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Apologists Every Christian Should Know PART 4
Must-Reads
H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 12
Understanding Intelligent Design: An intro written in plain language. ————————— Intelligent Design Uncensored: Another easy-to-read guide. ————————— The Design Revolution: Dembski answers hard questions about ID. ————————— Signs of Intelligence and Uncommon Dissent: Collections of essays by intellectuals who disagree with Darwinism. ————————— For a look at how DNA points to an intelligent Designer, see Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. ————————— For a biochemist’s argument for ID, see Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box. ————————— For an astrophysicist’s study on why life on earth must be designed, see Guillermo Gonzalez’s The Privileged Planet.
The Dangerous Defiance of William
Why Design Rev Creation or evolution? Seven literal
days or seven long periods of time? Is the earth 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion? It depends on who you ask. But the answers are not simply determined by whether you follow either the Bible or science. Not only is this distinction misleading—as though faith and facts necessarily disagree—but a variety of answers exists even among Christians. (Do a Google search for “views on creation” and you’ll see what I mean.) On the one hand, this is nothing new. Long before Darwin, there were many questions on how Scripture’s creation account should be interpreted. On the other hand, modern science has given Christians more data and theories to consider, which has added more options for how to understand Genesis. Of course, not all interpretations treat Scripture the same.
Certain believers, for example, think Genesis should be read metaphorically, with evolution being the process by which God created life on earth. In this view, humans evolved from earlier primates, but at some point God implanted a soul in one of them. Other believers take the seven days to be actual 24-hour days. On the sixth day, Adam was created directly from the dirt, with God literally breathing life into him. Yet even within this camp, some are “old earth creationists” who follow scientific dating methods, while others are “young earth creationists” who say the earth is just a few thousand years old. As a friend once asked me, “If Adam looked like an adult when he was only a minute old, might not everything look older than it really is?” Amidst all the disagreement, it can be easy to get bogged down or sidetracked when defending the faith. So where might an apologist start when dealing with God and science? A helpful example is found in William Dembski.
Doubting Darwin while Studying Science Dembski is both an expert mathematician and a philosopher whose study of earth’s life forms led him to conclude that, statistically speaking, random chance and time could never produce the diversity and complexity that we observe in the animal kingdom. Rather, life as we know it could only come about as the product of some outside intelligence—a Being who specifically designed each type of creature. This is evident by following standard observational science, which simply investigates the world and lets the facts fall where they may. For example, if you were hiking across the desert and found a smart phone in the sand, after playing around with it and taking it apart, the last thing you would conclude is that it was the product of billions of years of lifeless forces (rain, wind, dirt, rocks, whatever). You would instead think some intelligent being
