"I've always been a logical and curious kind of person." "I mean, that's just my personality." "I remember when I was little, my parents gave me an electric train for Christmas." "And then a couple hours later, my dad finds me in the garage and I'm throwing the locomotive against the cement floor, trying to break it open." "He said, "What are you doing?"" "And I said, "Well, I'm just trying to figure out how it works."" "I mean, my parents, because of all the "why" questions I would ask, finally Went out and said, "Here"" "And they bought me an encyclopedia and said, "Look, the answers are in there." "Go lookin' for 'em Go find 'em yourself."" "I mean, that's just the way I was." "And so I guess it's natural that I would become a journalist, 'cause journalists are looking for facts." "They're looking for evidence." "They're looking for data." "They're looking for something that they can publish in the paper and have confidence it is true." "[Narrator] Lee Strobel earned a Master of Studies in Law Degree from Yale Law School and is the former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune." "He is the best-selling author of several books that explore the evidence for the Christian faith." "I guess given my curiosity, it's not surprising that when I was in high school, science was my favorite topic because there the teachers actually encouraged me to, like, out open frogs and find out how things worked," "which I thought was great." "When I was a teenager, I had this deep trust in science, and I think part of it was prompted by the fact that I grew up in post-Sputnik America," "Where Eisenhower encouraged all young people to delve into science so We could catch up with the Russians." "Soto me, science sort of represented the empirical, the hard facts, the things that could be proven experimentally, and that was sort of the way in which I looked at life." "I thought people who had faith, people who believed in supernatural things like God..." "I saw that as a sign of Weakness because, you know, do you have any data to back that up?" "[School bell rings] [excited student chatter]" "[Narrator] In the autumn of 1966," "Strobel's interest in science fed to a life-changing decision." "I could take you back to the exact spot where I was sitting." "It was in the third floor, overlooking the asphalt parking lot." "I was in the second row, the third chair from the front, when my biology teacher recounted in great detail this experiment that had been conducted in the early 19505 at the University of Chicago." "[Narrator] This experiment that impressed Strobel so deeply was one of the most famous in the history of science." "In 1953, Stanley Miller, a graduate chemistry student, tried to demonstrate how life first emerged on earth." "Miller attempted to reproduce the Earth's early atmosphere." "He pumped hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and a small amount of Water vapor into a maze of glassware then sparked the gases with electrical discharges to simulate lightning." "After five days, he discovered what he had hoped for:" "A few simple amino acids, the basic building blocks of living organisms, had collected in the dark residue at the bottom of the glass." "Many hailed Miller's experiment as proof that essential components of life could have formed in the oceans of the Earth billions of years ago." "The philosophical implications of Miller's experiment were instantly obvious to me." "And for me, it was a eureka moment because I heard this, and I thought, Wait a minute." "If you can show scientifically that life can emerge Without any outside assistance, if life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God was out of a job." "[thunder]" "From there, the acceptance of Darwinian evolution and full-blown atheism, for that matter, was pretty easy because if living organisms could emerge by themselves out of this primordial soup" "Without the assistance of any kind of a god or--or supernatural intervention, then they certainly could develop naturally over the eons into more and more complex creatures, just as Charles Darwin theorized in his book" "On the Origin of Species." "[Narrator] As Strobel embraced Darwinism and its atheistic implications, he was surprised to discover that many Christians believed their faith was compatible with Darwinian evolution." "There's no way you can harmonize Neo-Darwinism with Christianity." "I could never understand Christiane who would say," "I believe in God evolution as well."" "[roars]" "You see, Darwin's ideas about the development of life led to his theory that modern science now generally defines as an undirected process, completely devoid of any purpose or plan." "Now, how could God direct an undirected process?" "How could God have purpose and a plan behind a system that has no plan and no purpose?" "It just does not make sense." "Didn't make sense to me in 1966, and it doesn't make sense to me now." "[Narrator] In 1972, Lee Strobel married Leslie Hurdler." "Five years later, Leslie, an agnostic, became a Christian." "And I thought, this is divorce." "This is gonna be the end of our marriage." "But all the negative things I expected to happen in her as a result of her new found faith, they didn't happen, and instead I saw positive changes in her values and her character and the way she related to me and the children." "And I thought, Wait a minute." "She is attributing this to God." "And I don't believe God exists!" "And so that was the main thing that prompted me to say maybe I need to really investigate this and get to the bottom of this and determine is there really any rational way" "I could ever believe that this kind of a God really exists and really causes this kind of transformation in a human being." "And so I decided to use my legal training and journalism training, my scientific curiosity, to systematically investigate