An intelligent designer might seem more necessary than ever now that we understand so much cellular biology, and the impossibly long odds facing any attempt to design proteins by chance, or assemble the regulatory mechanisms that control the life cycle of a cell. Meyer doesn’t reject Darwinian evolution. He only rejects it as a sufficient theory of life as we know it. He’s made a painstaking investigation of Darwin’s theory and has rejected it for many good reasons that he has carefully explained. He didn’t rush to embrace intelligent design. Just the opposite. But the explosion of detailed, precise information that was necessary to build the brand-new Cambrian organisms, and the fact that the information was encoded, represented symbolically, in DNA nucleotides, suggests to Meyer that an intelligent designer must have been responsible.

Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory. Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview. Accepting the theory as settled truth—no more subject to debate than the earth being round or the sky blue or force being mass times acceleration—certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life. But what if Darwin was wrong?
Like so many others, I grew up with Darwin’s theory, and had always believed it was true. I had heard doubts over the years from well-informed, sometimes brilliant people, but I had my hands full cultivating my garden, and it was easier to let biology take care of itself. But in recent years, reading and discussion have shut that road down for good.
This is sad. It is no victory of any sort for religion. It is a defeat for human ingenuity. It means one less beautiful idea in our world, and one more hugely difficult and important problem back on mankind’s to-do list. But we each need to make our peace with the facts, and not try to make life on earth simpler than it really is.
Charles Darwin explained monumental change by making one basic assumption—all life-forms descend from a common ancestor—and adding two simple processes anyone can understand: random, heritable variation and natural selection. Out of these simple ingredients, conceived to be operating blindly over hundreds of millions of years, he conjured up change that seems like the deliberate unfolding of a grand plan, designed and carried out with superhuman genius. Could nature really have pulled out of its hat the invention of life, of increasingly sophisticated life-forms and, ultimately, the unique-in-the-cosmos (so far as we know) human mind—given no strategy but trial and error? The mindless accumulation of small changes? It is an astounding idea. Yet Darwin’s brilliant and lovely theory explains how it could have happened.
Its beauty is important. Beauty is often a telltale sign of truth. Beauty is our guide to the intellectual universe—walking beside us through the uncharted wilderness, pointing us in the right direction, keeping us on track—most of the time.
Demolishing a Worldview
There’s no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape. Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture—not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones. The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.
Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt (2013) convinced me that Darwin has failed. He cannot answer the big question. Two other books are also essential: The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009), by David Berlinski, and Debating Darwin’s Doubt (2015), an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer, which collects some of the arguments Meyer’s book stirred up. These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore. Bringing to bear the work of many dozen scientists over many decades, Meyer, who after a stint as a geophysicist in Dallas earned a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge and now directs the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece. Darwin’s Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact.
Meyer doesn’t only demolish Darwin; he defends a replacement theory, intelligent design (I.D.). Although I can’t accept intelligent design as Meyer presents it, he does show that it is a plain case of the emperor’s new clothes: it says aloud what anyone who ponders biology must think, at some point, while sifting possible answers to hard questions. Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way. It does underline an obvious but important truth: Darwin’s mission was exactly to explain the flagrant appearance of design in nature.
The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument—fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not—to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever. They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.
As for Biblical religion, it forces its way into the discussion although Meyer didn’t invite it, and neither did Darwin. Some have always been bothered by the harm Darwin is said to have done religion. His theory has been thought by some naïfs (fundamentalists as well as intellectuals) to have shown or alleged that the Bible is wrong, and Judeo-Christian religion bunk. But this view assumes a childishly primitive reading of Scripture. Anyone can see that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, one based on seven days, the other on the Garden of Eden. When the Bible gives us two different versions of one story, it stands to reason that the facts on which they disagree are without basic religious significance. The facts on which they agree are the ones that matter: God created the universe, and put man there for a reason. Darwin has nothing to say on these or any other key religious issues.
