I don’t think arguing for God being the Creator of the universe necessitates an attack on the theory of evolution. Don’t misunderstand me; I think evolutionists have gone ape over their theory (forgive the pun) to the point that they seem to forget it is a theory, and refer to it as if it is an undeniable scientific fact. True, all concede that a form of evolution is taking place all the time. Variations emerge within species of plants and animals—that’s why there are so many different kinds of dogs, seedless grapes, hybrid corn, horses that can be bred to race faster, and bacteria that develop immunity to antibiotics. This kind of evolution is referred to as microevolution, and it happens constantly.

But Darwin’s theory goes way beyond that. It claims that, without the guidance of any intelligent designer, life began millions of years ago from a kind of primordial ooze that gave rise to single-celled creatures, which then evolved into more complex ones, all the way up to we homo sapiens. This is referred to as macroevolution. Is the theory true? It definitely has its problems, but whether it is true doesn’t impact the notion that God is the Creator of the world. Scientific theories about origins simply talk about how things came to be, not whether God was behind it. For Christians to argue about scientific theory—any theory—because they think it attacks the notion that God is the Creator seems silly to me.

Let me take this a bit further. What if the point of the creation narrative in Genesis was more poetic than literal? Historically, the Church has always held this position about creation. The Church’s take was simply that God created the world. That’s it. Before the nineteenth century, the Church never tried to specify how or when God did it. Those in the ancient world (to whom the text was written) did not think in literal or scientific terms, nor would they have cared about such notions. The big news of Genesis to the ancient world was that ONE God, not many, was responsible for all we see. That radical, salient point rang through that world which believed in many gods—not one—and had absolutely nothing to do with science.

A belief in God does not necessitate that a person accept the position that the earth is just six thousand years old. The historical, theistic argument is simply that we believe God is the why behind what is here, whenever and however it got here. Scientists may ultimately tell us how and when everything happened in ways not articulated in the biblical text, but science will never be able to tell us why. Why is the stuff of belief. Understanding this helps us be open to the research and questioning of science, while recognizing such questioning is not an enemy to faith.

Science does not have to be an enemy of faith. Nanoscientist James Tour, a professor at Rice University, spends his life building molecules in the lab. He says, “I stand in awe of God because of what he has done through his creation. Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God.” Well said, nanoscience guy.

The universe we live in is amazing. The visible universe—the universe we know and can talk about intelligibly—is a million million million million (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles across. When we look up into the sky with the naked eye, we can only see about 2000 stars from any given spot on earth. With a pair of binoculars that number shoots up to 50,000. If you snag a small two-inch telescope, you’d be able to see up to 300,000 stars. With a sixteen-inch telescope you start to count, not stars, but galaxies—up to 100,000 of them, each containing tens of billions of stars. Scientists estimate that there are at least a million different galaxies in just the section of sky framed by the cup of the Big Dipper. And all of this vastness with all of its complexities works together in seemingly perfect order. In describing how the planets work together in our vast solar system, astronomer Geoffrey Marcy remarks, “They’re all in the same plane. They’re all going around in the same direction… It’s perfect, you know. It’s gorgeous. It’s almost uncanny.” And if you turn your attention away from outer space to the universe that is microscopic, there appears to be as much “inner” space as there is outer space.

One could say that the order of non-living things—the laws that govern physical objects, the earth orbiting the sun, the seasons coming and going, the laws governing atoms and the subatomic universe—is enough evidence to assert that there is a God who designed things to be the way they are. But the most compelling evidence—the evidence that seems to scream: THERE IS A GOD! — comes from things that are alive.

Even the smallest, single-celled organisms have more complexity within their cellular walls then anything scientists have been able to recreate using huge supercomputers. What guides the process in all living things is the DNA molecule, which regulates every cell of every plant and animal. The DNA molecule is like a tiny microprocessor that controls everything a living cell does. The data encoded on the DNA inside every cell of every living thing is a kind of written language. The English language uses a twenty-six-letter alphabet; DNA uses a four-letter chemical alphabet. As the chemicals are arranged in various “lettered” sequences, they form what amounts to words, sentences, and paragraphs containing all the instructions needed to guide a living cell. The DNA molecule instructs cells on how to make proteins, what and how to eat, how to get rid of waste, when to divide, how to repair itself, and so on. So, where did DNA come from? How was the code “written?” Was it written by chance or was there a Designer?

