You personally wrote glowing book recommendations of the then latest wave of anti-evolutionist/creationist writing.
Evolving Developments
I want to draw attention to several other books, as well. They have not received reviews here, and very probably will not, but they have provided me some high-grade intellectual entertainment in recent months and I think others beside myself may well find them interesting.
The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies does not have an official position on the question of organic evolution. We certainly do not have an officially negative position. Indeed, I fully know the opinion on the matter of only one member of the FARMS Board of Trustees, and he is a convinced evolutionist. This Review, moreover, has published only one article dealing with evolution, and that article proceeded from an avowedly pro-evolutionary stance.2
Evolution is not a question over which I myself have lost much sleep. I have, for years, been pretty much an agnostic on the subject. Nevertheless, since a more or less Darwinian evolutionary theory is important to virtually every form of modern naturalism or antisupernaturalism, I have occasionally given a glance in its direction. "The entire scientific ethos and philosophy of modern western man," notes Michael Denton,
is based to a large extent upon the central claim of Darwinian theory that humanity was not born by the creative intentions of a deity but by a completely mindless trial and error selection of random molecular patterns. The cultural importance of evolution theory is therefore immeasurable, forming as it does the centrepiece, the crowning achievement, of the naturalistic view of the world, the final triumph of the secular thesis which since the end of the middle ages has displaced the old naïve cosmology of Genesis from the western mind. . . . [T]oday it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century.3
There is a great deal, an inexpressibly great deal, resting on the question of whether this universe is a closed system of atoms and the void--a system in which all can be explained without residue as merely matter in ultimately pointless motion. Shakespeare's Macbeth, burdened with bloody sin and looking unrepentantly into the face of death, summed that view up eloquently:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.4
I have been surprised, in recent years, to notice what I now suspect is a growing tendency among very good and reputable thinkers to question evolutionary dogma. I had naïvely assumed that, conservative Latter-day Saints and fundamentalist Protestants aside, all educated people--certainly all intellectuals--accepted evolution. I was immensely surprised, therefore, when, in talking with him repeatedly over the summer of 1990, I began to realize that Huston Smith, the eminent authority on world religions, is an outspoken critic of the theory of evolution. He is far from being a Christian fundamentalist and, with his impeccable academic credentials (including years of teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he is nothing at all like the backwoods bumpkin creationists that I had been led to imagine were the only folks who rejected Darwinism. Yet there he is.
Since that time, I have watched with mounting interest what I see as the emergence of an intellectual critique of evolution that has little if any link to Protestant fundamentalism or, indeed, directly to religion of any kind. It cannot be dismissed as a reprise of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial. It features neither simplistic appeals to the authority of scripture nor sermonizing on the fact that my grandpappy wasn't a monkey. So far as I can see, it offers up no conveniently ignorant William Jennings Bryan to be fatally humiliated by a new Clarence Darrow.
Norman Macbeth's Darwin Retried was the first book I read on the subject, and I was intrigued by the logical case he constructed against Darwinian evolution.5 Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis argued, on the basis of a lengthy analysis ranging from molecular biology to paleontology, that "the problems [with evolutionary theory] are too severe and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox Darwinian framework."6 Phillip Johnson, a prominent law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, subjected the theory of evolution to calm but withering criticism in his Darwin on Trial and followed it up with his important book Reason in the Balance.7 Within just the past few months, David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher who has taught in both the United States and France, has written a fascinating piece on "The Deniable Darwin" for Commentary.8 Finally, Michael Behe, who teaches biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, has just published a new book entitled Darwin's Black Box.9 In it, he contends that the astonishing complexity of the cell, which we have only begun to appreciate in recent decades, is impossible to explain on the basis of the gradualistic changes assumed by evolutionary theory. Rather, he says, the structure of the cell must have been purposefully devised by an intelligent designer--whether that designer be God or some other vastly intelligent and powerful being or beings.
What is the relevance of this? I am, as I have said, largely unconcerned with the truth or falsity of the theory of evolution. I think it possible, though not at all certain, that the central principles of the restored gospel can ultimately be reconciled with some modified form of evolution. But since faith in a blind evolutionary process is essential to the most common forms of naturalism, which are in turn among the chief enemies of belief in the gospel, I must admit that these recent writings have put me in exceptionally good spirits. I am pleased that some are beginning to recognize that evolution can itself be just as much a faith commitment and a world view as any religion, and can be just as dogmatically held, for reasons that are just as susceptible to psychological reduction, as a religion can be.10 "One might have expected," observes Michael Denton,
that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth. Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. Like the Genesis based cosmology which it replaced, and like the creation myths of ancient man, it satisfies the same deep psychological need for an all embracing explanation for the origin of the world which has motivated all the cosmogenic myth makers of the past, from the shamans of primitive peoples to the ideologues of the medieval church.11
I commend the books by Macbeth, Denton, Johnson, and Behe, and the article by Berlinski, to anybody interested in evolution, or in the broader question of whether good science commits us to a world view that excludes God. They make a powerful case for the proposition that rational people can be theists, believers in an intelligent and purposeful creator. This is a valuable contribution. After all, if one is convinced that a purposeful cosmos is an impossibility, there is little reason to look at the particular claims of any specific religion. Such claims will have already been destroyed by the one universal solvent, blind evolution. For those who are inclined to think along such lines, perhaps overawed by the sheer weight of the scientific authority that seems to be arrayed against theistic belief, it is pleasant to know that the foundation of evolutionary theory, which itself lies at the foundation of modern naturalism, may not be wholly secure. Not a few serious and reasonable observers have concluded, with Michael Denton, that "after a century of intensive effort biologists have failed to validate it in any significant sense."12
While I am on the issue, permit me also to commend a book by Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist/cosmologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, entitled The Creator and the Cosmos.13 Dr. Ross has established an organization in southern California called "Reasons to Believe," which specializes in often quite intriguing scientific apologetics for a conservative form of Christianity. Like Professor Behe, he argues for the presence of intelligent design in the universe.
Finally, I shall recommend with considerable enthusiasm a pair of books about the greatest miracle of them all, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ: The volume Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? supplies the text of a debate between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas about the historicity of Christ's resurrection, accompanied by the postdebate comments of several prominent thinkers of various persuasions.14 Reading it, I was genuinely surprised to realize how strong the historical case for the resurrection is. (And, I must say, I was delighted to see a well-known and widely respected atheist philosopher get thoroughly thumped on this issue by a little-known professor of philosophy at a small Christian college.) Last, but certainly not least, I heartily endorse Stephen Davis's wonderful recent book, Risen Indeed.15 A philosophy professor in Claremont, California, Davis argues forcefully and rigorously for the plausibility of Christ's resurrection as a genuine event in nonmetaphorical history.
It need scarcely be said that, if Jesus is alive, naturalism is dead.