Fundamentalists and intellectuals might go on arguing these things forever. But normal people will want to come to grips with Meyer and the downfall of a beautiful idea. I will mention several of his arguments, one of them in (just a bit of) detail. This is one of the most important intellectual issues of modern times, and every thinking person has the right and duty to judge for himself.
Looking for Evidence
Darwin himself had reservations about his theory, shared by some of the most important biologists of his time. And the problems that worried him have only grown more substantial over the decades. In the famous “Cambrian explosion” of around half a billion years ago, a striking variety of new organisms—including the first-ever animals—pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years. This great outburst followed many hundreds of millions of years of slow growth and scanty fossils, mainly of single-celled organisms, dating back to the origins of life roughly three and half billion years ago.
Darwin’s theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life. Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly, like a bunch of geysers. Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors: Darwinian evolution is gradual, step-by-step. All those predecessors must have come together, further back, into a series of branches leading down to the (long ago) trunk.
But those predecessors of the Cambrian creatures are missing. Darwin himself was disturbed by their absence from the fossil record. He believed they would turn up eventually. Some of his contemporaries (such as the eminent Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz) held that the fossil record was clear enough already, and showed that Darwin’s theory was wrong. Perhaps only a few sites had been searched for fossils, but they had been searched straight down. The Cambrian explosion had been unearthed, and beneath those Cambrian creatures their Precambrian predecessors should have been waiting—and weren’t. In fact, the fossil record as a whole lacked the upward-branching structure Darwin predicted.
The trunk was supposed to branch into many different species, each species giving rise to many genera, and towards the top of the tree you would find so much diversity that you could distinguish separate phyla—the large divisions (sponges, mosses, mollusks, chordates, and so on) that comprise the kingdoms of animals, plants, and several others—take your pick. But, as Berlinski points out, the fossil record shows the opposite: “representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification on those basic themes.” In general, “most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged.” The incremental development of new species is largely not there. Those missing pre-Cambrian organisms have still not turned up. (Although fossils are subject to interpretation, and some biologists place pre-Cambrian life-forms closer than others to the new-fangled Cambrian creatures.)
Some researchers have guessed that those missing Precambrian precursors were too small or too soft-bodied to have made good fossils. Meyer notes that fossil traces of ancient bacteria and single-celled algae have been discovered: smallness per se doesn’t mean that an organism can’t leave fossil traces—although the existence of fossils depends on the surroundings in which the organism lived, and the history of the relevant rock during the ages since it died. The story is similar for soft-bodied organisms. Hard-bodied forms are more likely to be fossilized than soft-bodied ones, but many fossils of soft-bodied organisms and body parts do exist. Precambrian fossil deposits have been discovered in which tiny, soft-bodied embryo sponges are preserved—but no predecessors to the celebrity organisms of the Cambrian explosion.
This sort of negative evidence can’t ever be conclusive. But the ever-expanding fossil archives don’t look good for Darwin, who made clear and concrete predictions that have (so far) been falsified—according to many reputable paleontologists, anyway. When does the clock run out on those predictions? Never. But any thoughtful person must ask himself whether scientists today are looking for evidence that bears on Darwin, or looking to explain away evidence that contradicts him. There are some of each. Scientists are only human, and their thinking (like everyone else’s) is colored by emotion.
The Advent of Molecular Biology
Darwin’s main problem, however, is molecular biology. There was no such thing in his own time. We now see from inside what he could only see from outside, as if he had developed a theory of mobile phone evolution without knowing that there were computers and software inside or what the digital revolution was all about. Under the circumstances, he did brilliantly.
Biology in his time was for naturalists, not laboratory scientists. Doctor Dolittle was a naturalist. (He is the hero of the wonderful children’s books by Hugh Lofting, now unfortunately nearing extinction.) The doctor loved animals and understood them, and had a sharp eye for all of nature not too different from Wordsworth’s or Goethe’s. But the character of the field has changed, and it’s not surprising that old theories don’t necessarily still work.
