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Dr. Reeb might have added another key point: the present "science community" is heavily invested in Darwin. A great deal of money and career status is tied up in some version of Darwinism. This is, I believe, the reason for the vicious behavior of the in-crowd in our higher education and research institutions when it comes to a critique of Darwin. In truth, the critics are not denying Darwin on the question of adaptation in response to environmental changes. Darwin is undoubtedly correct on the process of selection, at least insofar as some varieties of a species are better able to adapt than others when altered weather, food supply, or other new conditions appear in their living environment.

What is utterly new is the discovery of DNA and RNA, and the appearance of the encoded instructions on the building of materials and the assembly of those materials to make cells of various kinds. Even the simplest cell is complex and requires a number of molecular "machines," each programmed to perform certain functions and the whole activity to be subordinated to a guiding and highly ordered set of assembly instructions. In brief, the instructions MUST BE PRIOR to the cell. The cell is a product of manufactured materials assembled in the right order. Question: where did the DNA/RNA come from? Its instruction set was PRIOR to the very first cell ever to exist.

In the previews of the Ben Stein movie, Ben challenges the lecturer to explain by Darwinistic demonstration how life itself began. Darwin cannot explain this because Darwin was utterly ignorant of the complexity of the cell and of DNA/RNA and its multi-billion bit instruction set. He had never heard of the "genome." His work, therefore, is very narrowly interpretive, and, while useful as far as it goes, leaves untouched the deeper questions of biology. All the sciences face such new knowledge and evidence as requiring a revisiting of the old foundations. We cannot depend on Copernicus to explain black holes or neutron stars and we cannot depend on Darwin to explain the new conundrums of information theory.

The new biology, like the new astronomy, and the coming new physics, return us to the realization of mystery. They give science a new lease on life; but, inevitably, they disempower those whose reputations and fortunes are built on the old, mechanistic beliefs. "Intelligent design" is not a new explanation for our surprising recent observations; rather, it is a call for a return to St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, as Frederick J. E. Woodbridge understood these philosophers. The old wisdom meets the new discoveries and invites us to contemplate, to speculate, and to become reacquainted with a love for the truth.