The Case for a Creator

Overall comments
All of the people Lee Strobel interviews for this book are connected with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC): William Lane Craig is a fellow at the CSC; Jonathan Wells, Guillermo Gonzales, Jay Richards, and Michael Behe are senior fellows; Stephen Meyer is program director for the CSC; Robin Collins has received support for his work from the CSC.

In addition, Phillip Johnson, whose work is often cited for support, holds the title of program advisor for the CSC.

Nonetheless, although both the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture are mentioned several times, neither one appears in the index. Other people and concepts (such as Strobel's wife) do, despite being mentioned only once.

Chapter 1: White-Coated Scientists Versus Black-Robed Preachers
The first chapter begins with Strobel going through his early career as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune in the 1970's. At that time, he was not religious, but after covering a story in West Virginia about religion and schools, Stobel was reeled into religion. Strobel says he was a skeptic of Christianity and religion, but he does not give any evidence to support his story - so this may be just a ploy.

During his investigation, he learned that there were shootings and bombings at schools "all because some hillbillies are mad about the textbooks being used in the schools." Later, Strobel writes that when he attended an anti-evolution rally in rural Campbell's Creek and was recognized as a reporter, the crowd turned ugly and he was in real fear of physical harm (so much that Strobels knees were shaking) possibly because they thought the reporter would not portray them in a sympathetic light. An intense, dark-haired wife of a Baptist minister insisted, "The books bought for our school children would teach them to lose their love of God, to honor draft dodgers and revolutionaries, and to lose their respect for their parents." a local business man said, "Let me put it this way," he said. "If Darwin's right, we're just sophisticated monkeys. The Bible is wrong. There is no God. And without God, there's no right or wrong. We can just make up our morals as we go. The basis for all we believe is destroyed. And that's why this country is headed to hell in a handbasket. Is Darwin responsible? I'll say this: people have to choose between science and faith, between evolution and the Bible, between the Ten Commandments and make-'em-up-as-you-go ethics. We've made our choice - and we're not budging."

Chapter 2: The Images of Evolution
The chapter begins with a quote by Richard Lewontin and Phillip Johnson. Johnson, the father of the modern intelligent design movement, makes the claim that science is identical to materialism and naturalism that purposely excludes god.

Strobel begins by sharing his experience as an atheist going through a biology class and how his curiosity for truth drove him into liking science. He retells how he grew up in a post-Sputnik era when education and science were held in a high degree. He mentions that in the 1960's relativism and situational ethics caused the nation to turn upside down.

He quotes Richard Dawkins, who said Darwin make it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

The Images of Evolution
Strobel recalls the images he frequently saw in a biology class.


 * Image 1: Tubes, Flasks, and Electrodes of the Stanley Miller Experiment. - This excluded God from having a role in creating life.
 * Image 2: Darwin's "tree of Life" -After reading the Origin of Species Strobel says this explained the diversity of life.
 * Image 3: Ernst Haeckel's Drawings of Embryos - Strobel says these drawings could be found in virtually every evolution book he studied.
 * Image 4: The Missing Link - Strobel mentions and sticks to using Archeopteryx as an example.

Strobels says he met many spiritual skeptics who started doubting in high school or college. Strobel mentions in 2002, a Boy Scout was not granted the Eagle Scout award because he refused to pledge reverence to God. This started when he had "been an atheist since studying evolution in the ninth grade."(Dean E. Murphy of the New York Times, "Eagle Scout Faces Ultimatum over Atheism," Orange County Register (November 3, 2002))

Darwin Versus God
Here Strobel lists many scientists and theologians who find no conflict in accepting evolution and hold a belief in God. Where was Strobel when several Popes openly stated the evolutionary theory does not contradict or refute God? This did not make sense to Strobel because he was taught evolution is undirected. Strobel brings up Phillip Johnson's book, Darwin on Trial, that explains evolution's whole point is to exclude God. (Read this article to see everything wrong in Johnson's book) Strobel says Ernst Meyer agrees with Johnson (quoting phrase word for word on page 23), "the real core of Darwinism" is natural selection, which "permits the explanation of adaption...by natural means, instead of by divine intervention." Strobel takes the above quote from Stephen J. Gould, "Abscheulich! Atrocious! Natural History (March 2002). Strobel also mentions Fransisco Ayala, a Dominican priest for to his science career, claiming there was no need for a creator or external agent for the mechanisms of evolution. (Ayala refused to be interviewed for this book). Strobel goes on to quote several other sources, including Pulitzer Prize winners and Time magazine.