is there any credibility to the Christian faith?" "[Narrator] Because science had played such an instrumental role in his turn to atheism," "Strobel embarked on en investigation of major discoveries in biology, chemistry, cosmology and physics." "His study spanned more than 20 years and included interviews with scientists and scholars as he sought to determine for himself what these discoveries implied about the reality of a Creator." "Throughout his inquiry, one question remained constant:" "Does the evidence uncovered by contemporary science point us toward or away from the existence of God?" "Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling once said that science should be the Search for truth." "And that's what I wanted to do." "I didn't know where the evidence was ultimately gonna take me, but I really did want to Know the truth about God." "And what I found shocked me and it stunned me." "[Narrator] Strobel's search began with an examination of evidence that challenged materialistic theories of life's origin." "He discovered that this negative evidence contradicted the textbook explanations I that had once convinced him the blind forces of evolution could account for the creation and diversity of life on earth." "[Strobel] A good example of negative evidence is the 1953 origin of life experiment by Stanley Miller, the one that helped lead me into atheism in the first place." "As biologist Jonathan Wells explained to me," "Miller's experiment has now been thoroughly discredited." "Stanley Miller put together a glass apparatus, and in that apparatus he put a mixture of gases that people at the time thought reflected the atmosphere of the early earth." "And those gases were..." "But then the professional opinion of what was there oh the early earth changed." "In the '6Os, geochemists revised their hypotheses and decided that the hydrogen, being very light, would have escaped into outer space." "The Earth's gravity isn't strong enough to hold it." "And probably the early earth's atmosphere, then, consisted of what We now see coming out of volcanoes today, namely..." "Well, if the early earth's atmosphere consisted of those gases, then Stanley Miller's experiment would not Work." "In fact, he himself tried it with those gases and he found that he couldn't produce any amino acids at all." "So the experiment falls apart once you use a more realistic mixture of gases in the apparatus." "[Narrator] Miller's test has been repeated many times using the correct atmospheric components." "The results are always the same." "The amino acids that generated so much enthusiasm in 1' 953 do not appear." "[Wells] Even if Miller's experiment were valid, you're still light-years away from making life." "It comes down to this:" "No matter how many molecules you can produce with early earth conditions, plausible conditions, you're still nowhere near producing a living cell." "And here's how I know." "If I take a sterile test tube and I put in it a little bit of fluid with just the right salts, just the right balance of acidity and alkalinity, just the right temperature, the perfect solution for a living cell," "and I put in it one living cell, the cell is alive, it has everything it needs for life." "Now I take a sterile needle and I poke that cell." "And all its stuff leaks out into this test tube." "You have in this nice little test tube all the molecules you need for a living cell." "Not just the pieces of the molecules, but the molecules themselves." "And you cannot make a living cell out of them." "You can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again." "So what makes you think that a few amino acids dissolved in the ocean are gonna give you a living cell?" "It's totally unrealistic." "[Narrator] Stanley Miller's experiment was not the only unsuccessful attempt to explain how life originated." "Beginning with Russian chemist Alexander Oparin's Work in the 19205, theorists have also proposed chance, chemical attraction and biological seeding from outer space as possible answers." "Each has failed to account I for how non-living chemicals could have arranged themselves into the most basic components of the first living cell." "Strobel's research ultimately led him to conclude that materialistic explanations for the origin of life were deeply flawed." "And his examination of negative evidence did not end with the question of first life." "He also learned of weaknesses in the most celebrated icon of Darwinian evolution." "[Strobel] In Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, there's only one illustration." "It's called the Tree of Life." "Darwin used it to explain how every species of animal and plant that ever existed on earth had evolved from the same common ancestor through small, gradual steps over enormous periods of time." "Even though Darwin's Tree of Life is included in virtually every Biology textbook published over the last half century, contrary to what we've been told, there is no conclusive evidence of the common origin of all life." "[Narrator] Perhaps the most damaging blow to Darwin's theory is the fossil record." "If all living organisms have descended from the same primitive life form, then the rock strata of the Earth should be filled with the fossilized remains of animals that were once part of a great evolutionary chain... a chain of small biological modifications" "ultimately leading to a spectacular diversity of life." "Yet after two centuries of research, highlighted by excavations in southern China, the multitude of transitional experiments or missing links that should exist are conspicuous only by their absence." "The most graphic example of this void in the fossil record is a geological era known as the Cambrian Explosion." "The branching tree pattern of Darwin's theory is actually not seen anywhere in the fossil record unless we impose it with