The Mark of Meaning

Literature, chemistry, mathematics, biology. These subjects are not immediately connected in the human mind—though all challenge, inspire, and often engulf the mind, perhaps at its pinnacle. Does evolution, however, explain why man would endeavor so fervently to unlock the secrets of geometry or the periodic table? Or why he would draft page upon page to describe worlds unknown except to his own imagination?

In A Meaningful World, Discovery Institute fellows Jonathan Witt and Benjamin Wiker suggest that such discoveries defy the emptiness inherent in naturalism. The inexplicable order of nature counters the notion that such structures can be attributed to unguided processes. And the profound genius found in works of art can only be a reflection of a much greater Artist.

As Chuck Colson and Mark Earley have pointed out in BreakPoint commentaries on the book, this is not the typical defense of the intelligent design theory. One finds it somewhat overwhelming to go from an in-depth analysis of the writing style of Shakespeare to a discussion of the atomic makeup of the elements. And it is a bold venture to draw from so many widely varying sources in science and culture in order to draw a picture, as it were, of a universe that is finely tuned and awe-inspiring, and perhaps observed only by a few billion sentient life forms on one isolated planet.

The conclusion, however, is fairly simple: order, function, and consistency all represent evidence of purpose. Naturalism demands that purpose and meaning must, at root, be stripped away. But the human heart clamors for something deeper, while human experience—even in art and science—testifies to a world not simply enslaved to the whims of chance.

I recently had the chance to ask Jonathan Witt a few questions about why these concepts are so important in understanding and applying intelligent design.

Travis McSherley: A Meaningful World presents analyses of literature, chemistry, mathematics, and biology—a grouping that might not hold a natural (so to speak) connection. What is the common thread that weaves these arenas together? For example, how does the complexity of Shakespeare’s writing reflect or resemble the observed complexity of the periodic table?

Jonathan Witt: We argue that nature is as a work of genius, like a Shakespearian play is a work of genius—both are deep and elegant, full of meaning at every level.

To demonstrate this, we provide evidence of this overarching genius in a wide variety of fields. In chemistry, for instance, we show how the order of the elements possessed a depth that challenged chemists for centuries, but it also possessed an elegance and hidden clarity that allowed the great chemists to gradually unravel its order, and to describe that order in the periodic table.

It seemed to me that a central theme of the book was a bit of an ironic statement: that the depth and richness of nature, and man’s ability to find it, is evidence that it was supernaturally ordered. Thus, would it be fair to say that the study of science is itself an argument in favor of a meaning-filled world and a rebuke of Darwinist principles?

Instances of human genius, including scientific genius, are a real problem for Darwinism. Darwinism says that nature builds life one tiny mutation at a time, so why would Darwinian evolution burp up a species that could produce a genius like Shakespeare or Mozart or Einstein? On the Darwinian view, humans evolved before civilization arose, before there was any survival or reproductive benefit to being not merely pretty insightful or pretty musical, or pretty handy with words, but extraordinarily so, ingeniously so. The renowned physicist Paul Davies put the problem this way. “We have certain skills, for example—we can jump streams and catch falling apples—which are necessary for getting by in the world. . . . But, why is it that we also have the ability to discern, for example, what’s going on inside atoms or inside black holes. These are completely outside the domain of everyday experience…not at all necessary for good Darwinian survival . . . ” Davies asks a good question. We argue that the best explanation for the origin of human genius isn’t some mindless process; it’s intelligent design.

Physicist and atheist Steven Weinberg wrote, “It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes [after the Big Bang], but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. . . . It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. . . . The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

We argue that the evidence points in the opposite direction, to a universe overflowing with meaning and purpose, and to a creative intelligence of unparalleled genius. We begin by showing that Weinberg doesn’t even believe his own nihilism. In the final paragraph of his book, right after the paragraph we just quoted, Weinberg concludes: “But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

Note that he didn’t say that they work for endless hours spinning out physicists’ fantasies. He said they work out the meaning of real data. This assumes, of course, that the meaning is in the data, that there is an intelligible order the data reflects, one that humans can decipher. Science is a meaningful activity precisely because the universe is meaningful and humans have the strange capacity to understand it.