Dr. Walter L. Bradly, who has a doctorate in materials science from the University of Texas at Austin and is an expert on polymers and thermodynamics, says, “Ice crystals have a certain amount of order, but it’s simple, repetitive, and has a low amount of information, sort of like filling a book with the words, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ over and over again. In contrast, the kind of complexity we see in living matter has a high information content that specifies how to assemble amino acids in the right sequence, like a book being filled with meaningful sentences that communicate a story. Unquestionably, energy can create patterns of simple order. For instance, you could see ripples on the sand at a beach and know they were created by the action of waves. But if you saw the words, ‘John loves Mary’ and a heart with an arrow drawn in the sand, you know that energy alone didn’t create that.”

If you and I stumbled onto an ancient drawing on a cave wall or found a novel at an abandoned campsite, we would probably argue that there was intelligence behind it. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that something as complex as the DNA molecule had intelligence behind it? Keep in mind that the DNA molecule is an enormous polymer that contains much more complex information than any cave drawing or novel. Its primary role is the long-term storage of information. Scientists often compare DNA to a set of blueprints because it contains the instructions needed to manufacture all the internal components of cells, such as proteins and other complex molecules. DNA carries all the genetic information (the genes) of an organism, but it also carries the information that regulates everything done on the cellular level. DNA molecules are immensely complex and filled with billions of bits of data. They even know how to replicate themselves when a cell divides so that new cell has an exact copy of the blueprint to take along with it. DNA contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of what we call life. Is it really plausible to suggest such complexity happened by chance?

The 1997 film Contact was based on Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name. Sagan was an American astronomer and astrochemist who pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In the movie, Dr. Eleanor Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, scans the skies with radio telescopes, searching for signs of intelligent life in space. The radio telescopes are “listening” for a signal that is not the usual static (or white nose), which is the random sound of space. There is no intelligence behind random noise. One day Dr. Arroway began receiving a signal that was not noise; it was a transmission of prime numbers (which are numbers only divisible by themselves and the number one).

Arroway and the other scientists reason there is no way a natural cause could be behind a string of numbers like this; it would be too improbable. This was not random static; this was information. It was a message with content. The plot of the film is based on the pursuit to decode and learn from the message that was sent from space. Sagan himself once said, “The receipt of a single message from space would be enough to know there’s an intelligence out there.”

So, here’s a valid question: If, as Sagan asserted, a single message from space would be enough for scientists to conclude there is intelligent life out there, what about all the information encoded on the DNA molecule in every living thing? Isn’t that evidence that there might be some intelligent being behind it all? Is it silly to believe an Intelligent Designer might be involved?

To suggest that something as complex as DNA developed without any intelligence directing it is more far-fetched (strictly based on the odds) than the oft-used analogy of you standing in front of a fully functioning Boeing 747 and someone telling you it just showed up after a tornado went through a neighboring junk yard. Is it possible that believing that life emerged randomly, without an Intelligent Designer, requires more faith than believing it did?
Again, I am not attacking any scientific theories here, nor am I trying to blunt our curiosity to discover how things came to be. I’m suggesting that discovering how does not preclude the idea that there was intelligence involved. And, yet, there is such prejudice against this idea in many circles.

Case in point: Oxford educated, British chemist Leslie Orgel once said, “Evolution is smarter than you are,” to which atheist Christopher Hitchens responded, “But this complement to the ‘intelligence’ of natural selection is not by any means a concession to the stupid notion of ‘intelligent design.’”

Why not Christopher? Why couldn’t evolution have an intelligence that was put in it by God? That Hitchens (along with the other neo-atheists) can make no “concession” to the possibility of God being involved is evidence of a silly prejudice. It is not a logical observation.