One of the things that constantly amazes me in the public discussion of evolution and intelligent design is how quickly otherwise thoughtful adults are willing to assume they’ve got it all figured out and, having read an article or two in the popular media, cast their vote for Darwinian theory. That’s true of journalists, and even many professional scholars.

I had that in mind when the quarterly journal published by the Orthodox Union, Jewish Action, asked me to write in the current issue on the Jewish Sabbath and what it says about “why the evidence of design in the world is elusive to many people.”

Excerpt:

What my colleague Dr. Stephen Meyer calls the “signature in the cell” in the genetic code, in protein synthesis, in what biochemist Michael Behe calls irreducibly complex features of biology, in the Cambrian explosion and the rest of the fossil record, in cosmology, in individual types of creatures — from butterfly metamorphosis to the history of whale evolution — whatever piece of the argument for intelligent design that you think of, it is all very lightly imprinted. It takes patience and study to see.

It is the totality of that evidence that impresses you, the way that taken altogether it forms a suggestive pattern and alludes, subtly, to purpose and creativity behind nature’s facade.

Read the rest here.