Do I Have to Choose Between Science and Faith?

Well, first of all, can I just say what a great pleasure it is for me to be here at Brunsfield.

I've not been here for a long time, but years ago I used to come fairly regularly,

and so it is a pleasure for me to renew my contact with this church fellowship.

And thank you very much for asking me to tackle this subject,

Do I Have to Choose Between Science and Faith?

My qualifications to speak about science is that science has been a large part of my life.

I have a degree in chemistry.

I hold a PhD in chemistry.

I did research at university and some teaching,

but I spent most of my life in secondary education teaching chemistry.

I was an HMI in Scotland in the sciences,

and I eventually became a Deputy Director of Education.

So most of my life has been concerned with science and science education.

And, of course, you couldn't be a Christian these days

without sensing that there is a very significant tension between science and faith.

This tension is kind of summed up by the new prophetess, Greta,

who says,

Don't believe me, believe the science.

And so if you can claim that science is on your side in any matter,

then that is beyond dispute.

This is a particular problem,

because science doesn't deal in certainties.

It deals in probabilities.

The science is settled, people say.

Well, science is never settled, actually.

There are quite a number of things in science

that are settled as much as can be.

But science is always open to innovation and to new directions.

And, in fact, science is never determined by the consensus.

The consensus in science can change very rapidly,

and often changes as the results of the findings of one individual.

Science is not done by committee.

It's done by experimentation.

It's done by scientists.

And very often the scientific consensus changes,

sometimes quite rapidly,

and often on the basis of new evidence

that's uncovered by one scientist or by a group of scientists.

But you can't question science.

And there are some areas of our lives

where science demands to be accepted.

Climate change is one of them.

What you don't hear about, of course,

is the minority of scientists who dispute climate change.

And the problem for them is

they are subject to personal attack,

their research grants are cut off,

they're sidelined on the UN committees that deal with this.

The BBC won't allow any dissenters on climate change

on any programme to do with climate.

So what happens is that there's a consensus

based on what the academy decides, right or wrong,

and it's very hard to challenge that.

And part of the reason for this is that

science has such immense credibility.

In my lifetime, and over the last 100 or 150 years,

science has made such enormous advances

that affect all our lives for the good.

And therefore, if science says something,

then who are you or who are any of us to question it?

And so these things go unchallenged.

And I don't know a great deal about climate change.

I know enough to be suspicious of it.

I mean, I only discovered about a year ago

that the most common greenhouse gas is...

No, it's not.

No, it's not.

It's water vapour.

20 times more significant than carbon dioxide.

Now, that was the first thing that made me think,

wait a minute, there's potentially a problem here.

If water vapour is the most significant greenhouse gas,

why are we getting so worked up about carbon dioxide?

So that was a question that worried me.

And then why in the past did we have eras of human history

that were warmer than now when we had no motorcars

and we weren't using carbon?

And why did we have ice ages in the past?

Is it possible that climate change is affected by the sun

and that that's the key problem, not carbon dioxide?

But as I say, I don't know much about it.

So I'm only just trying to make the point to you

that there are certainties that arise from science

that cannot be challenged.

And the other area that cannot be challenged in science

is that you cannot challenge the science of origins.

The science of origins is settled.

So don't dare challenge it.

And the same phenomenon happens there.

There are a growing number of scientists who dissent

from the neo-Darwinian conception of nature.

And what happens to them is that their reputations are trashed,

their careers are threatened, and they are sidelined.

So the best thing to do if you want to feed your family

and keep a roof above your head is shut up.

And so once again, you have the domination of origins by science,

which is unchallengeable.

Now, I know a little about this,

and I've spent the last decade or more thinking about it.

And of course, I would have, as I'll try and indicate tonight to you,

some serious reservations about the current direction of science and origins.

But having said all that, I would want to say absolutely clearly

that science is a very powerful reality in our world.

And all of us, one way or another, have benefited from the advances in science.