our own minds." "So the Cambrian Explosion is the most dramatic refutation of the Tree of Life." "[Narrator] The Cambrian Explosion of life was a dramatic episode in geological history." "Usually dated at about 530 million years ago, the exquisitely preserved Cambrian fossils reveal that the body plans for virtually every major animal phyla appeared not gradually and slowly, as Darwin had speculated, but instead with astonishing suddenness" "If we imagine the whole history of life on earth taking place in one 24-hour period, the current standard estimates for the origin of life put it at about 3.8 billion years ago, let's say 4 billion." "So if We start the clock then, our 24-hour clock," "6 hours, nothing but these simple single-celled organisms appear." "The same sort that we saw in the beginning." "Twelve hours, same thing." "Eighteen hours, same thing." "Three-quarters of the day has passed and all WE have are these simple, single-celled organisms." "Then, at about the 21st hour, in the space of about two minutes, boom, most of the major animal forms appear in the form that they currently have in the present." "And many of them persist to the present, and we have them with us today." "Less than 2 minutes out of a 24-hour period." "That's how sudden the Cambrian Explosion was." "[Narrator] In a geological instant, the animal kingdom leaped from small, relatively simple organisms to extraordinary creatures with spinal cords, compound eyes, and articulated limbs." "The record of this explosion of life looks nothing like Darwin's slowly branching tree." "[Wells] Darwin's theory is that there's a Tree of Life" "Where you have one organism diverging into many other organisms and big differences appearing at the top." "What we really see is from here up." "This does not exist in the fossil record." "If I were using a botanical illustration, it would be a lawn, with separate blades of grass sprouting independently of each other." "And those would be the phyla" "Now, within each phylum, there is subsequent diversification." "But even there, I don't see the branches connecting that would make them a Tree of Life." "As scientists, it's not our job to force the evidence into a theory that just doesn't fit it." "And so I have absolutely no desire or reason to uphold Darwin's theory at this point." "I think what we're seeing today is a series of scientific discoveries that are opening the eyes of more and more scientists that say, "Wait a minute." ""I can no longer believe that pure, naturalistic processes" ""can account for the origin and diversity of life." "There must be something else here."" "[Narrator] The challenges to Darwinian theory have fed more than 600 scientists with PhDs from major universities throughout the World to sign e document titled "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" "It reads, in part, "We are skeptical of the claims" ""for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. "" "These are scientists with PhDs from Stanford and Berkeley and University of Chicago and Cambridge, major universities, who've looked hard and fast at the evidence and have walked away saying, "I am not convinced."" "Maybe there's another explanation." "Personally, the negative evidence forced me to conclude that Darwinism would require a blind leap of faith that I just had no good reason to make." "[Narrator] Strobe's rejection of Darwinism and materialistic science was also based on the large body of positive evidence for Intelligent Design-- evidence he first confronted in the science of cosmology, which explores the origin of the universe." "[Strobel] How did the universe begin?" "What is its source?" "Few questions have generated as much controversy through the centuries or inspired as many impassioned opinions." "I interviewed William Lane Craig, a philosopher who has devoted much of his career to the study of cosmology and the question of origins." "From Ancient Greek materialism at the time of Plato and Aristotle up through 19th-century idealism, the prevailing view was that the universe is eternal." "That the universe never began to exist." "That the universe as a whole is, as it were, a static, timeless entity." "[Narrator] This belief in an eternal, unchanging universe for centuries a pillar of Western cosmology, was unexpectedly challenged in 1915 by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity." "Einstein s equations implied a startling possibility:" "the cosmos was not static, but instead existed in a continual state of either contraction or expansion." "[Man] Einstein did not like the idea that the universe was dynamic at all." "In fact, like almost all scientists at the time, in the early 20th century, he assumed the universe was static and eternal." "What's interesting and ironic is that he thought he had made some kind of mistake in his equations for the general theory of relativity, but a few years after he developed the theory, a Belgian astronomer named Lemaitre" "developed a model based upon his equations which again predicted that the universe was in a continual state of expansion." "[Narrator] In 1929, theoretical predictions were confirmed with empirical data." "At the Mount Wilson Observatory overlooking Los Angeles, astronomer Edwin Hubble studied light from distant galaxies." "Hubble determined that galaxies beyond our Milky Way were moving away from us at a speed proportional to their distance from the Earth." "The more distant the galaxy, the faster it is receding." "Hubble's landmark discovery led most astronomers and physicists, including Albert Einstein, to a similar conclusion." "If the universe is continually expanding, then at earlier points in its history it must have been smaller and denser." "I think a good way to visualize this is to imagine that the history of the universe has somehow been photographed and made into a movie that