claim transitional forms - the transitional forms are found, and they’re eventually disproven. In fact, I believe that the argument for punctuated equilibrium was an attempt on the part of Darwinists to answer the question of why there are no transitional forms. Why do we not see this gradually taking place? Well, Gould comes up with this theory that he really has no evidence for - that we’ve got evolution occurring so rapidly out there that there is no chance for transitional forms to be left behind. I think Gould’s theory is an attempt to cover this problem that we see with macroevolution.

"This is God's truth we are out to discover, to learn something that was in the mind of God, to think God's thoughts behind him." James Huggins, chairman of the department of biology

Baldwin: I think it raises the question: Isn’t Darwin and Darwin's theory a prisoner of history? A prisoner of time? He's not able to defend himself. Is it not possible that he would agree with some of the ideas that you have expressed?

Behe: Well, maybe, but then he wouldn’t be a Darwinist. He wrote in The Origin of Species an interesting sentence, answering the question, "How would you know if something could not be produced by natural selection?" He wrote, "If there were any organ which could not possibly be produced by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." You can't prove that something can't be put together, but you can say this looks like a big problem for putting it together by numerous successive slight modifications. And it turns out that irreducibly complex things fit the bill, or are at least real good candidates for something that can't be put together by numerous successive slight modifications, because by definition they don't get the function of the system until it is all put together.

In his day he could still take refuge in the fact that the basis of life was unknown. Perhaps he might have thought future work would validate his theory even for things that looked resistant to it in the beginning. Darwin's ideas were published when people could see organs and whole animals and they could see how this theory might work. They could at least imagine that in the future, when more was known about the basis of life, then their ideas would bear out. But now we are in a position to judge. It turns out that the basis of life does not look like what would be required by Darwin's theory. I think intelligent design is, in fact, the answer, or at least a contribution to the answer.

Other people have said, "Why do you suggest intelligent design? In 50 years, we might come up with a theory to explain this." Science works with the evidence we have. We can't deal with a phantom theory from the future. You have to follow the data where it’s leading, and right now it sure looks like it is pointing to intelligent design. And of course intelligent design leaves open a lot of questions: What exactly was the means that God as the designer used to make life? How did He get the information into life? But for some reason, some people don't think of intelligent design as a natural scientific answer or deduction. I think of it as a real live scientific idea. The phantom theory they are hoping for to explain things is, in fact, intelligent design.

Baldwin: I think that is what I find most attractive about your ideas and the book. I take a little different view than what I heard expressed a moment ago about science and religion. Rather than these being two spheres, at least to me personally they’re one and the same. It is hard for me to separate science from God or God from science. I tend to think of God as Father, the Great Shepherd. I think of Him as the greatest scientist that ever was and ever will be. So whatever truth man is able to bear out of the creation, God put that there in the first place. So, intelligent design seems to me to be a wise overlight to what we have experienced in the past. I'm interested in knowing what intelligent design means mechanistically and specifically to microevolution?

Behe: That is a good question, and that is something that could be approached experimentally. Up to now everybody has said, "Well, Darwinian processes simply must have produced everything." And so I look for how they did it. We can say that perhaps natural selection could produce some things, and there’s no reason to say it can't. Certainly we have good evidence that it can. How much can it produce? What are the reasonable limits to natural undirected processes? How much of life is due to explicit intelligent design? You can take some model system and see how it works, put it under whatever selective pressure you wish, and see what is the most complicated system that you can, in fact, produce. What you are looking for is a reasonable approximation of where natural processes and secondary processes leave off and where perhaps other mechanisms or other explicit information has to be given to life.

Huggins: What we are talking about is a plasticity that can be found in the human genome. It makes sense to me that an all-knowing God would create a genome, a genetic package, that would respond to weather or environmental changes in terms of natural selection. God has allowed for some change to take place Ð to allow different beak sizes or whatever. But what are the limits to that? Where is that line drawn?

Behe: That becomes a real experimental question. If you are a committed Darwinist, you say there is no limit. Here we are - natural selection produced us. But if you look into literature where actual experiments of the power of natural selection are performed on really defined systems - bacterial clones, where selectively you take one area and you look for how much natural selection can accomplish - it's really modest. Let the data fall where it may.

Duduit: How does religious faith seem to influence those who are committed Darwinists?

Behe: There are plenty of western scientists who have antipathy towards religion. For example, Francis Crick became an atheist or a skeptic in his teens and became a molecular biologist specifically because he saw that this was an area of science that had not yet been shown to be independent of God. Some people still said God was necessary to produce life. He became a molecular biologist to debunk that. If you look at his career over the past 40 some odd years, that's what he certainly has tried to do. And he's got a lot of like-minded colleagues.

Often you will read snide remarks directed at religion printed in reputable journals. Nature, as a journal, for the longest time has been very hostile to religion. Their editor, John Maddox, who stepped down two or three years ago - he's an atheist of the Richard Dawkins school. They would have running commentaries where they just beat on religion. Then some scientists who were Christians or believing Jews would write in and protest and they'd beat religion some more. Maddox published an editorial saying that religion is going to have to be considered anti-science - practitioners of religion you know, should not be allowed to have jobs as scientists!

Huggins: Frances Crick also put forth the idea of directed panspermia, where he identifies with your belief that there is an intelligent design, but is unwilling and unable to accept that God is the author. Will there be others that will accept what you said, and flock to such a theory? Do you see any mood like that, or how is what you are saying different from what he is saying?

Behe: That is a great question. And essentially nothing I've said could prove to somebody that it wasn't a space alien who was the designer of the bacterial flagellum. But that’s OK. Science is not revelation. It is not Christianity. We do not dispense with the gospel now that we have found irreducible complexity. You can't ask from science more than what it has to give. Right now all we can say is that these things look like they were designed. But of course, Christianity is in a good position because it has always claimed that life is designed. These results support that.

