Fire and Knowledge

We say, then, that it pleased the designer to design only microorganisms for nearly 2 billion years of earth’s history. He then began to tinker with multicellular organisms, producing a bewildering variety of organisms that survived only briefly. In the Cambrian era, roughly 530 million years ago, the designer produced an extraordinary variety of microorganisms, many of which were the first representatives of what we now regard as the animal phyla, the major groups into which animals are classified. Even in the Cambrian, he was not yet interested in designing a vertebrate, an animal that, like us, is built around the backbone. That came later.

Then, as we have seen, the designer produced one organism after another in places and in sequences that would later be misinterpreted as evolution by one of his creatures. And just to compound that misunderstanding, he would ensure that the very first limbs he designed looked just like modified fins, and that the first jaws he designed looked like modified gill arches. He would further ensure that the first tetrapods had tail fins, like fish, and that the first birds had teeth, like reptiles. So thoughtful was this designer that after having designed mammals to live exclusively on the land, he would redesign a few, like whales and dolphins, to live in water—but not before he designed creatures that were literally halfway between land and swimming mammals. In working his magic, this designer chose to create forms truly intermediate between walking and swimming mammals….

Is the designer being deceptive? Is there a reason he can’t get it right the first time? Is the designer, despite all his powers, a slow learner? He must be clever enough to design an African elephant, but apparently not so clever that he can do it the first time. Therefore we find fossils of a couple dozen extinct almost-elephants over the last few million years. What are these failed experiments, and why does this master designer need to drive so many of his masterpieces to extinction?

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 127