We could play on a projector." "As the projector runs forward, we'd watch the universe as it continually expands." "But if the projector were to be stopped and were switched into reverse to make the movie run backward, then instead of Watching the galaxies move farther and farther apart from each other, we'd see them draw closer and closer together." "As you trace this expansion back in time, the universe grows denser and denser and denser, until finally the entire Known universe is contracted down to a state of infinite density which marked the beginning of the universe." "At this point, which cosmologists call "the singularity,"" "all matter and energy, physical space, and time themselves came into being." "This literally represents the origin of the universe from nothing." "So the startling implication of Hubble's discovery was the temporal finitude of the universe, that the universe had an absolute beginning at some point in the finite past." "[Narrator] During the second half of the 20th century, other discoveries also pointed to a universe with a beginning." "These images of the cosmic microwave background radiation document what most scientists now believe is the remnant heat generated during the universe's early history." "Background radiation is found throughout the cosmos and indicates its expansion from a sudden perhaps violent moment in time." "This evidence for a finite universe has reaffirmed the conclusion of an ancient philosophical deduction." "It is called the Kalam Cosmological Argument." "The Kalam argument is deceptively simple in its formulation." "It consists of basically three steps." "Premise 1 is that Whatever begins to exist has a cause." "Something cannot come into being uncaused out of absolutely nothing." "Premise 2 is that the universe began to exist and the remarkable development that has occurred is that for the first time, we now have solid scientific evidence for the truth of that second premise that the universe began to exist." "And from those two premises, it follows logically, therefore," "The universe has a cause of its existence." "Whatever begins to exist has a cause." "The universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence." "And that points to a reality beyond the universe." "A transcendent reality beyond space and time, and therefore, non-physical and immaterial, which created the universe out of nothing, and brought it into being." "[Narrator] The implications of a finite universe, coupled with other discoveries of modern cosmology, have led many scientists to unmistakably theological conclusions." "Supernatural creation of the universe, in a flash of energy and light." "You know, it sounds a lot like the first chapter of Genesis to me." "Today, the vast majority of even the most skeptical astronomers and cosmologists believe that the universe had a beginning." "This belief isn't based on some theological doctrine." "It's based on scientific evidence." "And I think if we follow the evidence Wherever it points, it points clearly and powerfully and persuasively in the direction of a Creator." "[Narrator] Since the beginning of time, all the matter in the universe has been governed by precisely balanced laws and constants." "During an interview with Robin Collins, a philosopher with degrees in mathematics and physics," "Strobel learned how these laws offer compelling evidence for a Creator and conspire to make the universe habitable for life." "The laws of physics are balanced on a razor's edge for life to occur." "For example, if you didn't have something like gravity that pulled matter together, you would never get planets, you wouldn't get stars, you wouldn't get any complex organisms." "If you didn't have the strong nuclear force, there would be nothing to hold protons and neutrons together in the nucleus." "And so you wouldn't have any atoms, so no chemistry." "If you didn't have the electromagnetic force, you would have no bonding between chemicals." "You would have no light and the list goes on." "So you need all these sorts of fundamental principles have to be in place in order for life to occur." "Wipe out one of those principles, wipe out one of those laws..." "no life." "[Narrator] Strobel learned that life also hinges on the precise strengths and relative values of many different physical constants." "One example of this fine tuning is the force of gravity." "Imagine a ruler divided up into one inch increments and then stretched across the entire universe." "A distance of some 14 billion light years." "For the purposes of illustration, the ruler represents the possible range for gravity." "In other Words, the setting for the strength of gravity could have been anywhere along the ruler, but it just happens to be situated in exactly the right place so that life is possible." "Now, if you were to change the force of gravity by moving the setting just one inch compared to the entire Width of the universe!" "The effect on life would be catastrophic." "No large scale life forms could exist." "Anything that was more than the size of pea would be completely crushed." "So you might be able to get life of a very, very primitive sort, such as bacteria, but you could never get conscious observers." "[Narrator] The strength of gravity is just one of at least 30 separate parameters that must be finely tuned to produce e life-sustaining universe." "Another example is the cosmological constant." "The cosmological constant describes the expansion speed of space in the universe." "If space expands too quickly, then the universe will spread out so quickly that material objects can't form." "So you can't get stars and galaxies and planets and the types of things that we, of course, take for granted in our universe." "[Narrator] Physicists have determined that the cosmological constant is fine-tuned to one part at a 100 million, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion." "Such precision has been compared to traveling hundreds of miles into space, then throwing a dart at the Earth and hitting a bulls-eye measuring one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter." "An area less than the width of a single atom." "Just consider those two parameters, gravity and the cosmological constant." "Their level of fine-tuning is to a precision of one part in a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion." "I mean, that's like one atom in the entire known universe" "[Narrator] This fine-tuning is also evident at the atomic level." "The strong nuclear force binds atoms together." "If the strength of this force were to decrease by one part in 10,000 billion, billion, billion, billion, the only element left in the universe would be hydrogen." "Again, chemical life would not be possible." "The fine-tuning of the laws and forces of physics is so precise that few theorists are comfortable invoking mere chance as an explanation." "Unless our universe is not the only roll of the dice." "If the universe looks like it's fine-tuned for complex life, maybe there is a fine-tuner." "Maybe it was fine-tuned for life." "And this has certain unsavory theological implications." "And so it's not surprising that those committed to a fundamentally materialistic view of reality would try to find an escape hatch and the most popular escape hatch for this theological implication of fine-tuning is this idea of multiple universes." "[Narrator] As its name suggests, the theory of multiple universes proposes that our universe is not alone." "Instead, it is part of a vast ensemble of universes, each with a different set of laws and constants." "If there's only one universe then the conclusion that the universe looks fine-tuned because it is fine-tuned is inescapable." "But if our universe is just one of a vast set, then you seem to have more resources to play with." "Chance gets a new lease on life." "I sometimes try to imagine what physicists have in mind that postulate this idea of multiple universes." "I mean, what would the generator look like that creates them?" "Maybe it's like a giant monolith that has dozens of different dials, each of which has to be set to the right physical constant." "If We think of these parameters as dials, each of the dials is different." "So if you produce enough universes with enough dial settings, eventually, just by chance, you get one just right." "So you might have to produce a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion universes." "But eventually, if you have a generator that's just spitting out just an enormous number of them, then it gets the right dial setting." "And then, by just chance, you get conditions right for life." "So it's a huge cosmic lottery, that's the idea." "It's an interesting idea!" "I mean, there's only one problem with it." "There's no independent evidence that it's true!" "Besides, it really just pushes the question back a step, because we could still ask, "Who built the generator?"" "The suggestion of multiple universes strikes me as a desperate attempt to explain the obvious." "Which is that the universe is finely-tuned by an intelligence to sustain complex life." "An intelligence that must be beyond the constraints of time and space." "An intelligence that must be beyond the constraints of time and space." "[Narrator] Strobel's journey through a universe finely-tuned for life inevitably led him home to the blue jewel of our solar system." "The planet Earth." "There, he encountered another array of critically balanced conditions essential to human existence." "When I was an atheist, I saw planet Earth as being one of probably billions of planets like it all over the universe." "I saw our sun as being an average undistinguished type of a sun." "I figured as I looked up at the stars at night that there must be millions and millions of advanced civilizations out there." "I just thought that there was an ordinariness to our situation." "This line of reasoning was totally consistent with my atheistic world view." "But what I learned later, is that it's not consistent with what science is revealing about the Earth." "[Narrator] Strobel's investigation caused him to consider the many conditions necessary for a life-sustaining planet." "In the process, he was introduced to the science of astrobiology, and astronomer, Guillermo Gonzalez." "I'm an astrobiologist, and what motivates me is to examine the conditions necessary for life, and look elsewhere in the universe and see if those conditions are met anywhere else." "And the answer could be yes, and the answer could be no." "And either answer is interesting." "[Narrator] For more than a decade," "Guillermo Gonzales has researched the characteristics of a planet required to support complex life." "Estimates vary." "But a current list of these factors would number at least 20." "And include an oxygen-rich atmosphere, liquid water and Large continental land masses." "A home star of the right temperature and mass." "An orbital path that is neither too far nor too close to the home star." "A moon large enough to stabilize the tilt of the planet's axis and the movement of its tides." "A magnetic field strong enough to deflect the sun's radiation." "And a position in the relatively narrow habitable region of a spiral galaxy." "All these factors need to be met at one place in time, in the galaxy, if you're going to have a planet as habitable as the Earth, which you need for complex and even technological life." "[Narrator] Theorists have attempted to calculate the odds of all the necessary factors for life appearing at the same time, on the same planet." "A conservative estimate is one chance in ten to the negative fifteenth, or one one thousandth of one one trillionth." "On those terms, even when compared to the billions of