To be honest, I had some professional interest as well, as I’ve been thinking about organizing a book signing for Your Religion Is False, and I wanted to see how it was done. However, my plan has always been more on the “card table on a street corner” scale than the “auditorium in the Seattle Art Museum” scale, and much of what I learned tonight doesn’t really apply. (Especially since I’m not particularly confident in my ability to get C-SPAN to show up at my book party.)

The book, in case I didn’t mention it already, is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, which I was sort of hoping was going to have something to do with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. (After sitting through the presentation, I’m mostly sure the two are unrelated.)

We started off with a video featuring Ben Stein, which I later learned was an excerpt from his autobiographical film No Intelligence Allowed. “Steve,” he asked, “what qualifies you to question the scientific theories of a man so genius that he’s buried right next to Isaac Newton?” (I think the question was sarcastic, but with Ben Stein it’s always hard to tell.) “This debate won’t be settled by numbers,” Meyer responded, “but with computerized animations.”

At this point I am having trouble reading my notes, but the point raised was either “science can’t solve the mystery of the origin of life,” “screwing can’t be the story of wing of Kate,” or “scary carrot where mystical long plate.” Probably the third.

After making fun of T.H. Huxley for not understanding the complexity of a cell, Meyer started playing with Snap Lock beads, which are supposed to demonstrate some sort of thing about DNA and/or proteins. (Curiously, if you search for “snap lock beads” on Amazon, Meyer’s book is the third result, making me suspect that the beads are more integral to his argument than I realized.)

After this, Meyer showed us a super-elaborate computer animation of gene expression. Although he didn’t explicitly say so, it was obvious that such a computer animation was the creative output of an intelligent designer, implicitly bolstering his main point.

Next we discussed the “DNA Enigma“, which (if you click on it) is apparently the Discovery Institute’s website. You see, if you have a computer, and you want it to do something different, you have to download new code. And the same is true for life.

This computer analogy was to appear repeatedly throughout the evening, as was the Bill Gates quote “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” (I wanted to ask Meyer what the DNA equivalent of Clippy was, but I didn’t get a chance.)

Somewhere around now, Meyer made an awful joke about Calvinism, which the audience just ate up. (It wasn’t a lightbulb joke. I’m thinking that maybe it involved total depravity, but only because I know a lot of jokes that do. I also know a lot of jokes about things that are black and white and red all over and can’t turn around in an elevator, but it definitely wasn’t one of those.)

Next we learned about the principle of “invoking causes now in operation.” You see, if you were to find ash all over the bottom of Mt. St. Helens, it would be more plausible to attribute it to a volcanic eruption than to an earthquake, simply because we have experience with volcanoes producing ash, but not with earthquakes doing so.

Similarly (and here’s where the magic happens), if we were to find “computer code” in the DNA of a cell, it would be more plausible to attribute it to Mountain-Dew-swilling nerds than to Charles Darwin, simply because we have experience with caffeinated losers writing code. (He left out the “God is a caffeinated loser. QED” slide, probably because of time contraints.)

There were further parallels. DNA uses design patterns and unit testing and a Model-view-controller architecture. So-called “Junk DNA” can be seen as a sort of operating system, albeit one with spectacularly-lousy driver support. And as soon as we go to the library and check out some more books on computers and learn more programming concepts, we’re going to draw up even more bad analogies.

We ended with a message to those who’d dismiss ID as the argument from ignorance: you’re wrong. It’s actually the argument from strength.

To sum up, Meyer’s argument is as follows:

(1) According to Bill Gates, DNA is like a computer program.
(2) Because I am unfamiliar with the field known as genetic programming, every computer program I’ve ever heard of has had a developer.
(3) Charles Darwin once used the principle of Inference To The Best Explanation.
(4) Even though Darwin was a wicked, wicked man, I’m going to use that same principle to refute him. It will be, you know, irony.
(5) I say that intelligent design is the best explanation for the computer-program-like-ness of DNA.
(6) Therefore, by Darwin’s own reasoning, intelligent design must be true.
(7) Please buy my book.

