I saw that Terrell Clemmons recently completed an 8-part series of posts on Science and Culture about the human body. This is not something that I talk about in my standard list of arguments against naturalism and for Christian theism. So, let’s take a look at this evidence and see if it is something for me to add to the list. And first, we will review the list to see what evidence is already in there.

So here is the current list of evidences:

1. origin of the universe
2. cosmic fine-tuning
3. origin of life (specified complexity)
4. Cambrian explosion (and other fossil record bursts)
5. galactic, stellar and planetary habitability
6. molecular machines, e.g. – bacterial flagellum
7. non-material mind, e.g. – split brain surgery
8. the waiting time problem

And you can always add philosophical arguments to the list, like the moral argument, if you work at McDonald’s and want to impress your co-workers.

Should we add the design of the human body to this list?

Well, let’s see what Terrell’s 8 posts are about.

1. The Spinal Column
2. The Laryngeal Nerve
3. The Eye (Retina Wiring)
4. Wisdom Teeth and Jaw
5. The Pelvis (Birth)
6. Faulty Reasoning by Evolution Advocates
7. How Academia Suppresses Dissent
8. The Human Body as an Argument for Designer

So, the first five are body parts. Had you heard about all of these? One of my friends contacted me about the laryngeal nerve article, shocked about how it relates to intelligent design. Well, I am not a big biology person, so I had not heard of any of them except for the wiring of the human retina.

This quote from the first one really appealed to me as an engineer who has debated evolutionists:

At Bristol University, engineering researchers have been studying the human vertebral column in order to copy design details and transfer them to bridge design. It is expected that bridges can be made more robust and efficient by copying details of the human spinal column. So at the same university we have the anatomy department claiming the human spine is a bad design, whilst the engineering department is improving bridge design by copying the optimal engineering of the human back! One department is basing claims on the philosophical predictions of macroevolution, whilst the other department is basing claims on physical reality and scientific testing. … From an engineering perspective, it’s common optimal design by a common designer.

The fifth article about the pelvis was new to me. What he had to say about that one did remind me of tradeoffs in software design:

The female pelvis is a good example of multi-objective optimization. … An engineer would say that the female pelvis is the perfect compromise, the perfect size. It’s just wide enough for a baby to be born, but it’s just narrow enough that women can run remarkably fast at sprinting and long-distance running. … If the female birth canal were any larger to make birth easier, running would be much more difficult because the legs would be too far apart. If the birth canal were any smaller, birth would be really difficult. So an engineer looks at the pelvis and says, it’s the perfect compromise. … Lucy Hyde cannot propose a better design. … No one has ever explained how childbirth could be better designed. In fact, in my book, I quote from research papers showing that it’s an incredibly well-designed process.

I don’t know how people can live in an age of information technology and not understand this. If you want to have a laptop, and you want to use it for software development, you might need things like Docker, an integrated development environment, virtual machines, build tools, etc. Maybe more. And all of that computational power is going to make your laptop more expensive. You can’t have everything! Performance costs more money.

The last one I wanted to talk about was in part 7. First, let’s see a quote and then I want to make a comment about this after:

Terrell: If it’s true that the evidence favors intelligent design, why do you think the evolutionary narrative persists — as in the article we’ve been discussing by Lucy Hyde, your anatomist colleague at the University of Bristol.

Stuart: There is a saying that “in China you cannot criticize the government, but you can criticize evolution; in the West you can criticize the government, but you cannot criticize evolution.” There is enormous peer pressure for academics not to question evidence for evolution.

I often speak with my academic colleagues about evolution, and they will often admit in private that the evidence is overwhelming for intelligent design, especially in areas like the origin of life. But you’re just not allowed to admit that in public. It’s an unwritten rule that you don’t support intelligent design in academia.

I had a good friend who was not a Christian, a really senior biologist. He was head of school, a world-leading microbiologist. And he said his colleagues have admitted to him that what’s most important to them is pay, promotion, pension, and parking. Those things are more important than evolution being right or wrong. People don’t want to stick their head above the parapet and say, “Hang on, the evidence points to intelligent design!”

Terrell: Truth is not the priority.

Stuart: Yes, sadly. It’s human nature. Academics want an easy life like most people do. And the easiest life is sticking to the current paradigm, not stirring things up but just sticking to accepting evolution. You’ve got that inertia. It’s very hard to change that inertia.

I have been doing a weekly Bible study with a wonderful Christian lady who has the most amazing Christian worldview. She is also very productive as a Christian apologist – writing, teaching and speaking. We have been going through the gospel of John.

The gospel of John is about how Jesus is constantly using “signs” (miracles) to prove to people that he is a reliable source of truth about who He is and what God the Father is really like. The big mystery in the book is why doesn’t everyone “believe the works” even if they don’t “believe the words”. Well, my friend and I have been talking about this. And one of the things we decided is that it is that it is often the case that people just don’t want to embrace views that will make them look “dumb” to their colleagues – even if they think their colleagues are factually wrong.

This is something I have faced myself in IT. Word gets around that I am a Christian, and even though I can wipe the floor with every other employee in terms of Christian apologetics, that doesn’t stop the gossiping. People talk about how you “hate women” for being pro-life. How you don’t want “gay people to marry who they love”. How you think that non-Christians “should be sent to Hell for failing a theology quiz”. And that stuff has caused me some setbacks in my IT career.

Last week, we studied John 12. So, I wanted to share this passage from John 12, which is one that was very significant for my hero and role model, Dr. Walter Bradley, in his famous lecture “Giants in the Land” (part 1, part 2).

John 12:37, 42-43: [NASB]

³⁷ But though He had performed so many signs in their sight, they still were not believing in Him.

⁴² Nevertheless many, even of the rulers, believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing Him, so that they would not be excommunicated from the synagogue;

⁴³ for they loved the approval of people rather than the approval of God.

I wanted to highlight this, because it’s becoming more and more obvious that there are very good reasons for people to decline to be a follower of Jesus even when they cannot beat the evidential case. We are living in a time of mob hysteria over fashionable mythologies. Why do well-educated people believe that surgeries can change a man into a woman or a woman into a man? Because they don’t want to lose the approval of their colleagues. Because there is a lot of money to be made. Because they don’t want to miss out on “pay, promotion, pension, and parking”.

Think about it. What Jesus requires is not the right answer to a theology quiz. You are expected to pay a price in loss of reputation in order to “follow the leader”. I don’t think you should do this naively. By all means, do the best you can at education and career and finances. Stuart himself is only able to say the things he says because he is at the top of his field in engineering.

In part 7, he says:

I’ve had a big advantage because I’m based in engineering. Had I been based in biology, I would have had a completely different life. I doubt I would have kept my job! I’ve had a lot of support from my engineering colleagues and my bosses, including head of school and dean.

Yes, you have to take care to answer questions honestly about who you are and what is important to you. But that does not mean that you have to live a reckless kind of a life, getting a degree in English, running up student loans, traveling to Europe, and buying luxury items to impress your friends. Save your money, write and podcast using an alias, be careful about your social connections, and make yourself a “hard target”. Boldness doesn’t come from piety or from feelings. It comes from knowing that you have made great decisions to protect your own supply lines.

Conclusion

So, should we add this evidence to the list? I would be willing to do it if I had the book, thoroughly understood the evidence and could recall the evidence in a conversation. Although, you know what they say about walking in the forest with an atheist and you meet a bear. You only have to outrun the atheist. I don’t think my atheist co-workers are studying evidence.

Further study

Finally, there is a nice lecture about this material from – where else? – the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith:

I highly recommend those conferences. If you missed them, they have all the past lectures on YouTube. And they have the conferences every year.