I had appendicitis when I was seven years old,

the only kind of major illness I've ever had.

And had I not been treated with antibiotics, I probably wouldn't be here tonight.

So I do understand the significance and power of science.

And you might ask the question, well, what is science?

Well, science is really the logical study of the natural world.

It's the study of nature and the laws that govern nature.

And the great breakthrough in science several hundred years ago

with the pioneers of modern science was that they set aside

all the pagan nonsense about gods fighting

and displaying their anger and thunder and lightning

and concentrated on natural laws and how natural laws operated.

And science is the study of natural laws.

And of course, it's understandable that scientists will only want explanations

in terms of natural laws and natural processes and biological processes

because that's the way we understand the world as it is.

There's a problem, though.

What happens when you come to ask the question

about how the natural laws got here?

And that's where science gets into a bit of a fankel

because what has happened in modern science

is not just that we have elucidated the natural laws,

but that we have insisted that there is no explanation beyond natural laws.

And that's no longer science.

That becomes philosophy.

That's a worldview.

That there cannot be anything beyond the natural laws.

And therefore, that makes the question,

where did the natural laws come from, virtually unanswerable.

Because if there's no agency beyond natural laws,

then the natural laws must be responsible for the natural laws,

which is philosophically incoherent.

Or perhaps the emerging scientific position about origins

is that they came out of nothing,

which is pretty absurd.

So you see, when you come to think about origins

and where the universe came from

and what's beyond the universe,

then science is, in some sense, rather powerless.

And it's interesting that in the modern world,

it is philosophy that's leading the way.

In the philosophical schools in our world and in our country,

there are a significant number of people

who recognize that philosophically,

there has to be a creative agency beyond nature

because there's no other way

in which we can understand nature as we encounter it.

And I must tell you a little incident I had about this.

I was at a school six-form conference

with a hundred pupils.

And there was a panel of people,

including myself and somebody from the Humanist Society,

and one of the pupils asked,

does the panel believe that the scientific explanations

for the origin of life and of the universe

are the best explanations?

And there was a moment or two silence,

and I said, well, maybe I could offer a view in that.

I said, I wasn't aware that science had an explanation

for the origin of life or the origin of the universe.

And my Humanist colleague nearly exploded at that point,

had a bit of a fit, and shouted at me,

who made God then?

And I said, well, I didn't mention God.

I just said I wasn't aware of a scientific explanation

for the origin of things.

And so we had this back and fro,

or this rather heated discussion about God.

And then he said to me this very odd thing.

He said to me, why can't you just believe

that the universe always existed?

And I said to him, I thought that was your problem with God.

And at that point, a wry smile crossed his face,

and he understood the problem.

The problem is that there has to be some cause of the universe

which is not itself caused, the first cause.

And that, of course, makes science entirely intelligible

if you believe that there is a creator who created the universe,

and indeed that's the direction in which science and philosophy,

and if I may say so, common sense points.

Let me pause for a minute.

I brought one or two books with me tonight,

which I'd like you to have a look at.

I have just recently written a little book called

Born in a Golden Age, which is part autobiographical,

but which has a couple of chapters in it

about the matters that we'll talk about tonight,

about intelligent design, evolution, creation, and so on.

So I have some copies of that tonight.

I also write other chapters about things that have been important to me,

like family matters, the Plymouth brethren,

Christians in the marketplace, and why I am a Christian.

So this is part autobiography, part apologetics,

and there are copies of it there.

Please take one.

I have also written a little pamphlet

entitled An Introduction to Intelligent Design,

and these are available over there too.

I also have a very excellent DVD

which deals with the science of origins and design

called Expelled, and there are a number of copies there,

and a book that I would recommend for students at high school

or at university entitled Explore Evolution.

This is not a religious book.

This is a book that looks at the science of Darwin

and looks at the contrary arguments.

I'd advise you to get a copy for your family who are students

or your grandchildren.

