Paul Davies is an Australian professor of mathematical physics, a highly successful scientific popularizer, and the winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for "progress in religion."
He has said in interviews that what set him on this career path was Honest to God, a 1960s manifesto of theological liberalism by the Anglican bishop John Robinson. "I was drawn to [Robinson's] idea of God as a sort of 'timeless ground of being' on which the cosmic order is built," Davies explains. "Since science proceeds from the assumption that nature unfailingly obeys rational mathematical laws, these laws must be rooted in something. But not a cosmic magician!"
From this starting point, Davies has been working to save science from the bleak nihilism of a reductionist materialism. Describing himself as seeking a middle ground between the supernaturalists and materialists, Davies has "a vision of a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe, governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve towards life and consciousness."
And now, in The Fifth Miracle, Davies has carried that vision into evolutionary biology, a field dominated by materialists who insist that no purposeful forces guided the evolution of life.
The "fifth miracle" of Davies's title refers to the creation of vegetation in Genesis 1:11: "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb-yielding seed, and the fruit tree." It's proverbial in popular science publishing that God is good for sales, and commercial requirements must have dictated Davies's use of "miracle," since he begins The Fifth Miracle by immediately disavowing the word. Like other evolutionary scientists, he presumes that "it is the job of science to solve mysteries without recourse to divine intervention": Life is not a miracle because scientists wish it to be only a product of natural forces.
But if the origin of life wasn't miraculous, Davies does at least think that it's mysterious. "We are missing something fundamental about the whole business," and a satisfactory theory of the origin of life will require not just more knowledge of the kind we already possess, but "some radically new ideas."
Through the middle of the twentieth century, the reigning belief was that life began with an immensely improbable chance event. In a dramatic 1954 article in Scientific American, for example, the Harvard biochemist George Wald conceded that the spontaneous generation of something as complex as a living organism seems impossible -- but he insisted that it could happen in the two billion years available. "Given so much time, the 'impossible' becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: Time itself performs the miracles."
Wald's sort of position, however, is now out of favor -- in part because it has become clearer that even the simplest life form is so complex that accidental self-assembly would still be miraculous, and in part because the time available for that statistical miracle has been dramatically shrinking. The dominant view of the 1990s -- most authoritatively stated in Nobel laureate Christian de Duve's 1995 Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative -- is instead that life is the product of law-driven chemical steps, each of which must have been highly probable in the right circumstances.
This modern reliance on laws favoring life is a giant step in the direction Davies wants to go. But it cannot take him all the way. In the view of orthodox prebiological chemists like de Duve, once the right chemicals were in place at the right time, the necessary reactions inevitably followed and life inevitably emerged. They concede that many of the specific steps leading to life are still unexplained, but they're confident that the picture will be filled in eventually on the basis of the known laws of chemistry, supplemented perhaps by chance events that are not forbiddingly unlikely.
For Davies, the solution to the riddle of life lies rather in explaining the origin of the genetic information, which he calls the "software" of the organism. A living cell's complex operations are coordinated by a program inscribed in the four-letter chemical alphabet of the DNA and then translated into the twenty-five-letter alphabet of the amino acids. What most needs to be explained, Davies argues, is not the chemicals but the information -- just as the important thing about a computer program is not the disk it's stored on but what it means. And what, he asks, is the source of the enormous amount of initial information necessary for metabolism and reproduction to get started?
Materialists assume that this information is an emergent product of chemical laws and chance, but Davies suggests that the leap from chemistry to biology requires something more. Law merely produces highly ordered, repetitive sequences like crystals or snowflakes. Chance merely produces disordered, unspecified sequences. But genetic information is simultaneously highly specified and random (i.e., non-repeating), requiring some third force that works against both repetitive order and chaotic chance. "A law of nature of the sort we know and love will not create biological information, or indeed any information at all," writes Davies.