Darwin's Universal Acid
Here Strobel goes back to finding sources to support his "atheistic" youth, and summarizes this section with a phrase by Daniel Dennett that evolution is a universal acid that slowly eats through every traditional concept.

Strobel goes on that since God was excluded from his worldview, he would go on forth towards his ambitions and pleasures (even the ones that "God" supposedly does not favor). Strobel blames this behavior on religious authorities were unwilling or unable to help him get the answers to questions he had about God. He ends this section retelling his view of such people as "slaves to their wishful thinking."

The Investigation Begins
A friend of Strobel announced that she was becoming a follower of Jesus, which made Strobel go about asking deeper questions about faith and God. The big three questions were the following,
 * Are science and faith doomed to always be at war?
 * Does the latest scientific evidence point toward or away from the existence of God?
 * Are the images of evolution (which spurred him to atheism) still valid?

Strobel then goes of on his quest, saying that he would go were the answers took him. As a journalist, he is supposed to ask questions. He is also a lawyer, meaning he is skilled to make cases. The difference between those two and science is that scientists test and repeat their data, whereas lawyers make a case for a proposition whether it is true or not.

Chapter 3: Doubts About Darwinism
Strobel begins this chapter with a paper from the Discovery Institute called "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism." He goes into detail which universities they are from and the several fields they expertise in. In the end, he concludes the "emperor of evolution has no clothes." He provides links to articles from the Discovery Institute criticizing PBS series presenting the evidence for evolution.

For this chapter, Strobel interviews Jonathan Wells, a senior member of the Discovery Institute, who stated his only goal in science is to "destroy Darwinism." Strobel begins to interview him and his book "Icons of Evolution." The "Icons" used by Wells denotes a religious reverence for a symbol.

Wells says the consensus is unclear what the atmosphere was like at the time, but it is generally agreed it is not like the one used in the Miller experiment. The experiment included methane, ammonia, and water vapor, but there is no evidence for methane-ammonia in the atmosphere and hydrogen was too light that the earth's gravity could not hold it.
 * Image 1: The Miller Experiment

Wells mentions that some textbooks mention organic material has formed, but says this organic material is Formaldehyde and Cyanide, and declares that these are toxic and life could not possible form from such substances.

Next, Wells develops a straw man: put a cell in a test tube, poke a hole in it, and all its contents will leak out.

Here Wells argues that fossil evidence has not proven Darwin's theory and the Cambrian explosion refutes Darwin's tree of life, which states that populations will diverse over time whereas the Cambrian shows a sudden appearance of life.
 * Image 2: Darwin's Tree of Life

Ernst Haeckel was a nineteenth-century biologist who lived around the same time as Charles Darwin. Haeckel is best remembered for his dictum "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", meaning that a developing embryo retraces the evolutionary history of its ancestors. Haeckel is also infamous for defending this claim by using his own drawings of developing embryos, which turned out to be faked to exaggerate the stages he claimed were there. Wells claims that these known fallacious drawing are still being taught in school text books today, even Strobel recalls seeing these pictures in his biology class.
 * Image 3: Heackel's Embryos

In this section, both Strobel and Wells repeat the old creationist lie that there are no such things as transitional fossils. Strobel quotes Michael Denton, [T]he universal experience of paleontology... [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life... what they have never yielded is any of Darwin's myriads of transitional forms... The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record.
 * Image 4: The Missing Link

Wells points out "Besides, we see strange animals around today, like the duck-billed platypus, which nobody considers transitional but which has characteristics of different classes."

Wells calls Archeopteryx a bird with modern feathers.

Chapter 4: Where Science Meets Faith
An interview with Stephen C. Meyer, a philosopher and one of the co-founders of the Discovery Institute. Strobel sets the theme of this chapter to argue how science and religion relate to each other. Strobel begins this chapter with a story of Allan Sandage, a respected cosmologist raised as a nonreligious Jew who shocked his colleagues by announcing his conversion to Christianity at the age of fifty.

Meyer claims that scientists adopt naturalism is the basis of science.

Chapter 5: The Evidence of Cosmology: Beginning with a Bang
An interview with William Lane Craig. Inexplicably, in a book which claims to present the conclusions of scientific authorities, Strobel's interviewee on the subject of cosmology is not a practicing scientist but a professional Christian apologist. Strobel mentions at the beginning of the chapter "I wasn't interested in unsupported conjecture or armchair musings by pipe-puffing theorists. I wanted the hard facts of mathematics, the cold data of cosmology, and only the most reasonable inferences that could be drawn from them." And yet, Strobel does not interview someone in the fields of cosmology and physics, but rather theology and philosophy?