Darwin’s theory is simple to grasp; its simplicity is the heart of its brilliance and power. We all know that variation occurs naturally among individuals of the same type—white or black sheep, dove-gray versus off-white or pale beige pigeons, boring and sullen undergraduates versus charming, lissome ones. We all know that many variations have no effect on a creature’s prospects, but some do. A sheep born with extra-warm wool will presumably do better at surviving a rough Scottish winter than his normal-wooled friends. Such a sheep would be more likely than normal sheep to live long enough to mate, and pass on its superior trait to the next generation. Over millions of years, small good-for-survival variations accumulate, and eventually (says Darwin) you have a brand new species. The same mechanism naturally favors genes that are right for the local environment—warm wool in Scotland, light and comfortable wool for the tropics, other varieties for mountains and deserts. Thus one species (your standard sheep) might eventually become four specialized ones. And thus new species should develop from old in the upward-branching tree pattern Darwin described.
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Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Friday, June 21, 2024
Ideas have consequences. In the end, what we believe ought to be apparent in the way we live and behave. I’ll be honest with you; most parents couldn’t care less what you teach their kids as long as you address the behavior issues. But if you make behavior your focus, you’ll likely fail in an overly legalistic attempt to impact your students from the outside-in. On the other hand, if you can help your students understand the foundational theological, rational, philosophical issues related to Christianity, you’ve got a good chance of impacting them from the inside-out.

I spent most of my adult life as an atheist and once I eventually determined Christianity was true, I jumped in with both feet. I volunteered in Children’s Ministry and eventually became a ministry coordinator. It wasn’t long before I was enrolled in Seminary, and within a few years I found myself pastoring a youth group comprised of both junior high and high school-aged students. My first year was a disaster. Don’t get me wrong, my students wouldn’t have necessarily described it negatively, but looking back at it, I did little to protect or prepare them for what they would face in university. In fact, most of the students in my first graduating class of seniors left Christianity before the Christmas break of their freshman year. When I discovered this was the case, I decided it was time to rethink my approach.
In the first year, I leaned heavily on my background as an artist rather than my background as a skeptical cop. I spent nine years in the arts, completing an undergraduate degree in design and a graduate degree in architecture. I am also a musician and have played on a number of worship teams over the years. I wanted to celebrate the arts and create emotionally moving weekly experiences for my students, and my first year as a youth pastor was an adventure in creativity. Unfortunately it was light on content. All that changed once I realized how poorly my graduates were surviving when they left us. At this point I re-examined my priorities and shifted from creative artist to critical investigator. I also stopped teaching and started training.
Like most of you who are leading or teaching youth ministries across the country, I had difficulty finding pre-designed curriculum meeting my needs. As I surveyed the challenges facing young people, I identified three areas of concern, but I was unable to find curriculum matching these priorities. I knew I was going to have to create my own material, and I knew it was going to take some work. Given my art background, I tried to create a content-rich, focused, robust, visual learning experience, even as I attempted to tailor the curriculum to specific trips I planned for my group (the key to turning teaching into training). I divided my annual training calendar into eight six-week series (leaving four weeks for holidays and special occasions).
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, October 16, 2023
Biblical critical theory takes a very different approach. Read Isaiah and Paul and you immediately see that the purpose of their critiques is the restoration of God’s creation and its fulfillment in God’s covenant. Natural law and similar concepts can give us a substantive picture of the moral structure of creation. The Book of Proverbs outlines that architecture in detail. The greater fulfillment is even more concrete, given at Sinai for Jews and enacted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for Christians…. Compare this vision to that of Marcuse. For him and other modern theorists, the purpose of critical theory is revolution undertaken in the nebulous hope that something new and just will emerge from the wreckage.

