The line of reasoning used in the previous chapters so far has avoided entirely resorting to any particular religion or sacred text. The facts and numbers that have been thrown in are the same or similar to those encountered by most students in many science courses taught at many universities around the world. The power of science lies not only in its ability to predict an outcome but also in its ability to analyze the past or even the distant past by careful consideration of current facts and events. Many believe in an evolutionary process and in species now extinct, species that once roamed the Earth, partly and mostly because of the many fossil remains found by archaeologists all around the world even before Darwin’s time. Darwin got the credit for putting the facts together, but even if he hadn’t been born, somebody else would have come to the same conclusions after analyzing the same facts. Without any physical evidence of previous life forms similar to us but now long gone, the case for evolution through natural selection would have been much harder to prove. Likewise, DNA fingerprinting nowadays can provide us with substantial evidence in favor of common genetic traits shared by most living species, but without the phenomenon of random spontaneous mutations, the same kind of spontaneous variations that gave rise to antibiotic resistant germs in modern times, the case against independent creationism (the belief that each species was created independently and directly by some supreme being) would have been much harder to sustain in the absence of DNA analysis.
If we now throw religion into the picture and take some statements from religious texts at their face value, giving a literal interpretation to what may very well be a passage from books such as the Book of Genesis, loaded with symbolisms, a confrontation is inevitable between those who will not accept any other explanations except those based on faith alone, and those who will not accept the hard fact that the explanations to some important issues facing every living human being on this planet are and will forever be way beyond the reach of science. In the United States, this confrontation came to a head in July 1925 at the Rhea County Courthouse in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, with the so-called Trial of the Century, better known as the Scopes “Monkey Trial”. In this trial, a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Barely five months ago, in March 1925, the Tennessee legislature through the Butler Act had declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible. The Scopes Trial pitted William Jennings Bryan, the lawyer representing the state, against Clarence Darrow, the lawyer representing John Scopes. The case was partly flawed from the beginning, because it was inspired on the generalized concept that evolutionary theory held the belief that man descended from monkeys. While there is no denying that a basic conclusion of evolution through natural selection is that modern man evolved from more basic life forms, the statement held by some supporters of evolution that man is a direct descendant from monkeys remains to be proven, so much so that the famous missing link between man and monkeys has proven to be rather elusive. A strict interpretation of evolutionary theory as applied to men and monkeys can only establish at this point in time that monkeys and men share common genetic traits, and this can be proven by DNA fingerprinting to such an extent that it has been found that almost all of the genes possessed by modern man are also possessed by monkeys, and there actually was a time when some scientists joked upon this fact by saying that the only difference between monkeys and us is cultural. Of course, we are still genetically different from monkeys, but the rather small set of genes that makes us different from them is critical enough to set us apart by a wide margin. In other words, a very little can make a very big difference, which by the way is one of the characteristics of those non-linear processes we have already covered in previous chapters. Some modern theologians argue that the sudden appearance of this small set of genes that sets us apart from all other species is what carries the imprint of a higher intelligence vesting us Homo Sapiens with that peculiarity we call a soul, spirit, or elan vital. But if we maintain that, after the Big Bang, there has been no direct intervention of the kind many would call divine, (we will not consider here the argument of miracles, since by their very definition they are not repeatable under controlled laboratory conditions, they are not a common occurrence, and their seemingly random nature make it impossible to have them verified by an independent authority while they are taking place) then we must conclude that from the very beginning, or better said, before the very beginning, the initial conditions that gave rise to our Universe had to enable the later appearance of those intelligent genes.
The discussion between independent creationists and evolutionary scientists, as sterile and pointless as it might seem to us nowadays in the third millennium, was actually an issue of great concern shortly after Darwin’s work came out, with one side holding on to religious beliefs based on texts written thousands of years ago by people long gone, and the other side holding on to logic reasoning alone. It was a classical confrontation between faith and logic.
Before proceeding any further, let us reiterate this: evolution through natural selection is not just a theory, it is a hard scientific fact, to the point in which even the Catholic Church has come to grips with this issue by acknowledging the growing evidence in favor of evolutionary processes by means of natural selection, although insisting in the intervention of a supreme being in the events leading up to the appearance of a soul in modern man
The Scopes trial was only the prelude to a confrontation that is still being waged today on a major scale all over the world between those for whom, evolutionary theory aside, there are more than enough clues pointing to a Universe as the end result of some major act of creation, and those for whom the Universe we are living in is a Universe that sparked out of nowhere with no intent and no purpose.
