William A. Dembski - Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-To-Understand Guide to Controversy

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Fantastic Voyage

Did mind make matter, or matter mind? Are the things of nature the product of mindless forces alone, or did creative reason play a role? Theologians have grappled with this question but so have philosophers and scientists stretching from ancient Athens to modern Nobel Prize winners like physicists Albert Einstein, Arno Penzias and George Smoot. The reason is simple: It may be the most important, the most fundamental question of all.

In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution to argue that blind nature had produced all the species of plants and animals around us. The new theory convinced a lot of people that evidence of a Creator could not be found in nature. If there were things in nature that remained mysterious, scientists would figure them out in time. To attribute its origin to God, they insisted, was simply to give up on the enterprise of science.

Today, Darwinists level the same charge against the contemporary theory of intelligent design (ID). They insist that ID is just an argument from ignoranceplugging God into the gaps of our current scientific understanding. Darwinists have made many thoughtful arguments over the years, but this isnt one of them. The theory of intelligent design holds that many things in nature carry a clear signature of design. The theory isnt based on what scientists dont know about nature but on what they do know. Its built on a host of scientific discoveries in everything from biology to astronomy, and some of them are very recent discoveries. To show what we mean, lets take a journey.

Miracle of Rare Device

Imagine you are a world-class software architect living twenty years in the future, and you just learned that youve won a lottery for a space flight to an unnamed distant planet. The rendezvous point for departure is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. When you arrive, the scientists in the obligatory white lab coats seat you in a white conference room and explain that the flight will employ what they refer to as mass driver technologyno rockets, no flames and thus no need for an enormous launch pad. Youll depart directly from JPL.

After a thorough physical, you enter the raindrop-shaped vessel along with the captain, pilot and two other lottery winners. Youre strapped into a cockpit seat in front of a panoramic viewing window and hooked to various wires, patches and tubes. On your left is a lottery winner with thick, hairy arms. He looks and talks like an aging steel worker from Pittsburgh, though you soon learn that hes actually a top-notch submarine engineer. The woman to your right is a gangly blond in her thirties, a Cal Tech physicist who keeps peppering the captain with questions about the mass driver.

The hatch is shut. The countdown begins. At seven you hear a low, groaning. At five it drops an octave and your teeth vibrate inside your gums. At three the lights flicker. At zero the cabin falls silent, a stab of pain runs the length of your body, and you fall into darkness.

When you wake, drooling, eyes blurry, head aching, you have no idea how long youve been asleep. A minute? An hour? A day? You rub your eyes and see that the ship is already approaching a moon or planet marked by a pattern of blobs haphazardly swinging this way and that over the surface. Maybe theyre tornados, except that theyre moving in all different directions. Would a storm do that? As the ship draws closer, you realize the moon isnt quite like anything from our solar system that youve ever heard about. The colors, the details are wrong somehow.

Noticing that you have the arms of your chair in a death grip, you try to relax. Farther and farther the ship descends. Its clear now that this strange moon is closer and smaller than you supposed, maybe only a dozen miles away and as many across.

If its an asteroid, though, its a strange onealmost perfectly round. You glance to either side to read the expressions of your fellow lottery winners. Theyre wearing the same blank look of wonder you are.

You turn back to the approaching moon, and here a curious thing happens. Though the moon had seemed small a moment ago, it now seems enormous again, not because you go back to thinking its big for a moon but because you realize youre not approaching a moon, not a planet, but a machine of some kind, one far bigger than any manmade object youve ever met.

As your ship draws closer, you make out, across the things surface, millions of portholes opening and shutting as millions of ships enter and exit. A sensor beeps gently at the pilots control panel. I suggest the three of you breathe, he says, turning toward you with a smile.

You take a few deep breaths, but a moment later youre holding your breath again. You were expecting your ship to move into orbit around the space station, but now you realize that one holebarely larger than the shiplies directly ahead and the pilot is making straight for it.

You find yourself counting down from ten, wondering if these will be the final seconds of your life.

The engineer beside you crosses himself and murmurs, What is it?

Byzantium, the captain answers mysteriously.

In the next moment youre through the portal and on the other side.

In modern parlance the ancient capital city of Byzantium, with its intricate and devious political environment has come to serve as a metaphor for all things labyrinthine and, well, Byzantine. Immediately you understand why the captain would refer to your destination by the name of that ancient city. Within is a realm of dizzying sophistication, a labyrinth of intricate corridors and conduits networking off in every direction, some stretching off to processing units and assembly stations, others to what the captain explains is an enormous computer, as yet far out of sight, at the center of the space station.