Most investigators have sought the secret of life in the physics and chemistry of molecules. But they will look in vain for conventional physics and chemistry to explain life, for this is a classic case of confusing the medium with the message. The secret of life lies, not in its chemical basis, but in the logical and informational rules it exploits. . . . Real progress with the mystery of biogenesis will be made, I believe, not through exotic chemistry, but from something conceptually new.
But what exactly is this "something conceptually new?" At times in The Fifth Miracle, it starts to look a little like God. Indeed, analyzing the "biological determinism" of de Duve and others that relies on laws favoring life, Davies writes:
Although biological determinists strongly deny that there is any actual design, or predetermined goal, involved in their proposals, the idea that the laws of nature may be slanted towards life, while not contradicting the letter of Darwinism, certainly offends its spirit. It slips an element of teleology back into nature, a century and a half after Darwin banished it.
When Davies presented this thesis at a scientific 1998 conference at which Christian de Duve and I were also participants, I thought he had walked right up to the brink of saying that an intelligent agent had participated in the origin of life. Evidently de Duve thought so too, for he immediately began to ask whether Davies was implying that information came before chemistry and thereby "reviving vitalism and final causes." It took a lot of assurance from Davies that he hadn't meant that before de Duve smiled benignly and said, "I must have misunderstood you."
Everybody agrees that new knowledge is needed. But Davies had seemed to raise a more interesting question about whether this means more knowledge about what law and chance can do, or knowledge about some third factor beyond law and chance. And yet, he had to retreat to avoid being labeled a vitalist or even a creationist.
Physicists are typically allowed to hold that the laws of physics are rooted in some cosmic intelligence, because that implies only a deism that leaves the laws inviolate for every moment after creation. But with The Fifth Miracle, Davies has ventured from physics into biology, and it is quite another thing to say that some agent was involved in the origin of life, billions of years after the Big Bang. Regardless of any disclaimers he might make, the claim that an intelligent force operated in the history of life would be seen by the scientific materialists of biology as placing the famous and award-winning physicist Paul Davies on the side of those they caricature as know-nothing, anti-Darwinist, backwoods creationists trying to reintroduce the Book of Genesis into high-school biology classes.
And in fact, Davies may have been right to hesitate to commit himself to the need for a third factor beyond law and chance, for he does believe that, once the life process had somehow been jump-started, the Darwinian mechanism of the evolutionary biologists did all the rest of the information-building. Indeed, he argues that the problems he shows about the origin of life apply "with equal force" to the development of life in the 3.8 billion years since -- but "in this case we have a ready-made solution to the puzzle, called Darwinism." And if that is true, then it is reasonable to agree with de Duve that there must be some quasi-Darwinian process operating in the prebiotic environment.
This amounts to saying that law and chance can create life after all, when the package is labeled Darwinism. But the alleged information-creating power of the Darwinian mechanism has never been demonstrated. Evolutionary biologists believe in it for the same reason that prebiological chemists such as de Duve believe that law and chance can create life: They are philosophical materialists, and they identify science with that philosophy.
The equation of materialism and science seems to derive from the assumption that the only alternative to law and chance is a miracle, a cosmic magician's arbitrary interference with the stately order of nature. But why should we assume that? A computer does not operate by magic, nor does it contravene the laws of physics and chemistry. Its operations are within the laws and as predictable as other systems which scientists study -- though it doesn't come into existence until an intelligent entity designs it. If genetic information is comparable to software, it must be designed by an entity with the capability of a software designer.
Paul Davies understands, I believe, that the nature of genetic information requires a third factor beyond law and chance, but he seems to have lost his nerve when he saw how ferociously biologists and biochemists would react to any challenge to materialism. I hope he will think again about how the materialists have misled him, and find the courage to follow his own insights to their conclusion. Science does not mean believing what you want to believe, or holding fast to a philosophy regardless of the evidence. It means having the boldness to follow the trail of the evidence, even if it leads you into unfamiliar territory.
Phillip E. Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of four books about Darwinism.