The Discovery Institute, a “think-tank” founded in 1990 in Seattle, Washington by Bruce Chapman, George Gilder and Stephen C. Meyer as a non-profit educational institution funded by philanthropic foundation grants, is the home of the better known proponents of the theory of Intelligent Design, the concept that certain features of the Universe and of living things are best described by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
From what we have seen up to this point, there is no direct evidence of a supreme being hard at work at this very moment, tinkering here and there, acting as a guiding force by directing and modifying at will the normal chain of events. The natural laws that the Universe follows blindly already take care of this. If the Universe is the product of an intelligent design, we would not expect the designer (or designers) to constantly intervene to correct serious mistakes, any less than we would not expect an architect to keep coming back to to modify the foundations of a tall building like the Empire State. Perhaps the architect of a structure such as the Empire State would come back to make some small changes, like adding an outside elevator, or joining the building somehow with a bridge to another building just across the street. But these would be actions taken in response to the demands of the landowners who commissioned the design of the structure in the first place, the landowners and investors for whom the architect is working. When dealing with a structure such as the Universe itself, we would assume that the designer and builder would be working for nobody else but for himself. He would be the boss. He would certainly not be coming back at every moment to correct mistakes, for if that were the case he would not have been intelligent enough to design such a thing as the Universe in the first place. In any event, if a project is flawed on its very foundations, the overhauling required to correct the flaws could be of such a magnitude that discarding the project and starting anew might be the only alternative. (Some philosophers have certainly argued that the reason we have not heard lately from this being many call God is because he has decided to this discard this project, abandoning us while he starts anew somewhere else with an endeavor more fruitful for his purpose than the one we are living in.) Of course, if a project is found to be flawed, starting anew will almost certainly require a change in the blueprint, it will require starting with a different set of initial conditions, for otherwise we will only be repeating an experiment which will yield the same undesirable results as the original design. However, trying out a different set of initial conditions in order to carry out a new experiment with the hope of getting a different and perhaps better result is no improvement over the trial and error methodology that Science itself uses when it is unable to anticipate an outcome, which in itself denotes some ignorance.
For the proponents of the theory of intelligent design there was a rather serious legal setback in the Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School District case, where US District Judge John E. Jones III ruled on December 20th 2005 that a public school district requirement for science classes to teach that intelligent design is an alternative to evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, also ruling that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.
Regrettably, the legal victory over the proponents of intelligent design did not bring us any closer to a credible answer to the core question: where did everything come from? While we ourselves may know where we come from (the birds and the bees), we still do not know where the basic substrate that allows us to be a physical reality comes from. The so-called scientific community so fiercely opposed to the concept of intelligent design did not make any attempt to address the most fundamental question of them all, nor does it have any intentions of doing so now or in the near future. They know their limitations. As a result, millions of students have been left in the dark by being officially deprived of considering the hypothesis (we will consider it here as a hypothesis instead of a scientific theory, even though as we have seen from the beginning of this treatise, it is a hypothesis loaded with many arguments that make it plausible) that the conditions that allowed this Universe to come into being, those elusive initial conditions, could reflect some kind of intelligent design, given the complexity of the task in setting up a scenario capable of allowing us to appear and evolve into intelligent life forms. Without that hypothesis, we are worse than we were before, for now we have no credible hypothesis. It appears that, to some, it is better to have no hypothesis at all, than to have a hypothesis that is as hard to prove, as it is to disprove. Thus, contrary to popular belief that something is better than nothing, in this case the legal verdict is that nothing is better than something!
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences itself claims that intelligent design “and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life” are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions and propose no new hypotheses of their own. Clearly, the hypothesis of an intelligent design involved in the creation of the Universe cannot be tested directly by any conceivable experiment now, for this would require us to go back somehow in time before the Universe even existed, before time itself existed, a physical impossibility since we ourselves are confined (or perhaps a more proper word would be imprisoned?) inside a space-time continuum beyond which we cannot exist, at least not in a physical sense. On the other hand, a hypothesis of an intelligent design cannot generate any predictions since we are ignorant on the nature of those initial conditions that allowed our Universe to come into being. The only way a hypothesis of intelligent design could generate predictions is for the designer (or designers) to actually hand us over the whole set of specifications considered in the design of this Universe. As mathematicians would put it, it would be the equivalent of handing us a huge library loaded with sophisticated equations explaining everything from the very beginning. From those equations (or some of those equations) or from that part of the material that could be comprehensible to us, we could make predictions based upon the outcome anticipated by those equations. We could design experiments to put the consequences of some of those “supreme” equations to the test. As things stand right now, we do not even have the so-called Theory of Everything (TOE) sought by physics.
Surprisingly, string theory, the closest thing to this “Theory of Everything”, the holy grail of modern science, also fails miserably on the three requirements imposed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences upon intelligent design. String theory itself cannot be tested by experiment. Its main proponents concede that actually proving by some experimental means, either directly or indirectly; the existence of those “vibrating strings” (a better term would be mathematical entities) is beyond our reach, it is beyond our current experimental capabilities. Likewise, to this date, string theory has not generated any predictions on its own; it has only been used to explain part of what we already know. Likewise, string theory has so far proposed no hypotheses of its own, so string theory would fail the same requirements that are being demanded from intelligent design. In reality, string theory shares with intelligent design many of the shortcomings adjudicated to intelligent design, however one is being applauded by academicians and the other is being reviled by them. Perhaps because formal string theory does not intend to pursue any further the thorny matter of where did those strings come from. Doing so would take it to the same paths already travelled by the proponents of intelligent design. Anyway, if the scientific community were to apply the same rigor to string theory as it is applying to the hypothesis of intelligent design, then we should not only discard string theory from being taught at public colleges and universities, but we should even forbid it from receiving funds on any publicly funded research program, for it cannot be tested by experiment, it has generated no predictions on its own, and has proposed no hypotheses of its own. Shouldn’t we also classify string theory then as pseudo-science? Complex math, impressive as it may be, on its own cannot be used in futile attempts to cover up what beneath the surface remains as a vast sea of ignorance.