As debates over critical race theory rage on, both in society and within the church, one important point seems to have been missed by all sides: Many of the most important biblical writers were among the sharpest critical theorists of their day. I may be naive to imagine that an appreciation of the theological resources available to those who wish to hone their analysis of society might move the current discussions forward—given that so many presume that race, class, gender, sexual identity, and the rest exhaust our critical tools. But Christians, at least, should acknowledge Isaiah and Paul as more fruitful interlocutors than Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Isaiah never read The German Ideology of Marx and Engels. Yet he had a clear grasp of how falsehood can supplant truth and lead to the perversion of a culture, a perversion that alienates men and women from themselves, from nature, and from reality. Isaiah’s complaint echoes through his prophecy: Israel had created—we might say socially constructed—gods to replace the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These social constructions were given material form as idols, and Israelite society, history, and cultic life were reconfigured around their purported power. Isaiah’s divine commission was to expose idolatry as a system of falsehoods—not just deceptions about the true nature of God, but also lies about who should dominate. Injustices flourish when men’s worship is perverted. Moreover, the consciousness of the people was so seared by their wickedness that God told Isaiah at the outset that they would be blind and deaf to his critique of their culture. One could rightly say that Israel was captive to “systemic idolatry.”
In chapter 44, Isaiah describes a man who cuts down a tree and uses half of it to make a fire to cook dinner while fashioning the other half into a god, which he then worships. The critique is powerful. The prophet uses the man’s actions in order to expose the absurdity of his idolatrous behavior. Rather, as later critical theorists might point to the conflict between Jefferson’s proclamation of natural rights in the Declaration and his ownership of slaves, Isaiah here lays bare the internal contradictions of Israelite idolatry, mocking the self-deceptions as Marx would millennia later when commenting on the ideological mystifications of class domination.
The apostle Paul continues in the Old Testament’s critical tradition. In Romans 1, he points to the fact that fallen man has perverted his religious instinct and its natural orientation to worship of the true God. This perversion occurs because we fabricate idols, and by venerating them we direct our attention away from God the creator. Instead of looking upward, idolatrous man looks downward and is bewitched by and enslaved to worldly lusts. Paul recounts the disastrous consequences: the abandonment of natural sexual relations between men and women, and then all manner of wickedness, from envy to actual murder. Our moral depravity and social dysfunctions arise from a fundamental rejection of the truth of God in favor of the lies of idols.
The cultural criticism offered by Isaiah and Paul has two key elements. First, although the criticism shows the perversions of what we now call “systems” or culturally constructed patterns of behavior, it brings into focus our culpability. Yes, the Israelites of Isaiah’s day were embedded in systemic idolatry, as were the people of Paul’s day (and our own day as well). But this “social conditioning” does not exculpate. We are idolaters because we want to be. We are not hapless tools of a system that dominates our individual agency and thus absolves us of any responsibility. Isaiah notes the zeal with which Israel embraces idolatry. Paul links the lust of sexual sin to panting after idols. We want to reject God and create our own gods. Thus, the biblical critique is not only cultural but also spiritual. It convicts idolaters of their personal responsibility for the system within which they operate, a system within which they happily live, even as it contradicts the moral structure of the world God created.
Because the scriptural mode of critique focuses on culpability, the second key element follows: repentance and forgiveness. Isaiah and Paul are aiming to dismantle idolatry as a social system in the way so many call for activism on behalf of “social justice.” They are calling for idolaters to turn from their idolatry and seek forgiveness from God, forgiveness that will not be withheld, because the God of Israel is a merciful God. Again and again, Isaiah calls the people to turn in repentance from their false gods, a perverted worship that causes the grave injustices he recounts. If Israel will return to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then peace and justice have a chance. Paul’s purpose is the same. He seeks to convict his readers of the dead end of worldliness that flows from worshiping graven images (bondage to sin and death) so that they will turn in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ. In other words, biblical critical theory does not end in “critique”; it aims at transformation through grace.
Secular critical theory ranges from old-fashioned Marxist critical theory based on economic factors to feminist and gay theories of forms of false consciousness that entail repressive social mores. In one way or another, modern critical theory focuses on social construction and the manipulative nature of the dominant narratives cultures tell themselves; the results are not unlike the critiques of idolatry that Isaiah and Paul advance. So it’s not surprising that Christians are attracted to critical theory. Like the Bible’s prophetic tradition, it refuses to take the world at face value and seeks to unmask the discourses of power that structure social relations. Furthermore, the purpose of secular critical theories—which is not merely to expose the world’s ideological captivity but to effect its transformation—resonates with what Isaiah and Paul are doing.