This is an excellent book that will not only help them

with their studies in evolution,

but will also give them a degree of resilience

when they look at the science that is claimed to be unquestionable.

These are available.

If you're a student or a pensioner,

please just take what you want.

This one is absolutely free.

Just take it.

If you can leave me five pounds for the others,

that's five pounds each,

then I'd be grateful.

But please don't make money an obstacle.

Just help yourself to what's there.

So I would like tonight to deal with just three questions briefly,

if I can.

And maybe to your astonishment,

my first point is that science depends on faith.

I'll explain what I mean in a moment.

The second thing I want to speak about is that science dismisses faith.

I think we're pretty familiar with that.

And thirdly, I want to say a little controversially,

that science actually develops faith.

So let me come to the first of these,

which is that science depends on faith.

Now, a very interesting book that came from Solis and Dundee,

entitled Why I Am Not an Atheist,

has this rather interesting chapter at the beginning by Donald Bruce,

where he says,

I am a scientist and I think like one.

This is one of the main reasons I am not an atheist.

So here is a representative of a body of scientists,

and I would be one of these,

which is the reason why I couldn't be an atheist is because I'm a scientist.

And because science has taught us so much about the universe,

it just seems to me impossible to be an atheist.

And not least, of course, is what we now understand about the human mind and the human brain.

One of the most mysterious things about our existence is our consciousness.

You're all sitting there listening to me tonight.

I'm not sure if you've ever started thinking about your mind and your consciousness.

I had a lecturer at university who tried to teach us something about consciousness.

I wasn't listening that well because I was more interested in the chemistry,

but I do remember him saying,

once you start thinking about thinking, it's worse than drinking.

But actually, having been brought up in the brethren,

I didn't know anything about drinking.

But the line stayed with me nevertheless.

And of course, one of the most mysterious things about the universe we live in

is the sheer complexity of the brain.

The connections in our brain, the neurological connections, are mind-blowing.

And recently, a world-renowned philosopher and lawyer, Thomas Nagel,

published this book entitled Mind and Cosmos.

It's the subtitle that's intriguing.

It's why the neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.

And Nagel's argument is that any theory that cannot begin to comprehend the complexity of consciousness

is not explaining anything.

And of course, the Darwinian view of consciousness is that consciousness

is just an accidental byproduct of physics and chemistry.

And Nagel's view would be, well, if you can believe that, you'll believe anything

because consciousness is the ultimate reality of our existence.

And if we can't begin to explain that, then we really actually haven't got very far.

And he makes this remarkable statement about neo-Darwinism,

that it's a triumph of ideological theory over common sense.

Now, the interesting thing about Nagel is, and this is breathtaking,

Nagel is an atheist.

But he's wise enough to see that science really hasn't got anywhere with understanding consciousness.

To those of us who are Christians and who sense that we live in a universe made by God,

I think we understand that the mystery of consciousness has got something to do with a connection

to the supreme intelligence that made and maintains the universe.

John Lennox has an interesting observation on this.

He says,

Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter,

or there is a creator.

It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.

And I think that's a very trenchant view on this.

Keith Ward, Oxford philosopher, has an interesting book entitled,

Why There Almost Certainly Is a God.

And his argument is, if anything exists, then God almost certainly exists.

And it's pretty obvious that anything exists.

So therefore it's pretty obvious that God exists.

But one of the things that young people in our generation,

and scientists generally perhaps don't recognize, is,

and this is the key point about science depending on faith,

the pioneers of Western science, the great pioneers of Western science,

believed that science was only possible

because the universe was designed and predictable.

You could only do science if behind the universe there is a designer

and design and laws that are predictable.

So scientific laws can tell us what happens,

and we expect that to happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

And it's that predictability which the pioneers of science recognized

and believed that science depends on faith.

It depends on faith in a creator who has made the world logically

in a way that we can perceive it.

That's a remarkable thing.