It has been argued by the detractors of intelligent design that much of its case is based upon circumstantial evidence, evidence which would not hold up in court, which would explain the legal defeat handed down in the Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School District case. However, many famous cases in the criminal justice system have been based entirely upon purely circumstantial evidence, and this has been no obstacle to get convictions in the legal system carrying life sentences or even death sentences. Take for instance the famous Atlanta Child Murders, for which a young man by the name of Wayne Williams was identified as the key suspect. Wayne Williams was found guilty of the murder of two adult men, and after his conviction in January 1982 the Atlanta police declared an additional 22 of the 29 Atlanta child murders solved. Williams has always vehemently denied all charges. Nobody ever witnessed Williams committing any of the crimes for which he was accused, he never gave some kind of confession describing details which would only be known to the serial killer himself, yet he was found guilty and committed for the rest of his life behind bars (actually, he received two consecutive life sentences) on cases based mainly on clues. The case is best known for its fibers evidence, fibers found in the scene of the crimes that matched fibers found at the home of Wayne Williams. However, it is entirely possible that the actual killer himself, a person with access to the home of Wayne Williams, could have taken fibers from Williams’ home to plant them at the scene of each crime. It is also possible that those fibers found at the crime scenes matched those found at the home of Williams by sheer coincidence. This last hypothesis is improbable but not impossible. Such a thing can happen. It is possible. The rules of probability do not forbid such a thing from happening; they do not rule it out completely, even though the odds of such a thing happening without any kind of intelligent intervention seem to be rather remote. (Sounds familiar?) To this date, the conviction of Wayne Williams is still a controversial issue, and on May 6, 2005, De Kalb County Police Chief Louis Graham ordered the reopening of the murder cases of four boys killed in the De Kalb County that were attributed to Williams. Chief Graham believes that Williams may be innocent of all of the murders. In November 2005, British rock band Deep Purple’s latest album included a song called Wrong Man, supporting Williams’ claim of innocence. And there are thousands upon thousands of cases in the criminal justice system where the trials have ended in guilty verdicts in spite of being based solely upon circumstantial evidence, based solely upon the very clues used by the police departments to solve those cases. It stands to reason that if a justice system whose basic tenet is “equal justice under law” applied the same stringent requirements to all criminal cases as was applied in the Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School District case, many jails would be empty and it would be extremely hard if not impossible to obtain criminal convictions. (On the positive side, there would be no need for lawyers either!)
By the way in which a person has been found dead, we may be able to infer that a murder has been committed if the assassin was not clever enough to remove all of his footprints, those clues to past events, even if we were not present at the moment in which the crime took place. Very seldom do police departments have the golden opportunity to have one of their agents present just when a crime is taking place. And even less often do they have a chance to witness the actual planning before the crime takes place, which would enable them to prevent it. After the fact, they must rely on wily sleuths who can gather all available evidences in order to crack the case. And even after a case has been solved, many fine details will be missing, this is unavoidable. Their main concern is to gather enough evidences to make the solution of a case credible enough to an impartial jury. They cannot be expected to provide such overwhelming proof that the jury will have no choice but to fully agree with them with absolute certainty; since very few things in life are certain to the fullest extent of the word (can you think of any?), there will always be some lingering doubt. Even the noted philosopher and mathematician René Descartes had to devise his own line of thought to convince himself that he actually existed. Jurors are not expected to base their decisions on absolute certainty; they must use their common sense to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. Of course, if a jury (or a Judge) is so prejudiced or so stubborn that it will demand nothing less than absolute certainty, it is fair to say that nothing will suffice to convince them, and no line of thought will ever be enough for them. Not when the deck of cards is already stacked even before the case has been presented.
From the very beginning here on this book, we have presented arguments pointing to the existential reality of those initial conditions that gave rise to this Universe. They cannot be denied by any respectable scientist, for with no initial conditions the Universe would not be here today. With no initial conditions, we would give up the most basic of all scientific tools, the tool of cause and effect. Even absolute nothingness itself, proposed by some physicists as the prelude to the Big Bang, is an initial condition. This is inescapable. Furthermore, given the enormous complexity of the conditions required to produce sustainable evolving life in this Universe, and given the accepted fact that the Universe has not existed forever backwards in time but instead is relatively young, it is very plausible that those initial conditions that gave rise to our Universe were not fortuitous but were, in fact, the result of a well laid-out plan. What we are seeing today in our everyday lives are the clues pointing towards such a plan. If this sounds crazy to some, the idea of something as complex as life itself and the Universe that harbors it coming out of nowhere, perhaps by an unconscious act of ignorant self-creation with no purpose whatsoever, sounds even crazier.
