Jonathan Wells

About the author: Jonathan Wells holds doctorates in both biology (University of California at Berkeley) and theology (Yale). When he wrote this article, he was a postdoctoral research biologist in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and a fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

Evolutionary biologists reject the idea of design in evolution. They fully support Darwin's concept of natural selection, which implies that change is governed by chance alone. Yet the evidence demonstrates that Darwin's theory cannot be reconciled with several important features of evolution. Therefore, it appears that Darwin's naturalistic explanation for the history of life has widespread acceptance among evolutionary biologists for one reason: The alternative, conscious design, is completely unacceptable.

Before the twentieth century, most Western scientists believed that God created living...