And indeed, all the pioneers of Western science,

Kepler, Copernicus, Lord Kelvin, Clark Maxwell,

these were all devout believers in God.

And actually all of them, almost without exception,

were practicing Christians.

So the idea that science and faith are in conflict

is a kind of balmy idea because it was actually faith

that gave us science in the first place.

And if you ever visit the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge,

this is where the structure of DNA was first elucidated.

You'll find across the doors of the Cavendish Laboratory,

reflecting an age of faith more significant than the one we live in,

across it it says,

the works of the Lord of Great sought out by all those that have pleasure therein.

And the Cavendish Laboratory, in a way,

symbolizes this understanding of science,

that it's only possible if we believe we are exploring the works of a great creator.

But of course, we live in an age when science dismisses faith.

And it does so in pretty brutal terms.

I mean, here's some of the cartoons you'll see.

And this one says,

tell the neighbors that creation's back in town.

You know, the whole thing is a laughing matter.

Here is the ascent of a theory,

monkey to man to intelligent design.

This is the kind of treatment that faith gets in the modern world.

So you have Richard Dawkins and the blind watchmaker talking about science,

not requiring any creator,

about science being supreme.

He goes on to talk about the something almost sacred about scientific investigation.

However, the interesting thing is that

if you listen to Richard Dawkins talking about origins,

and in fact, in this DVD,

there's an interview with Richard Dawkins,

it's worth having it just for this interview,

in which Richard Dawkins concedes

that if you look at the details of cellular biochemistry,

and I quote,

you could detect the hand of a designer.

That's what he says.

Now, I'm not quite sure at the time if he knew exactly what he was saying,

but that's what he said.

And then almost as if to catch himself, he says,

but of course,

that designer would have to have come from somewhere else in the universe

and would have to have arisen by some kind of Darwinian means.

Now, the question he was asked is,

how did life begin?

And he says,

we don't know how life began.

And that's why he says,

you could maybe see evidence of a higher power.

So the curious thing as I listen to this interview,

and it's worth listening to in detail,

the curious thing is that Richard Dawkins doesn't know how life began on this planet,

but he somehow knows how it began on some other planet in the universe.

In other words,

this, as John Lennox says somewhere else,

nonsense is nonsense,

even when talked by world-renowned scientists.

And this is the kind of nonsense that sometimes we're up against in this whole area.

Anthony Flew was a philosopher,

a well-known philosopher,

and Anthony Flew used to regularly debate with C.S. Lewis.

Lewis was the Christian.

Anthony Flew was the atheist.

But in his last years,

Anthony Flew changed his mind,

and he published a book entitled,

There Is a God.

And this was a remarkable change of mind

and a remarkable conversion by a remarkable man.

I actually had the pleasure of sitting at a lunch with him

at a conference we were having about design.

And I asked him,

What was it that led you to change your mind?

And he said,

Well, he said,

There are really three things that made me change my mind.

One was that nature exists.

If anything exists,

it begs a question about how it got there.

Secondly,

that nature should obey laws that we can perceive

and laws that we can make predictions from

is a compelling argument for a mind behind nature.

And thirdly, he said,

In recent years,

we have come to understand

that life at a cellular level

is hugely complex

and is intelligently organized.

And he said,

When I thought about all of this,

he said,

I came to the conclusion that there is no escaping,

that there is a God.

It's interesting that he came along to a conference

organized by Christians

at which T.N. Wright was speaking about

the resurrection of Jesus.

And I dare to hope that in his last years,

he found Christian faith.

Richard Dawkins was a lot less charitable

about Anthony Flew's change of mind

and dismissed it as a man who was,

quote,

cramming for his finals,

which was a rather negative way

of looking at a change of mind.

However,

the scientific consensus would be

that we're all here by chance.

We're all accidents.

I remember listening to an Oxford professor of chemistry

telling us this on television.

I don't know what that does for your self-esteem,

but we're basically all accidents, he said.

