Like many Englishmen of his generation, Charles Darwin in his youth was an avid reader of William Paley’s The Evidences of Christianity (1794). As Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, he lost his faith in Paley’s argument that nature manifests God’s wisdom and foresight. “The old argument from design in nature,” he wrote in his’ Autobiography, “as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Most of Darwin’s readers have agreed, relegating Paley’s work to the dustbin of history.

But Paley’s line of argument has been revived by Robert Augros and George Stanciu in The New Biology. Before proceeding to outline their own paradigm for interpreting nature, the authors (one a philosopher, the other a physicist) attempt to dismantle the Darwinian theory of evolution that has for so long paralyzed thought on the metaphysical issues they raise. Grounded in the latest research in paleontology, ecology, and genetics, this critique of Darwinian orthodoxy exposes some key weaknesses. For instance, Darwinism predicts slow and gradual accumulating adaptations, but the fossil record is punctuated with sharp discontinuities that gave rise to Miles Eldridge’s “punctuated equilibrium.” More radically, Augros and Stanciu dispute the materialistic premises unthinkingly embraced by most evolutionists. Originally borrowed from physics, these premises remain essential to evolutionary biology, even though theoretical physics has now abandoned them as too narrow and mechanistic. Materialistic evolution fails most visibly when asked to account for human consciousness, but the theory stretches credibility even in its explanations for the appearance of intelligence, purpose, and design in nonhuman species. The origin of life itself still remains a dark mystery, which so far refuses to unravel itself in spontaneous-generation experiments.

As they contemplate the beauties of nature, many of which have no discernible “survival value,” the authors posit the necessary existence of a supernatural Artist. “This Artist is God,” they urge, “and nature is God’s handiwork.” The argument advanced must not be mistaken for creationism, which they repudiate as pseudoscience. Rather, in arguing for the evolution of species through divinely directed changes in regulatory genes, the authors offer a sophisticated version of “orthogenesis,” refurbished with all of the latest discoveries in molecular biology.

An important book that deserves wide attention, The New Biology will stimulate an overdue debate over the first principles of evolutionary biology. Christian biologists, long cowed by orthodox materialists, should particularly welcome a serious-reconsideration of a theistic approach. Still, readers should assess this new synthesis with caution. In the first place, it must be remembered that scientific theories, even good ones, do not last forever, but are eventually supplanted. Anyone who embraces a scientific theory as a definitive bulwark for faith runs the risk of eventually imitating the churchmen who rejected Copernicus’s theory because of its incompatibility with their dogmatic synthesis of Aristotle and Scripture. Nor can Christians ignore the risk of pantheism inherent in the belief that “nature incorporates wisdom, purpose and beauty” and that “ethics . . . can look to nature for a foundation of its principles.” Natural evidence of God’s goodness and grace does abound, yet believers also detect in nature the effects of the Fall, so memorably described by Milton:

Earth felt the wound, and

Nature from her seat

Sighing through all her

Works gave signs of woe.

In their eagerness to prove God’s governance in nature, Augros and Stanciu implausibly minimize the suffering, pain, conflict, and ugliness also quite visible in nature. No one with personal experience with trichinosis or tapeworms will readily acquiesce to the cheerful assertion that “parasitism is rarely harmful to the host.” Nor will readers find it easy to reconcile the claim on one page that predators do not really threaten prey species with the argument on a different page that cicadas have developed remarkable patterns of reproduction to avoid being wiped out by predators.

Augros and Stanciu deserve high praise for rekindling a sense of wonder for the divine patterns in nature. Yet if the study of biology can at times stir a recognition of providential harmony, that study should at other times remind us—through disease, death, decay, and deformity—that we do not live in the Garden of Eden and that in a fallen world the most sublime truths can only be glimpsed “through a glass darkly.”

[The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom in Nature, by Robert Augros and George Stanciu (Boston: New Science Library/Shambala) $22.50]