Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Design, according to fundamentalists, is also diametrically opposed to chance.
The venerable Argument from Design remains the chief weapon in creationist
apologetics. Creationists consider it self-evident and incontrovertible. Though the theory
of evolutionary adaptation stood the design argument completely on its head, creationists
continue to appeal to Design without even a trace of defensiveness. It is featured in
virtually every book or article promoting creation-science. “Actually,” says John Morris
(1989), Henry Morris’s son, “any living thing gives such strong evidence for design by an
intelligent designer that only a willful ignorance of the data (II Peter 3:5) could lead one
to assign such intricacy to chance.”
“The most powerful evidence for creation and against evolution,” state Robert
Kofahl and Kelly Segraves in The Creation Explanation, a widely-cited creation-science
textbook, is “found in specific evidences of intelligent, purposeful design. This evidence
is all around us and is something the layman as well as the scientist can appreciate”
(1975:xii). ICR biologist Gary Parker features UC Santa Barbara evolutionist Garrett
Hardin’s rhetorical question “Was Paley right?” (which Hardin posed in a biology
textbook to stimulate discussion about adaptation) in his creationist primer Creation: The
Facts of Life (1980:36-9; Parker’s book is also reprinted as the first half of What Is
Creation Science? [1982] by Morris and Parker). To Parker, the answer to this rhetorical
question is obvious: Yes. Wernher von Braun’s contribution to the 1972 California
textbook hearings was titled The Case for Design.
The book Why We Believe in Creation Not in Evolution, by Fred John Meldau
(1974), for instance, consists almost entirely of densely packed examples of “witnesses
against evolution”: various wonders and designs of nature. Meldau describes hundreds of
animal and plant adaptations, the design of earth’s physical properties and ecosystem, the
social insects, marvels of the human body, and many more. R.E.D. Clark argues long
and hard against chance in The Universe—Plan or Accident? (1961), describing the
remarkable “fitness” of the universe for life as evidence for Creation. In the chapter
“Nature—The First Inventor” Clark shows that many examples of design in nature utilize
scientific and engineering principles only recently discovered by man. The theme of A.
Cressy Morrison’s 1944 book Man Does Not Stand Alone (written in response to Julian
Huxley’s evolutionist Man Stands Alone) is that the wonders and design of nature prove a
Supreme Intelligence and purpose. Morrison, a former president of the New York
Academy of Sciences, admits the strength of Darwin’s theory, but maintains that Paley’s
design argument has not been refuted.
Norman Macbeth, a retired lawyer, claims in Darwin Retried: An Appeal to
Reason (1973) that the design argument has not been defeated. (Macbeth, who became a
regular and prominent attendee of the Systematics Group meetings at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, first made these accusations in a Yale Review
article.) James E. Horigan, a Denver lawyer, wrote a book Chance or Design? (1979),
arguing for Design in nature. Horigan unabashedly professes his admiration for Paley
and the Bridgewater Treatises. The evidences of obvious intelligent design in the
universe are “far too bewildering to attribute to chance.” Horigan notes laconically that
“the biblical account of Genesis fits quite comfortably” with his interpretation.
Wilder-Smith, the British-born triple doctorate living in Switzerland, has made a
modernized version of the design argument the thesis of several creation-science books.
His chief argument is that Intelligence—Logos—is necessary for the creation of life; that