Ranald Macaulay introduces us to a very significant book
My admittedly dramatic title is deliberate.
I want to clarify, right at the start and as succinctly as possible, the import of the book titled Undeniable, by Douglas Axe. Everyone who cares about biblical origins and ‘True-Truth’ needs to read it. Axe’s title says it all: evolution theory is no longer tenable and God’s creation is undeniable.
Chance meeting
Interestingly, the author begins with a chance meeting on the streets of Cambridge in 2013. While revisiting the university he bumped into his earlier Director, the eminent scientist, Sir Alan Fersht (now Master of Caius College Cambridge) on the pavement in King’s Parade. They hadn’t met since 2002 when he left Cambridge, but the chance meeting had an awkward twist, as we shall see.
Between 1990 and 2002 they had been colleagues at the Centre for Protein Engineering (CPE) in Cambridge. Before that Axe had attended Caltech (The California Institute of Technology) where, in the late 1980s, an innocuous sounding exam question got him thinking about what he himself labels ‘awkward things’.
Going with the flow?
He realised he couldn’t any longer just go with the flow. ‘Which of the biological macromolecules’ he was asked, ‘is apt to have been the first living molecule and why?’ to which he replies: ‘the question is about how life began, posed with the assumption that it began by ordinary molecular means.
‘…I decided to give the expected answer in full and then – for extra credit – to state why I found that answer unconvincing. I explained why, contrary to the consensus view, I didn’t think any molecule has what would be needed to start life… [however] I learned when my exam was returned (with points deducted) that we students were expected not only to know the current thinking in biology but also to accept it without resistance. We were there as much to be acculturated as educated… I had learned my lesson. The stream of scientific consensus flows with an almost irresistible current…’
This sets the scene perfectly. Axe had and still has a problem on his hands – as do we all – and it’s spelled ‘D-a-r-w-i-n’.
Coming to Cambridge
From Caltech he came to Cambridge, where his expertise in protein engineering prompted Fersht to suggest that he supervise some PhD students whose work had been jeopardised by a previous colleague’s mistake. (She had published an article ‘proving’ that a particular enzyme could adequately take over the work of another enzyme, thus supporting the view that organic life evolves. Her samples, however, had been contaminated and mis-labelled: so Myriam’s evolved version of enzyme B turned out to be the natural enzyme B – not evolved!)
Intelligent Design
Then in February 2002 came the big surprise: while working early one day before others had arrived, Fersht approached him in the lab. Just then ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID) was in the headlines due to a Newcastle school which was teaching creation alongside evolution – and he knew that Axe had connections with ID in the States. Horrors!
Within a few weeks Axe received an e-mail to say that the CPE was short of space and would he vacate by the end of the month. Even though trusted as a researcher he had to go – which explains the initial awkwardness I mentioned. Thankfully, their brief encounter helped to clear the air.
Intolerant scientific establishment
All of this is seminal for the book as a whole. Axe is an ‘insider’, he has worked with genetic material, he knows what he’s talking about. But the Cambridge experience left him with an important question and a somewhat surprising solution: looking back he quite rightly wonders how young scientists, or any of us for that matter, can proceed with a scientific establishment this intolerant. Can the differing views on origins be resolved merely by a show of hands? Surely not, so he proposes an alternative to enable ordinary punters to assess what the experts are saying. Something more fundamental has to be introduced into the equation, which he labels ‘Common Science’ (because everyone has to be concerned about ‘knowledge’ – scientia – making judgments ‘true’ or ‘false’). The heart of this is the ‘Universal Design Intuition’.
To get to grips with its importance an historical analogy may be helpful – my analogy, let me carefully point out, not the author’s. In 1517 Luther was a young academic with (theological) ‘experts’ vastly outnumbering him and his Wittenberg friends. But he refused to be deflected, for he knew he was appealing to something so fundamental that even unlearned people could grasp its significance. They didn’t need to be ‘educated’ to see that the Catholic hierarchy was an all-powerful institution which was rotten to the core. A new paradigm had to be found and all that was needed was a ‘small boy’ courageous enough to take on the ‘playground bully’.
Needing an Inventor
Remember this is an analogy only and therefore limited, but it highlights the fact that Undeniable has a similar thrust – only in scientific not theological terms, obviously. The author wants to take the Genesis discussion away from ‘expert-theories’ and return it to ‘undeniable facts’ – things ordinary people can have an opinion about and come to certainty over.
Not that he spurns science or invokes an essentially theological discussion – far from it. No, his arena is reality itself and the way things are structured. Here, he argues, one is on firm ground: nothing in the material world can make itself; invented things need an Inventor; this is undeniable. And this provides him with the opportunity to distinguish between ID and ‘Creationism’: Whereas ‘creationism’ begins with revelation ‘ID starts with a commitment to the essential principles of science and shows how those principles ultimately compel us to attribute life to a purposeful inventor… [and it] settle[s] for this vague description not because [it] want[s] to smuggle God into science but because the jump from ‘intelligent designer’ to ‘God’ requires something beyond the essential principles of science’ (p.48) The theological details may be arguable, the facts of reality aren’t.
Alphabetti spaghetti!
Space precludes an elaboration of the many issues which the book deals with – like the process of ‘invention’, the nature of language, the ‘hierarchy of functional coherence’, nature’s ‘perfection’ and so on. But nothing puts it beyond the reach of a non-scientist and the author uses lots of helpful illustrations – like ‘oracle soup’, or the robot that cleans our swimming pools: (a) pasta-alphabet-letters never form meaningful sentences when poured into our bowls! (b) robots are ingenious but never because they are ingenious themselves! They have ingenious ‘creators’.
He also shows that creation is the default mode for human beings, not something strange. He quotes an American psychology professor who says ‘by elementary-school age children start to invoke an ultimate God-like designer to explain the complexity of the world around them – even children brought up by atheists’. The experts of course take this to be an aberration needing to be put right through more ‘acculturation’ as above. But the experts are working uphill: the shape of reality testifies against them.
Mount Impossible
Similarly, when it comes to protein engineering (the author’s expertise), the likelihood of enzymes morphing into one another is slender: the likelihood of inventing entirely new proteins by evolution (1074) is greater than the outer limits of evolutionary possibility by a factor of 1034 – that’s one with 34 zeros after it! ‘How, you may wonder, can anyone believe that natural selection is incapable of such tiny transformation while maintaining that it accomplished so many gargantuan ones?’ (p. 84) Amazing: a single step is impossible, yet Everest is scaled! Which reminds one of Professor John Polkinghorne’s comment about planet earth’s ideal location: ‘accurate to within one part in a trillion trillion…a degree of accuracy equivalent to hitting a target an inch wide on the other side of the universe…’
Finally, the author comes clean about his commitment to God’s real existence. He enters unashamedly into apologetic-mode: ‘I haven’t shied away from naming God as the knower who made us. I see no other way to make sense of everything we’ve encountered on our journey’.
He’s dead right and everyone should join him on that journey.
Ranald Macaulay is a retired pastor of the International Presbyterian Church and lives in Cambridge.