Baldwin: I'm sure that some critics have hearkened back to the time of the Greeks, when some things which couldn't be explained intelligently and logically - like the paths of the heavenly bodies when they were ascribed to be moving in circles - were attributed to the gods being in charge. How would you answer that criticism of intelligent design?

Behe: Critics say that all the time. They say you’re giving up - it’s a God of the gaps. We see this, we don’t know where it came from, so we say God did it.

Ask yourself, how do you recognize design? How do you know if something was designed? Every day we walk down the street, and we can see what was designed. This is just a tree growing over here, but these flowers were arranged to spell out this word, or something like that. In my talk I show a Far Side cartoon. It is a troop of jungle explorers walking through the jungle. The lead explorer has been strung up by his foot, pulled up, and these bamboo sticks skewer him. Everybody looking at it immediately knows that the trap was designed. It wasn't an accident, and the humor of the cartoon depends on recognizing that this was designed. How do you know that was designed? It turns out that you know it was designed because you see a number of different parts interacting with great specificity to perform a function that none of the parts alone can perform. Essentially, it’s irreducibly complex.

And so, whenever you see something like that jungle trap in our everyday life, something with a consistent number of parts and it’s performing a function, always conclude that it’s the result of intelligent activity. So this is essentially an inductive argument. Complex systems that do things - every time you see one you conclude it’s designed. And you see them in the cell. I argue we should conclude those are designed, too. So it is more than just saying we don't know how they could have been put together. It’s induction.

Duduit: Each of you is a scientist professionally and also a Christian. How do those two parts of your life relate to one another?

Wofford: I think about my days in graduate school and my time as a full-time researcher. I think about the people I worked with. I was an odd duck because I got up on Sunday morning and went to church. That made me unusual. I don't know that I worked with a lot of devout atheists who made a cause of proving that God doesn’t exist, but I worked with a lot of people who were pretty indifferent to religion. We did have a graduate adviser where I went to graduate school who was a militant atheist. The one thing that would make his day the most was to find rather timid Christian undergraduates and shred them. I've never been really able to understand that because I don't understand how you can be a scientist and not come to the conclusion God is in the world. The more you learn, the more you realize how complex the world is, how intricately everything is interrelated, how beautiful it is. I can't accept that it has risen from random processes. God had to be in it.

Huggins: Well I've seen the same thing, Wayne. I’ve seen science literally shred Christian faith for young people that entered the scientific arena and, perhaps, were not strong enough. In fact in my own life I know that, for a while, science (and learning science) led me to doubt some of the Bible. Science literally pointed me in the wrong direction. Since then I’ve come to believe that all truth is God’s truth, and as a scientist I search for truth. This is God’s truth we are out to discover, to learn something that was in the mind of God, to think God's thoughts behind him. I think it is what we need to do as scientists, whether operating at the molecular or the organismal level.

Baldwin: I grew up in a Baptist pastor’s home. The realization that all truth is God's truth became the foundation of my life. Science as a career and profession came later, and it was natural for that to be built on this Christian foundation. One never has to slink from the truth. God will allow the truth to be tested, to be refined. And if it is authentic it will prove to be pure gold. So I've never been afraid to test. I see the work of the scientist as experimental, a hands-on kind of endeavor, entirely consistent with the Christian faith.

Dr. Charles Baldwin, O.P. and Evalyn Hammons professor of pre-medical studies

Duduit: In fact, you may be pointing out that it is more likely the Christian scientist can honestly and legitimately test, as opposed to that scientist who is locked in the Darwinian paradigm and can't escape.

Behe: What a Christian who is interested in science has to keep in mind is that all science is pretty tentative - even things that look rock solid. So nobody can rest their faith, or even make that big of a deal of their faith, on what science says in next week's issue of Nature. Christianity is a historical religion. It depends on truths that were revealed in time. And that's what our faith is based on. Science is nice. It is wonderful to see how God's world works. But, you know, it is not terribly different from being a Christian lawyer or Christian accountant or anything else. There are different perspectives on God's world in those professions. There are different temptations as well, different difficulties. So people sometimes pit science against Christianity. I think as a Christian scientist you’ve got to take your science and appreciate it - but realize that it's not the be all and end all. It’s a part of God's world. There are a lot of other things going on as well.

Duduit: Do Christian scholars have something unique to contribute to the scientific enterprise as Christian scholars?

Baldwin: We’ve already identified one thing that Christian scholars are able to offer, and that is a certain freedom to explore and to consider ideas that perhaps others with belief constraints, cannot explore.

Behe: Certainly Christian scholars, in all ranges of learning, have potentially at least a very different perspective than their counterparts, especially in the humanities and psychology and the human sciences as well. They are free to believe that there is in fact a truth, a focus, a grounding in human life with morality, human purpose. Many of the great works of art and great pieces of literature over the centuries have resulted from Christian cultures, specifically because they believed in this purpose and morality and so on. And it’s getting to be a cliche these days, but much of the university is "going south" pretty quickly because they have abandoned the idea of truth in many respects, and abandoned the idea of morality and absolute truth. Especially in our times, I think, Christian scholars in history and psychology and the social sciences, if they will bring their Christianity to their studies, can contribute an awful lot to the recovery of direction for the university.

Huggins: I think that we as Christian scholars have a great deal to offer because we do have that unique perspective, that unique freedom to search for truth knowing that truth is of God. Personally I think that gives us a leg up to delve into what God has done - to think God’s thoughts behind Him. I think that’s the beauty of what we do.