suns and possible planets in our Milky Way galaxy, the probability of even a single habitable World appears unlikely." "There are many probabilistic resources in the galaxy." "But on the other side of the coin are all these factors that you need." "You have to get just right in order to have just one habitable planet like the Earth, and that leads me to conclude that yes, we're rare in the galaxy." "[Narrator] Gonzalez' study of the Earth's habitability led him and Jay Richards to expand the scope of their research." "They began to examine how a life-sustaining planet like Earth may also give its human inhabitants access to the mysteries of the universe." "I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of the human race in which, at least, some people haven't contemplated these questions." "We ask why can we see distant galaxies millions of light-years away in the universe," "Why can we postulate what's going on inside atoms, or inside black holes." "Why are we able to discover things about the universe." "To answer questions about its age." "For most scientific discoveries that we're able to make, these sorts of things can't be explained in terms of the survival of the fittest of our distant ancestors." "Not only our ability to do science, but the openness to the natural World to science." "Just completely outstrips the sort of reductionist and Darwinian explanations that we're used to." "[Narrator] In response to this evidence," "Richards and Gonzalez have argued that our ability to make scientific discoveries is no fluke or accident." "Instead, it points to an underlying purpose behind the universe." "It is actually designed for discovery." "Guillermo Gonzalez and I spent several years pursuing a hypothesis that those rare things that life needs in a planetary environment, those things that make a planet habitable also set up the best possible set of conditions overall for scientific discovery." "[Narrator] There are man y examples of this correlation, including our planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere." "Both a critical requirement for our survival and a transparent window that allows us to explore the distant universe." "The Earth's precise distance from the sun and the size of its moon and home star." "These factors not only control our planet's temperature, axial tilt, and the movement of its tides, they also ensure perfect solar eclipses." "Phenomena that have provided scientists with in valuable data about the composition of stars and the properties of fight." "And our location in the Milky Way." "The Earth is positioned between two spiral arms within a relatively small region where life is possible." "As a result, we enjoy an excellent platform for clear, unimpeded view of our galaxy and the rest of the cosmos." "I think God intentionally invented a habitat for us that allows us to see Him through the Creation that He has left behind." "And this habitat is conducive for us to do scientific research." "It didn't have to be that way." "But it is." "Why?" "Because I believe that by doing science," "We find God." "[Narrator] The final leg of Strobel's investigation transported him from the deepest reaches of the cosmos to the microscopic universe of the living cell, and the science of biochemistry." "There he encountered more challenges to Darwinian evolution end new evidence of design." "Throughout the second half of the 20th century, spectacular technologies revolutionized scientific understanding of the cell." "The basic unit of life." "During an interview with biochemist Michael Behe," "Strobel learned how this new knowledge has shaken the foundations of Darwin's theory." "In the 19th century, when Darwin was alive, scientists thought that the basis of life, the cell, was some simple glob of protoplasm, like a little piece of Jell-O or something that was not hard to explain at all." "But with the hard Work of science in the 20th century we've seen that the cell is far from simple." "It's got very complicated molecular machines and things that are very resistant to Darwinian explanation." "[Narrator] Michael Behe has devoted his career to the study of the design and operation of the cell." "He has also Written extensively on the biochemical challenge to evolution." "Most people have no idea how small and complex cells are." "Atypical cell from you or me called a eukaryotic cell, is probably a tenth of the size of the head of a pin and yet, in that single cell, there are about 3 billion units of DNA making out the chromosomes." "And those 3 billion units make the molecular machines of the cell." "Literally, machines that make the cell Work." "[Narrator] With computer animation, we can enter the cell." "Here, the staggering complexity of its molecular machinery is clearly seen." "It's like going into an automobile factory." "The factory has a large number of machines." "The parts have to fit together in very specific Ways to do their jobs." "And if things go wrong, the cell is in big trouble." "And, just one cell is enormously complex, but humans, you and I, are made from trillions of cells and those trillions of cells have to fit together in the right way and do their own job." "Darwinism was a lot more plausible when we were thinking about globe of protoplasm, than it is when we're thinking about molecular machines." "[Narrator] Each of these biochemical machines is a masterpiece of engineering and nanotechnology." "They are essential to functions as vital and diverse as vision, photosynthesis and the production of energy in the cell." "Michael Behe has studied several of these machines," "I including the flagellum, a remarkable rotary motor" "I remember the first time I looked in a biochemistry textbook and I saw a drawing of something called a bacterial flagellum, with all of its parts in all of its glory." "It had a propeller and a hook region and