And he didn't mean in a local or limited sense.

He meant that the whole universe is an accident

and we're all the products of an accident.

That's pretty close to what Lord Rees,

the astronomer royal,

recently opined in the Daily Telegraph

when he said that we might all be here

as the result of a massive fluke.

Now, that's not the most scientific proposition

I've ever heard.

But what I would say about that is

that I prefer the design theory to the fluke theory.

I think that's a much more scientific way to approach it.

And a professor that I've got to know relatively recently,

a man called Steve Fuller.

I don't think he's a practicing Christian,

but he's a professor of sociology,

but he is a supporter of the position of intelligent design.

And he makes this very interesting comment.

From cosmology to biology,

it is becoming increasingly clear

that science's failure to explain matters

at the most fundamental level

is at least in part due to

an institutional prohibition on intelligent design.

Now, notice these words.

An institutional prohibition on intelligent design

as one of the explanatory options.

Now, this is pathetic for scientists

because you can only do science with an open mind.

You can only do science if you're prepared

to consider various possibilities.

But he is right.

There is an institutional prohibition

on proposing intelligent design

as an explanation for life and for the universe.

Now, I know a little bit about this.

I'm not a practicing academic,

but I do understand a little bit about science.

But to my surprise, a few years ago,

the Guardian asked me

if I would write an op-ed piece.

In fact, they put it in the middle pages of the Guardian.

And I was arguing that in school science,

intelligent design should take its place

alongside evolution as one of the possibilities.

I was surprised that they published the article,

but they did.

And the journalist who asked me for it said,

be prepared for a backlash to what you've written.

And then he called me up sometime later and said,

you'll be interested to know

that the response online to your article

is amongst the biggest

that the Guardian has ever had.

And he said, I'm afraid to say

that it's almost uniformly critical of you.

Well, Steve Fuller had helped me with this.

He phoned me up and said,

that's a lovely article.

Well done.

He said, can I offer you a word of advice?

Don't read the comments online, he said.

Don't read the idiots.

It'll only upset you.

And I took his advice.

So I didn't read the 2000 retorts.

But indeed, there is an institutional prohibition

on intelligent design in academia.

You can't mention it.

There are scientists,

and the DVD would show you this,

there are scientists that have actually lost their jobs

because they have indicated sympathy

for the scientific theory of design.

There are others who have had their careers trashed,

who constantly have ad hominem arguments.

And in a kind of a way,

you can take encouragement from that

because what nobody ever does

is try to face the argument for design.

They just heap criticism on those who promote it.

And it's a bit like,

I remember reading about a member of parliament

who in his notes,

when giving a speech,

in the margin of its notes,

it said,

argument weak at this point, shout.

And that, I think,

has got something to do

with the way in which intelligent design

is treated in academia.

So science dismisses faith.

But actually, the design argument,

and I have spent the last decade and a half

looking at it,

the design argument

is a powerful argument from science

that is not going to go away.

And it is the argument

that gave us science in the first place.

And so I come to my third point.

And my third point is this.

Science develops faith.

I say to you humbly

that over the last 15 years,

when I've been looking and speaking

and reading about intelligent design,

this has certainly been something

that has strengthened and developed my faith.

And I want to try and tell you very briefly,

if I can,

how I encountered this.

What is not widely known

is that the key to biology

is not mutation and natural selection.

The key to biology is information.

And where we find information in biology

is in this remarkable substance called DNA.

DNA.

Now, this is a stylized diagram

of a DNA molecule.

This is the double helical molecule

that we have in every cell in our body.

This is the molecule

that carries the information

that builds human beings.

It doesn't have letters

down the spine like that.

These letters are there

to represent chemical units.

Adenine, guimine, thymine, cytosine.

These are four chemical units

that are quite similar,

but just a little different.

And these units are carried

within the double helix of DNA.

Now, I used to teach this stuff

to sixth form pupils at school.

I used to tell them about Crick and Watson.

