Equal Time for Intelligent Design?  An Intimate Debate Case

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Letter from a Failed Atheist upon Reading the National Geographic

The article was about the amazing adaptations that orchids have made to their environments in order to propagate successfully. As I read I was particularly intrigued by the reproductive strategy of one species, which involved the cooperation of a male wasp. Apparently the flower resembled very closely the female of this species of wasp, including having an opening in the proper place, so that the male wasp might just reach, by copulating with the flower, the pollen produced by the blossom. Flying on to the next flower the process would be repeated, and thus cross-pollination take place. And what made the flower attractive to the wasp in the first place was that it emitted pheromones (specific chemical attractants much used by insects to bring the sexes together) identical to the female of that species of wasp. With some interest I studied the accompanying picture for a minute or so. Then, with a terrific sense of shock, I realized that in order for that reproductive strategy to have worked at all, it had to be perfect the first time. No incremental steps could account for it, for if the orchid did not look like and smell like the female wasp, and have an opening suitable for copulation with the pollen within perfect reach of the male wasp’s reproductive organ, the strategy would have been a complete failure.

I will never forget the sinking feeling that overwhelmed me, because it became clear to me in that minute that some kind of God in some kind of fashion must exist, and have an ongoing relationship with the processes by which things come into being. That in short, the creator God was not some antediluvian myth, but something real. And, most reluctantly, I also saw at once that I must search to find out more about that God.

Extract from a letter to Richard Dawkins from an American minister who had been an atheist but was converted by reading an article in the National Geographic. Quoted in R. Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, pp. 59–60 (New York: Basic Books, HarperCollins Pub., 1995).

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