the drive shaft and the motor, and I looked at that and I said," ""That's an outboard motor." ""That's designed, you know, that's no chance assemblage of parts."" "[Narrator] Behe's reaction was not surprising, especially when the bacterial flagella motor is animated and magnified more than 50,000 times to display the details of its construction and operation." "And Howard Berg at Harvard has labeled it the most efficient machine in the universe." "These machines, some of them are running at 100,000 RPMs, and are hard-Wired into a signal transduction or a sensory mechanism, so that its getting feedback from the environment." "It's got some tail proteins which act as the propeller." "When the flagellum rotates, these push against the water and therefore push the bacterium forward." "And the motor uses a flow of acid from outside of the cell to the inside of the cell to power the turning." "The bacterial flagellum has two gears, forward and reverse." "Water-cooled proton-motive force." "It has a stator, it has a rotor, it has a U-joint, it has drive shaft, it has a propeller." "It's not convenient that we give them these names." "That's truly their function." "[Narrator] In all, about 40 different protein parts are required to build a flagellar motor." "Half of them are constructer proteins, specialized mechanisms that assemble the flagellum's individual components." "Since its discovery, biologists have tried to understand how a machine of such superb design could have arisen gradually" "Without foresight or plan through the biological pathway Darwin envisioned." "I think what Darwin was trying to show was that things that look designed aren't really designed." "But, that We can find naturalistic processes to account for the complexity of life." "Darwin theorized that every part of every living organism evolved through natural selection." "A blind process that acts upon random changes in the cell." "[Narrator] Darwin believed that, given enough time, these random variations would transform the simplest cells into the great diversity of life that inhabits our planet." "In his study of evolution and molecular machines," "Michael Behe has raised a significant challenge to the creative power of Datwin's mechanism of natural selection." "It is called irreducible complexity." "I Irreducible complexity was coined by Mike Behe in describing these molecular machines." "Basically, what it says is that you have multi-component parts to any given organelle or system in a cell." "All of which are necessary for function." "That is, if you remove one part, you lose function of that system." "[Narrator] Irreducible complexity can be illustrated by a familiar non-biological machine, a mousetrap." "The trap is composed of five basic pieces." "A catch to hold the bait." "A strong spring." "A thin, bent rod called the hammer." "A holding bar to secure the hammer in place." "And a platform upon which the entire system is mounted." "If any one of these parts is missing or defective the mechanism will not Work." "All components of this irreducibly complex system must be present simultaneously for the machine to perform its function... catching mice." "The concept of irreducible complexity also applies to biological machines, including the bacterial flagellum." "All told, there are about 40 different protein parts which are necessary for this machine to Work." "And if any of those parts are missing, then either you get a flagellum that doesn't Work, because it's missing the hook or it's missing the drive shaft or Whatever, or it doesn't even get built Within the cell." "You can't put something like that together gradually, because they need a large number of parts interacting with each other at the same time before they Work at all." "[Narrator] Without the tools to observe the machinery of the craft, and long before the idea of irreducible complexity," "Charles Darwin offered a way to test his own theory." "In Origin of Species, he Wrote:" "Darwin acknowledged that if someone identified a biological system that could not have been constructed in incremental steps, over long periods of time, then his theory would be invalid." "And what Michael Behe and others have discovered is the existence of biological machinery that cannot be explained away by Darwinian processes." "Darwin's failed predictions have in fact falsified his own theory." "The existence of complex biological machines raises an obvious question." "If natural selection wasn't the agent of their construction, then what was?" "The centerpiece of my investigation was an interview' with philosopher of science, Dr. Stephen Meyer." "Meyer, who holds a PhD from Cambridge University, brought me face to face with the most efficient information-processing system in the universe." "The DNA molecule and its language of life." "The discovery of the information-bearing properties of DNA and RNA is a fundamental challenge to all materialistic theories of the origin of life." "Neo-Darwinism and its associated theories of chemical evolution and the like, will not be able to survive the biology of the information age, the biology of the 21st century." "[Narrator] Meyers conclusions are based upon his understanding of the DNA molecule and the genetic instructions that are locked within the nucleus of living cells." "In 1953, when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they discovered that DNA was a carrier of genetic information in the form of a four-character digital code." "That is to say that DNA functions like a software program, only more complex than any anyone has ever created or devised." "For a biological system to run and operate, it needs genetic information to build the proteins and build the protein machines that cause the cells to maintain their function." "[Narrator] This information is stored in a precise arrangement of four chemicals that