Finally there was an exceptionally boring question and answer period, which mostly consisted of people referencing parts of the books they’d particularly enjoyed and wondering aloud why those parts hadn’t been incorporated into the brief presentation. As I hadn’t read the book, I was unable to participate.

The only interesting question came from a woman who asked what Francis Collins thought of the book. Despite his prominent opposition to intelligent design, it was decided that he might enjoy the chapter explaining the uncanny parallels between triunely-frozen waterfalls and computer code.

Bruce Chapman followed this with a moderately-thrilling appeal for donations, at which point I left and checked Amazon, where I discovered that Meyer was creaming me in sales rank. You could do something about that, you know…

But you’re not alone in your struggle. The BioLogos foundation is there with you every step of the way (and when you see one set of footprints, that’s where they were carrying you).

Today, for instance, they’re offering “Three Ways to View the Fossil Record [that aren't incompatible with your religious faith, even though (if you want to get technical) the fossil record isn't compatible with your religious faith].”

1. God created each species “individually from nothing” as time proceeded. (Note: not actually compatible with fossil record.)
2. God created species in “bursts” over time. (Note: not actually compatible with fossil record.)
3. Evolutionary biology is the proper explanation for the history and diversity of species, but god has been continually doing the work behind the scenes. So, for instance, he’s always choosing which genetic material crosses over during meiosis, and he helps ducks decide which other ducks to rape, and he helps misdirect mooses he doesn’t want reproducing into having sex with horses instead.

Although the third theory is (vacuously) compatible with the fossil record, it presumes a level of perversity on the part of god that’s really more compatible with the jealous, kinky Old Testament god, not the effeminate, hippie New Testament god.

Accordingly, New-Testament-believing Christians might be better served by a fourth way of viewing the fossil record:

4. Your religion is false.

This explanation does have the drawback of not being exactly “compatible” with the Christian faith. But this is almost surely outweighed by its virtue of being the correct explanation.

Make sure to come back next time, when we discuss “Five (Incorrect) Ways To Explain The Existence of Suffering”!

After his best-selling The Language of God came out three years ago, Collins began receiving thousands of e-mails — primarily from other Evangelicals — asking questions about how to reconcile scriptural teachings with scientific evidence. “Many of these Christians have been taught that evolution is wrong,” Collins explains. “They go to college and get exposed to data, and then they’re thrust into personal crises of great intensity. If the church was wrong about the origins of life, was it wrong about everything?

You’d like to think a “scientist” would conclude, “yeah, probably.” I mean, if I were to show up at a scientific conference and present my several-hundred-page “Grand Theory of Everything,” and if the first few chapters were filled with obvious falsehoods, you’d hope that the other scientists would laugh me off the stage, tell me to take a long walk off a short pier, or tar and feather me. And you’d certainly hope that they wouldn’t run off to their little science lairs and try to come up with harebrained justifications as to why the rest of my theory was probably still true.

Which is why, although I have great respect for the Human Genome Project (a scientific achievement on par with the Alan Parsons Project), I find myself wondering just how rigorous it was. And looking at Collins’s BioLogos website isn’t doing much to reassure me.

Here, for instance, is how he sums up his answer to “Question 11: Is there room in BioLogos to believe in miracles?”

This response provides a simple answer to the question of miracles, namely that BioLogos does not in any way remove the logical possibility of miracles. However, for the universe to behave in an apparently ordered fashion, such events must be rare. BioLogos is thus compatible with many faiths that have miraculous events at the center of their doctrine. Finally, although a scientific explanation does in fact take away a phenomenon’s miraculous status, it does not establish that God was not involved in the process.

In other words,

• The fact that the laws of science are regular and predictable seems to leave no room for miracles; however, there could still be miracles as long as they didn’t happen very often.
• Also, even though any given “miracle” may have a perfectly natural scientific explanation, god may have been involved somehow.

I am not sure what the word is for “let’s add an element to our theory that makes it more complicated and doesn’t actually explain anything, but that makes our theory more palatable to the superstitious,” but I’m pretty sure it’s not “science.”

Still, I’ll keep checking the BioLogos site, because I want to see what their answer is to “Question 39: This whole website is just a gigantic prank, isn’t it?”