We used to watch a film about it.

We used to discuss how they managed

in what is one of the outstanding

chemical feats of all time

to work out the structure of DNA.

But what I never noticed

or had never heard

until somewhere around 2005

when I listened to an American scientist

by the name of Stephen Meyer

talking about DNA,

Meyer was interested

in the information content of DNA.

And he said,

as a scientist,

it is a legitimate question to ask,

where does the information

in DNA come from?

Now, we are children

of the information age.

In fact, I can hardly go half an hour

without looking at my phone.

And this is the most incredible technology.

Do you know that there's

more computing power

in my iPhone

than there was on Apollo 11

when it landed on the moon?

The amount of information

carried in these devices

is absolutely astonishing.

Now, you probably, like me,

don't know a whole lot

about computer science,

but you do know

that it works by information.

And the information

is carried in computer software.

And the computer software

is coded with ones and zeros.

You don't need to know this

to be able to use it

or to use computers.

But computers are programmed

by the orders

of the ones and the zeros.

And there are trillions of them

to carry all the information

that these phones have

or that our sophisticated world

operates on.

Now, these ones and zeros

are not there randomly.

They are there precisely

in the order that is required

to convey the necessary information.

And if you get one of them wrong,

it doesn't work.

If you corrupt the software,

it doesn't work.

There's a precision about information

that's breathtaking.

And I wonder how in all the world

computer scientists manage

to produce devices like this

that I could drop occasionally

and it still works.

But, you know,

this is not a patch on our DNA.

And the DNA that we carry

in every cell in our body

carries vastly more information

than is carried in my mobile phone.

I mean, think about it for a moment.

Each one of us started life

as a single cell

inside a mother's womb.

And in that single cell,

there is about six feet of DNA.

If you uncouple the strands of DNA

and join them together,

don't do this,

it's bad for your health,

and stretch it out,

you will get roughly six feet of DNA.

And the sequencing

of the A's, the T's,

the C's, and the G's,

the sequencing of these

along the DNA molecule

is what carries the information

that built you and built me,

every bit of us.

This is one of the great unknown secrets

of the modern world.

We think we know about DNA,

but DNA is an information base

beyond anything that anyone has created.

Now, Myers' argument about this was,

the units in DNA are not regular,

they're not random,

they're actually coded.

They are, in a sense,

the same kind of arrangement

as the digitally coded information

that we use in our lives every day.

And Myers says,

it is legitimate for a scientist to ask,

how does this information arise?

Now, this is not a religious question,

this is a biological question.

Where does the information come from?

And he's written a stunning book

about this called

Signature in the Cell.

It was a New York Times bestseller

for Times Literary Survey bestseller

in 2009.

This is an astonishing book.

Perhaps not exactly for the layperson,

but if you've got any knowledge of science,

this book is remarkable.

In which he argues

that the only credible explanation

for the information in DNA

is that it is the product of mind.

Now, you think about it.

I'm looking at notes tonight.

I've printed them rather too small

to be able to read them properly.

But these notes of mine

represent the information

that came from my mind

about a week ago

when I was putting this together.

The information that we have

in our hymn books,

in papers,

in our computers,

on the screen.

You never get information

without a mind.

And so if you're looking at DNA

and trying to draw

a scientific conclusion about it,

the only conclusion you can draw

is that this is clear evidence

of intelligent mind.

Intelligent mind is the only known source

of specified functional information,

like newsprint or computer software.

And this is a scientific process

which was best described

as inference to the best explanation.

Now, when you're dealing

with historical science,

like where did the world come from?

Where did life come from?

Where did we come from?

You can't go back and watch it.

You can't repeat the experiments.

All you can do

is look at the data you've got

and come to the best conclusion

on the evidence before you.

And the best conclusion you can come to

when you look at DNA

is to say this has to be

the product of intelligent mind.

Bill Gates remarkably has said

the machine code of genes

is uncannily computer-like,

according to Professor Richard Dawkins.