But we do well to remember John Henry Newman’s observation on the nature of heresy: It seizes on one aspect of the truth and presses it at the expense of all others. Secular critical theory is not made necessarily incompatible with Christianity by the substance of its affirmations (although it may be incompatible in respect to some). Taken as a whole, the critical turn in modernity is incompatible with Christianity because it takes a part of the truth and presents it as the whole truth. By advancing a comprehensive theory based on partial truths, it ends up opposing the truth.
The basic hopelessness of the visions espoused by modern critical theorists offers the clearest instance of this opposition. Christianity is a religion of hope, and our hope has a definite shape and content: repentance, faith in Christ, and the consummation of all things in him. By contrast, secular critical theory is utopian in the literal sense of urging us to work to create a “nowhere,” a state of fulfillment lacking in content.
From the early days of the Frankfurt School, which spawned many strands of today’s academic cultural critique, critical theory has been marked by an inability to articulate a positive social vision in anything but the vaguest terms. The lack of a positive vision occurs because, unlike Christianity, critical theory denies that the world has an intrinsic moral shape. The mavens of critique have no conception of the good that needs to be restored. Thus, the positive criteria for social change remain undefined beyond reference to vague but appealing language such as equity, inclusion, and social justice.
In a 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Max Horkheimer offered an account of critical theory that summarized its purpose and ambition: “For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice.”
Two things are striking about this statement. First, Horkheimer makes clear that critical theory is not simply a descriptive approach to interpreting the world. The mere unmasking and analyzing of social relations in terms of manipulation and exploitation is not the goal. The purpose, to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx, is not to describe the world but to change it. So far, so good, for a gospel-informed critique of society likewise seeks to midwife transformation, or in Christian language, “conversion.” But, second, Horkheimer expresses this aspiration with a purely negative formulation: the abolition of social injustice. That is a nicely apophatic phrase. The negation of injustice does not produce a substantial positive vision. Horkheimer does not tell the reader exactly—or even approximately—what the hoped-for future entails.
Herbert Marcuse was Horkheimer’s colleague. Perhaps the most culturally influential member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was more sanguine about the possibility of realizing heaven on earth. Indeed, he was an unabashed utopian, speaking at times of the abolition of repression. But, like most utopians, he was singularly incapable of giving a positive definition of the wonderland he sought to build. Instead, he filled out his utopian vision with a series of repudiations of everything about modern society that he did not like, combined with wishful pronouncements that everything would be wonderful once corrupt capitalist society had been demolished. Here is a good example:
Marxism must risk defining freedom in such a way that people become conscious of and recognize it as something that is nowhere already in existence. And precisely because the so-called utopian possibilities are not at all utopian but rather the determinate socio-historical negation of what exists, a very real and very pragmatic opposition is required of us if we are to make ourselves and others conscious of these possibilities and the forces that hinder and deny them. An opposition is required that is free of all illusion but also of all defeatism, for through its mere existence defeatism betrays the possibility of freedom to the status quo.
In plain English, Marcuse is saying that we must struggle to achieve nothing that actually exists. Thus hoping in something defined entirely by opposition to that which does exist, the utopian (critical theoretical) project must pit itself implacably against all that is. In short, the goal of Marcuse’s critical theory and of those theories descended from it can be described only in negative terms: anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-racism, and so forth. The emphasis falls on dismantling institutions, social relations, or moral codes that stand in the way of the vague but hoped-for future.
There is an obvious problem here: How can the critical theorist define social justice if all that exists is by definition unjust, infected by capitalism, systemic racism, patriarchy, or some other structural injustice? Lacking an account of the moral order of creation, he cannot do so positively. The hope of modern critical theory is that, when everything has been torn down, social justice will emerge. Liberated from the now-vanquished unjust system, like Rousseau’s primitive man untainted by civilization, we will recover our original integrity.
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