Evolution or Creation?
Patterns
that Point to Design by Mark Early
Breakpoint Worldview
© 2007, Prison Fellowship, PO Box 1550, Merrifield, VA 22116-1550
In their interesting book, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt argue that the wonders of our world point to a universe full of meaning – meaning that, in turn, points to a Designer. The uniqueness of their work is that they focus on the arts and sciences to make their case.
The authors show that all efforts to force Shakespeare's works into a tidy little box have come up short. Materialism and deconstructionism insist that all people and all literature are basically the same — that "everybody is a genius, so no one is." Shakespeare's beautiful and profound plays and poetry stand as a living rebuke of such a despairing worldview.
Wiker and Witt write, "The playwright's themes pose a profound challenge for materialism. . . . But more fundamental still is the challenge Shakespeare's genius poses to any worldview that would reduce everything, including the human mind, to the mindless flux of matter and energy. . . . . Are we really to believe that natural selection moved from a single cell in a dirty pond to this?"
But that's only the beginning. From exploring the genius of one human being, the authors move on to exploring another kind of genius. Specifically, they go on to talk about geometry and chemistry.
But they are not talking about the intelligence of the human beings who came up with the Pythagorean Theorem and the periodic table. After all, these things weren't invented by humans. What they are pointing to is the genius that created the orderly physical and mathematical laws that govern the whole universe. Without this intentional design, there would have been no Pythagorean Theorem or periodic table to discover.
The authors ask that, if the world was born out of chance, how is it that nature acts according to rational laws? If we're all here because of random and meaningless events, it doesn't make sense that, one, there are mathematical and scientific laws that govern our world, and, two, that our efforts could discover what those laws are. We would be fumbling in the darkness of randomness, looking for explanations that didn't even exist.
But the universe is full of patterns-patterns that extend to the smallest particles of an atom, that can be seen in the orderliness of the periodic table of elements. Furthermore, they're patterns that the human mind could discover and comprehend. How does random chance explain all that?
Materialists
look at these natural laws and patterns and say that they allow a closed and godless
universe to function properly. Wiker and Witt show that this is utterly "absurd."
They give the proper respect to these natural laws and patterns by showing that
there's nothing random or
godless about them. The universe is saturated with
evidence of the Designer's existence. The very mathematics and science —
and literature — that lead some to posit a barren and meaningless existence
are actually the very keys to discovering a universe full of intelligence and
meaning.