Equal Time for Intelligent Design?  An Intimate Debate Case

---

Finding Darwin’s God

The great hall of the Hynes Convention center in Boston looks nothing like a church. So what was I doing there, smiling in the midst of an audience of scientists, shaking my head and laughing to myself as I remembered another talk, given long ago, inside a church to an audience of children? …. [M]y first Communion. I was eight years old sitting with the boys on the right side of our little church (the girls sat on the left) and Father Murphy, our pastor was speaking.

Trying to put the finishing touches on our year of preparation for the sacrament, father was trying to impress us with the reality of God’s power in the world ….

Look at the beauty of a flower. The Bible tells us that even Solomon in all of his glory was never arrayed as one of these. And do you know what? Not a single person in the world can tell us what makes a flower bloom. All of those scientists in their laboratories, the ones who can split the atom and build jet planes and televisions, well, not one of them can tell you how a plant makes flowers …. Flowers, just like you, are the work of God.

I was impressed. No one argued, no one wisecracked. We filed out of the church like good little girls and boys, ready for our First Communion the next day. And I never thought of it again, until this symposium on developmental biology. Sandwiched in between two speakers working on more fashionable topics in animal development was Elliot M. Meyerowitz, a plant scientist at Caltech ….

[By crossing various plant mutants, Meyerowitz and his team were] able to identify four genes that have to be turned on or off in a specific pattern to produce a normal flower. Each of these genes, in turn sets off a series of signals that “tell” the cells of a brand new bud to develop as sepals or petals rather than ordinary leaves …. To me, sitting in the crowd thirty-seven years after my First Communion, the scientific details were just the icing on the cake. The real message was “Father Murphy, you were wrong.” God doesn’t make a flower. The floral induction genes do ….

Before the age of science, one might have argued that the world would never yield its secrets to the feeble powers of the human mind. Neither the towers of heaven nor the depths of the earth were accessible to man, and life in all of its forms seemed the greatest mystery of all. As we know, all of that has changed. We have walked on the moon, probed the depths of the skies, and even decoded the secrets of life. The good old days of utter mystery may not be gone, but they are fading fast. And a scientific detective list of solved cases, like it or not, includes evolution.

Adapted from Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, pp.260–263 (New York: HarperCollins Pub. Perennial ed., 2002).

Copyright © 1999–2010 by the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science.  Please see our usage guidelines, which outline our policy concerning permissible reproduction of this work.