The founders of modern science, men like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton were all driven by the twin convictions that nature was the product of a rational mind and that it was accessible to human reason because humans were made in the image of nature’s maker, God. A quotation from Kepler illustrates this point nicely. After he discovered a more precise and mathematically elegant description of the planetary orbits, he said, “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.” The other founders of modern science made similar comments, and we see this meaning not only in the mathematically tractable laws and constants of physics, but in the book-like information found in cells, in the art and architecture of living forms like butterflies.

This depiction seems to tell us quite a bit about the ways of man and the order of nature, but what might those in turn reveal about a Creator?

Good question. It’s one that we tackle in our book, and one that astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards pose in their superb book, The Privileged Planet. Why are so many things in nature set up in a tutorial fashion, allowing scientists to proceed toward deeper insights a little bit at a time, rather than forcing them to make impossibly long leaps to the more advanced theories? For instance, science was able to progress to Einstein’s theory of relativity in part because there existed an elegant mathematical description of gravity that approximated reality, namely the one Newton formulated.

What if there had been no elegantly beautiful approximation to focus the physicist’s attention short of Einstein’s? If that had been the case, physics might never have reached it, for Newton’s model laid much of the groundwork for Einstein’s later breakthrough. This tutorial quality to the natural order, its clarity, is highly significant, I believe. It undermines any notion that the maker of our vast universe is distant and detached, unconcerned about anything so tiny and insignificant as humankind. Instead it suggests that the book of nature was authored by one interested in us discovering Him, discovering even that He wants to be discovered.

The debate between evolution and design is often presented as a clash between science and philosophy (or faith). Where do you think this book fits in regard to that argument?

Christians shouldn’t let Darwinists get away with painting this as a clash between science and philosophy, much less as a clash between science and faith or reason and faith. Rather, it’s a clash between those who insist that scientists can only give material explanations for material phenomena on the one hand, and those on the other hand who insist that scientists should follow the evidence where it leads, even if the evidence points to intelligent design. The Darwinists are the dogmatists in this debate. Keep in mind, too, that the Christian faith played a crucial role in the birth of science. The evidence from God’s book of general revelation—nature—continues to reinforce the testimony found in His book of special revelation—the Bible. A Meaningful World is a guided tour of the genius evident in God’s book of general revelation, the physical world all around us, from atoms to stars, from cells to Shakespeare.

If academia were to find more widespread appreciation for the natural world as a product of genius rather than chance, how would that change our approach to science in the lab and classroom?

There’s an old saying that “man is more than the sum of his parts.” But modern reductionism seeks to describe wholes strictly according to their parts, and it seeks to identify ultimate reality with smaller and smaller parts, all the way down to the atomic and subatomic levels. We argue that reductionist science is misguided in two important ways. First, as the best biologists now realize, the living wholes are just as real as their parts. Second, as we demonstrate in our treatment of the history of chemistry, the best science has generally assumed that nature was not a mere accident of matter and energy, but a work of genius.

By returning to those core convictions, we believe science will become more rather than less fruitful. We show that reductionism in a variety of fields is being overturned by the latest evidence in favor of a kind of wholism—the living cell over the parts; the living animal over its material parts; the fine tuning of the physical constants of physics and chemistry as finding their greatest meaning in the drama of biology.

Thus how would such a shift in perspective change the way we interpret scientific discoveries?

We would recognize what the founders of modern science understood, that the evidence of a designing genius in nature rests not in the gaps of our present scientific knowledge but in the growing body of things we do understand about nature.

Travis K. McSherley is editor of BreakPoint Online and a contributor to The Point.

Jonathan Witt is a senior fellow at the Discovery Insitute and co-author of A Meaningful World.