Do I Have to Choose Between Science and Faith?

[0:00] 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.

[0:16] 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.

[0:28] 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.

[0:39] 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.

[0:51] 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.

[1:11] 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.

[1:22] 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.

[1:34] But science is always open to innovation and to new directions. And, in fact, science is never determined by the consensus.

[1:45] 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.

[1:56] 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.

[2:10] 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.

[2:27] 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.

[2:41] 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.

[2:51] 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.

[3:05] 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.

[3:17] 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.

[3:29] 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.

[3:41] 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?

[3:56] 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.

[4:13] 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.

[4:25] 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.

[4:39] 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.

[4:52] 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.

[5:04] 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.

[5:17] 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.

[5:31] 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.

[5:43] 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.

[5:59] 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.

[6:15] 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.

[6:39] 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.

[6:54] 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.

[7:12] 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.

[7:27] 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.

[7:44] 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?

[8:06] 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.

[8:17] 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.

[8:30] 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?

[8:42] 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.

[8:59] 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.

[9:15] 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.

[9:35] 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.

[9:47] 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.

[10:01] 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.

[10:16] 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.

[10:27] 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.

[10:39] 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.

[10:53] 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.

[11:05] And maybe to your astonishment, my first point is that science depends on faith. I'll explain what I mean in a moment.

[11:17] 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.

[11:29] 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.

[11:52] 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.

[12:07] 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.

[12:21] 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.

[12:33] 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.

[12:46] 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.

[13:02] 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.

[13:18] 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.

[13:36] 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.

[13:51] 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.

[14:07] 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.

[14:19] 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.

[14:36] 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.

[14:52] 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.

[15:08] 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.

[15:41] 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.

[15:56] 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.

[16:12] 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.

[16:25] 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.

[16:39] 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.

[17:01] 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.

[17:12] 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.

[17:24] 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.

[17:40] 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.

[17:55] 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.

[18:31] 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.

[18:53] 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.

[19:04] 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.

[19:17] 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.

[19:31] Anthony Flew was a philosopher, a well-known philosopher, and Anthony Flew used to regularly debate with C.S. Lewis. Lewis was the Christian.

[19:42] 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.

[19:58] 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?

[20:09] 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.

[20:19] 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.

[20:29] 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.

[20:40] 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.

[20:56] 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.

[21:17] 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.

[21:29] 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.

[21:41] 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.

[21:52] 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.

[22:06] 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.

[22:22] 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.

[22:43] 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.

[22:59] 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.

[23:15] 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.

[23:26] 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.

[23:38] 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.

[23:48] 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.

[24:01] 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.

[24:12] 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.

[24:25] 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.

[24:45] 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.

[25:00] 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.

[25:14] And that, I think, has got something to do with the way in which intelligent design is treated in academia. So science dismisses faith.

[25:26] 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.

[25:41] 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.

[25:53] 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.

[26:06] 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.

[26:22] The key to biology is information. And where we find information in biology is in this remarkable substance called DNA.

[26:33] 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.

[26:43] 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.

[26:55] 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.

[27:09] 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.

[27:24] 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.

[27:42] And he said, as a scientist, it is a legitimate question to ask, where does the information in DNA come from?

[27:52] 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.

[28:05] 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.

[28:21] 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.

[28:32] 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.

[28:45] 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.

[28:58] 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.

[29:11] 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.

[29:25] 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.

[29:38] 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.

[29:53] 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.

[30:04] 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.

[30:20] 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.

[30:33] Now, Myers' argument about this was, the units in DNA are not regular, they're not random, they're actually coded.

[30:45] 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?

[31:02] 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.

[31:19] 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.

[31:39] 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.

[31:52] 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.

[32:13] 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.

[32:30] 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.

[32:48] 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.

[33:08] 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.

[33:19] 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.

[33:30] 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?

[33:43] 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.

[34:04] 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.

[34:15] 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.

[34:27] 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.

[34:44] 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.

[34:58] 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.

[35:28] 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.

[35:47] 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.

[35:58] 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.

[36:14] 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.

[36:26] 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.

[36:40] 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.

[36:55] 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.

[37:11] 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.

[37:25] 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.

[37:51] 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.

[38:06] 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.