We must begin by making a most important distinction. Evolution and Darwinism are not the same thing. Evolution is the evidence we have that species of plants and animals have changed over vast amounts of time, or more modestly, that over millions of years extinct species have regularly been replaced by closely allied species. Darwinism is a particular explanation of the evidence for evolution, one that is passionately reductionist and materialist, and purposely excludes the possibility of a Creator. Evolution is not incompatible with theology; Darwinism is an ideological interpretation of the evidence for evolution designed by Charles Darwin himself to exclude God. It is quite possible, then, to affirm evolution, reject Darwinism, and believe in God.
We press this distinction precisely because prominent evolutionists, astronomers, physicists, and chemists are beginning to voice their disagreements with ideological Darwinism, and the reason is revolutionary. The evidence for evolution itself seems to be pointing decidedly away from Darwinism, and to God.
One must be cautious and sober about so monumental a shift, and there are few more cautious and sober scientists than those found in John Barrow and Simon Conway Morris’s The Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning. It is fair to say that it is a technical book, with essays from experts in all relevant fields, but then, great scientific debates are waged in the technical details.
But, given the details, we may summarize the flow of their various arguments as follows. In the last twenty-five years, science has become increasingly aware that the universe is finely-tuned at its origin and in its unfolding. The fundamental laws of nature, the very precise and particular calibration of its various forces, the stellar evolution of the elements all turn out to be exactly balanced and orchestrated so that the merest nudge to any of them would result in a lifeless universe or perhaps no universe at all.
Such unimaginable precision strikes directly against Darwinism for an obvious reason. Darwin sought to eliminate the need for a Creator God by elevating chance and death, random variation and natural selection, as the twin secular deities. But such cosmic fine-tuning is the very opposite of randomness, and it occurs long before biological evolution. Moreover—and here is the most important news—the cosmic fine-tuning is suspiciously biocentric. That is, the chemistry of the cosmos is designed for life, the non-living for the living. Death is not the creative force, as Darwin believed. Nor is life an accident. Instead, life is written into the cosmos from the beginning. Not scribbled or dashed off thoughtlessly, but written in an elegant hand.
What do I mean by this? The science of biochemistry is revealing optimal design for biology. Carbon isn’t just a little bit better than the alternatives to serve as the backbone of biological complexity, but off the scale superior. Water isn’t just a little better than other compounds to serve as the liquid of life; no other possibilities even get close. Our genetic code isn’t just one possibility among many for carrying genetic information; it is one in a million better than the alternatives. Such optimal design isn’t the result of something a little better fit having emerged from a pool of close competitors. It’s the existence of superfitness without any competition at all.
Let’s put these discoveries in context. Darwin believed that the evident appearance of design in biology could be explained entirely as the result of two non-intelligent causes, random variation and natural selection. Against this, the authors of Fitness of the Cosmos for Life argue that the appearance of design occurs on the pre-biotic level, the level of chemistry and biochemistry, before natural selection can occur. In fact, biology depends upon the optimality of chemistry for biological form. The recognition of such optimality strikes a death blow to Darwinism. Evolution depends upon this optimality to function at all, and the optimality explains why life is so robust and evolution is so startlingly effective. Such optimality, like the fine-tuning of the Big Bang, leads us to an intelligent cause of the universe, not to mere randomness.
If the various scientists represented in Fitness of the Cosmos for Life are on the right track, then Darwinism is obsolete. That is, if pre-biological fine-tuning and optimality are confirmed, then whatever the contingencies involved in evolution, they certainly take place within and because of an extraordinarily well-designed cosmos superfit for life. That’s no accident.
 
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