scientists represent with the letters A, C, 71 and G." "Sequences of these chemicals provide the instructions necessary to assemble complex protein molecules that in turn help form structures as diverse as eyes, legs, Wings, and hearts." "This code has been called the language of life." "And it is the most densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known universe." "Geneticist Michael Denton has estimated that the amount of biological information necessary to build all of the proteins in all of the species of organisms that have ever existed on planet Earth could be held in a single teaspoon and we'd still have room left over for all of the information" "contained in every book ever Written." "The more I learned about DNA the more I understood the significance of what Stephen Meyer called the most fundamental question facing biology today." "Where did the information in DNA come from?" "How did it arise in the first place?" "Well, lots of people have wanted to explain the origin of information by references to the laws of physics and chemistry or by reference to the chemical properties of the constituent parts of the DNA." "But that would be like saying that you could explain the information in this morning's New York Times headline by reference to the physics and chemistry of ink bonding to paper." "There is a chemical explanation as to why the ink sticks to the paper." "But that does not explain the way the ink got arranged to convey a message that could be understood by speakers of the English language." "Information requires a material medium, but it transcends the material medium." "[Narrator] An explanation for the origin of the genetic instructions needed to build the first life is the Holy Grail of 21st century biology." "Theories proposing that this information arose through natural selection acting upon non-living molecules or the self-organizing power of chemicals fr; a primordial soup have repeatedly failed." "[monkey screeching]" "Even time and blind chance, the often invoked saviors of implausible biological scenarios have fallen far short as accounts for the source of the instructions in DNA." "Mathematicians for example have calculated that a universe filled with monkeys typing relentlessly throughout the oldest estimated age of the cosmos would have no realistic chance of producing Shakespeare's play Hamlet, let alone a transcript of the genetic in formation" "required to build even the simplest living cell." "Based on our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past, there is only one known cause for the origin of information, and that cause is intelligence." "Whether we're looking at a hieroglyphic inscription, a section of text in a book, or a computer software, if you have information and you trace it back to its source invariably you come to an intelligence." "Therefore, when you find information inscribed along the backbone of the DNA molecule, in the cell, the most rational inference, based on our repeated experience, is that an intelligence of some kind played a role in the origin of that information." "The implications of the scientific evidence, coupled with Meyer's logic, are profound." "If we are finding information inside every cell in every living creature, could that not be in a sense the signature of a Creator?" "[lamb bleating]" "[Narrator] 30 centuries before science unlocked the mysteries of genetic information or a telescope probed billions of fight years into space, the Hebrew shepherd and poet, David, wrote eloquently of a Creator who revealed His existence and power through all that He had made." "God himself is invisible." "He is a spirit." "And yet, one of the purposes He has for us is to find Him so we can know Him." "And He's left behind a series of clues." "And sometimes We just have to take our blinders off and get beyond our pre-suppositions and say, "Wait a minute," "I am going to pursue "the evidence of science Wherever it points." ""And if it takes me to a very uncomfortable conclusion," ""that there is a Creator," ""then if the evidence points in that direction," ""then that's the way I'm gonna go."" "According to a lot of the mainstream media, the theory of intelligent design is a "faith-based" idea." "And, in saying that, they want to dismiss it as something that has no basis in science." "But the media has confused a fundamental issue." "They're confusing the evidence for the theory with the implications of the theory." "The theory of intelligent design may well have implications that are supportive of theistic belief." "But the theory is not based on theistic belief." "It's based on the discovery of digital code in cells, miniature machines in cells, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry." "And standard Ways of scientific reasoning about the remote past in the history of life." "[Narrator] 40 years ago, a lecture in a high school biology class convinced an inquisitive 14-year-old freshman that there was no God." "Ironically, years later, it was an open-minded investigation of scientific evidence that fed Lee Strobel to belief in e Creator." "One of the most interesting things I've learned as I've gone on this journey of scientific discovery has been that you don't have to commit intellectual suicide to come to the conclusion that there is an intelligent designer." "Because today, science is pointing more directly and more powerfully toward a Creator than any other time in the history of the world." "I was trained in journalism and law to respond to truth." "I had to take a step of faith in the same direction that that evidence is flowing." "Which is logical and rational." "We do that every day of our life." "We make steps of faith based on the evidence that we perceive." "And so it was the most logical and rational step I've ever taken to put my faith in the Creator that science tells me exists."