He says,

DNA is like a computer program,

but far, far more advanced

than any software we have ever created.

Now, think about that for a moment.

How did Bill Gates get his software?

He didn't get his software

by opening the windows of his laboratory

and letting the weather blow through

and just waiting for it to assemble by chance.

That's ridiculous.

He got it by employing

world-class software engineers

who programmed the computers.

So how do we get the information

that's carried in our DNA?

Well, according to Lord Reese,

it's a fluke.

I think that idea is utterly laughable.

And I think the most credible evidence

for the existence

of an intelligent mind behind nature

is the wonder of the DNA

that makes us what we are.

Incidentally, each of us has about

a hundred trillion cells in our body.

It depends what kind of diet you're on,

but roughly a hundred trillion cells.

Every cell in our body

has six feet of DNA.

Every cell carries

a complete set of genetic information.

And if you were to take

all the DNA in your body

and join it together in a line,

don't try that

because that would be really bad

for your health.

If you joined it all together in a line,

and I have to apologize,

there's a mistake in my book here.

I say,

if you join all the DNA,

you would get a string of DNA

that would reach to the moon

and back 8,000 times.

You're supposed to say wow at that point.

Yeah.

But somebody said to me,

are you sure about that?

I said, well, I'm pretty sure about it.

I looked it up

and that's the figure I got.

He said, no, I think you're wrong.

So I went and recalculated it

and I am wrong.

It's not 8,000 times.

It's 200,000 times.

Wow.

So you see,

science develops faith

because actually,

instead of faith

being the opposite of science,

it is science that tells us

just the sheer physical evidence of science

tells us

that there's a creator

who created us,

whose mind is written

all over our DNA.

There was an interesting day

on the 26th of June, 2000.

Bill Gates

and the then Prime Minister,

Tony Blair,

had a transatlantic

telephone conversation,

transatlantic telephone news conference

to announce

the unraveling of the human genome.

This is when scientists

working on both sides of the Atlantic

and elsewhere in the world

had at last established

the sequence of the base pairs

in DNA.

This was a colossal breakthrough.

Because, of course,

it opens up all sorts of possibilities

for science and medicine

and would enable scientists

potentially to be able to deal

with some of the life-limiting diseases

that arise from mutations

and irregularities in our DNA.

And it's interesting

that the language

that Bill Clinton used was,

today we are learning the language

in which God created life.

Well, some people would say,

well, an American president

would say that.

My theory is

that he was writing a script

that was written for him

by the other man in the picture

who is Francis Collins.

Francis Collins was the director

of the Human Genome Project.

And the interesting thing

about Francis Collins is

that Francis Collins

is an evangelical Christian.

So he had no doubt

that science pointed towards

a creator

who had put this information

in DNA.

And that's what has led me,

among other things,

to the position known

as intelligent design,

which holds that certain features

of the universe

and of living things

are best explained

by an intelligent cause,

not by an undirected process

such as natural selection.

Now, I have more I'd like to say,

but I think I should pause there

and ask for guidance

as to whether you want me

to continue for a few more minutes

or is this a point

at which we'd have some questions.

What I would want to go on to say

is that DNA is not the only evidence

for God's existence.

What we call cosmic fine-tuning,

why the laws of the universe

are just right for life,

there's evidence that comes

from biological complexity,

the work of Michael Behe

and other scientists,

that biological systems

within our body

are so complex

that they couldn't possibly

have arisen by accident.

These are all strands

of intelligent design.

There's a list of seven.

You'll see my brethren,

Lee, preaching coming through that.

Get them all to alliterate

our intuition,

our intelligence,

the intelligibility of nature,

the intentionality of nature.

Things look as if

they've been designed

to be exactly right.

The improbability of getting

biological molecules by chance.

The intricacy of biological systems.

And as I've outlined to you tonight,

the huge information bank

that's carried in every cell

of every living thing.