Here Craig presents his most popularized cosmological argument. He calls it the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which goes as follows:
 * P1) Everything that exists has a cause
 * P2) The universe had a beginning
 * C) Therefore, the universe had a cause

Chapter 6: The Evidence of Physics: The Cosmos on a Razor's Edge
An interview with Robin Collins. Collins is not a member of the Discovery Institute, he is a professor of Philosophy at Messiah College. He has a Ph.D in philosophy, but he dropped out of a Ph.D in physics program at UT, Austin. His actual study is in philosophy, not physics.

Collins focuses on the "Fine-tuning argument" and anthropic principle as evidence for God.

Strobel and Collins address the multiple universe or "multiverse" theories. Strobel proceeds to confess that "I found myself agreeing with the iconoclastic Gregg Easterbrook," whom he then quotes as saying: "The multiverse idea rests on assumptions that would be laughed out of town if they came from a religious text" (p. 144).

Chapter 7: The Evidence of Astronomy: The Privileged Planet
An interview with Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Wesley Richards, authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery in which they argue for the "rare earth hypothesis." Their position is the earth is so unique suited for life.

Both Gonzales and Richards argument rests on the anthropic principle.

Chapter 8: The Evidence of Biochemistry: The Complexity of Molecular Machines
An interview with Michael Behe, a senior member of the Discovery Institute and author of Darwin's Black Box. He is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, but disowned by his own department with an unprecedented disclaimer.

Behe is known for constructing the argument irreducible complexity.

Strobel quotes Behe, "Now, does this microscopic transportation system [Behe is speaking about the endoplasmic reticulum —Ebonmuse] sound like something that self-assembled by gradual modifications over the years? I don't see how it could have been. To me, it has all the earmarks of being designed."

When asked if irreducible complexity is falsifiable, Behe said it is otherwise all these "scientists" would not go through the trouble of trying to falsify it.

Chapter 9: The Evidence of Biological Information: The Challenge of DNA and the Origin of Life
An interview with Stephen C. Meyer, a fellow of the Discovery Institute. Strobel describes Meyer, who is not a biologist and has never published a single piece of research on this topic, as "one of the country's leading experts on origin-of-life issues." Strobel continues to praise Meyer in an obnoxious way by sharing an experience Strobel had witnessing Meyer in a debate and how fearless Meyer was (perhaps due to his boxing training).

Moving onto Meyer, on page 243 Meyer made such an erroneous claim, Well, I say it's time to redefine science. We should not be looking for only the best naturalistic explanation, but the best explanation, period. And intelligent design is the explanation that's most in conformity with how the world works.

When addressing abiogenesis and the prebiotic soup, Strobel asks where is the evidence for it? Meyer responds with, "The answer is there isn't any evidence... If this prebiotic soup had really existed... it would have been rich in amino acids. Therefore, there would have been a lot of nitrogen, because amino acids are nitrogenous. So when we examine the earliest sediments of the Earth, we should find large deposits of nitrogen-rich minerals... Those deposits have never been located."

Chapter 10: The Evidence of Consciousness: The Enigma of the Mind
An interview with J.P. Moreland, a Christian philosopher and theologian.

The discussion between Strobel and Moreland addresses consciousness. Moreland argues that consciousness could not have originated by natural processes.

Moreland insists that consciousness is separate from the brain. His best proof is a report from neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably, the patient would respond, "I didn't do that. You did." According to Penfield, "the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body."

Chapter 11: The Cumulative Case for a Creator
Addressing the historicity of Jesus and the historical stance that Jesus did not exist, Strobel quotes Gregory Boyd as some who, "offered a devastating critique of the Jesus Seminar, a group that questions whether Jesus aid or did most of what's attributed to him. He identified the Seminar as 'an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking."

Strobel then briefly goes over the evidence addressed throughout this book.
 * 1) Evidence of Cosmology - Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument
 * 2) Evidence of Physics - the fine-tuned argument that turned atheist Patrick Glynn into a believer.
 * 3) Evidence of Astronomy - Earth's rare position to support life
 * 4) Evidence of Biochemistry - irreducible complexity
 * 5) Evidence of Biological Information - DNA and information that can only come from an intelligent source.

All of these, when compared to Scripture, seem to show a link as if the "creator" authored the Bible.