Q: The Farm at the Center of the Universe is a novel for teens and young adults (a YA novel). It pits intelligent design against atheistic Darwinism. But why bother? Guillermo, you co-authored the excellent intelligent design book The Privileged Planet. And Jonathan, you co-authored the very accessible ID books Intelligent Design Uncensored and Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwinism to Design. Why not opt for a straight non-fiction science book such as one of these?

A: Those books present rigorous scientific evidence for intelligent design in language that non-scientists can follow. So, by all means, go out and buy them! But our pro-ID novel offers a few advantages. 

First, even a lot of us who read non-fiction science like a change of pace from time to time, especially during the summer. For a lot of us, a short novel is just inherently more appealing, more doable. 

Second, the case for intelligent design is an argument to the best explanation, and the novel genre provides an organic way to pit two competing explanations — evolutionary materialism and intelligent design — against each other, doing so through the everyday give and take among flesh-and-blood characters. 

Another advantage of a novel over a straight science book is that most people who wrestle with science-and-faith matters have theological and personal issues wrapped up in the exploration, and a novel allows us to surface some of those issues in a very organic way. So, for example, if nature is the product of a good and wise cosmic designer, why do good people sometimes die young? Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? What do I do with my encounter with ugliness in nature? Or my encounter with the sublime and beautiful? Narrative is, in some ways, a much better mode for exploring such things. 

In this case, the protagonist of the novel, the teenager Isaac, has lost his father to cancer. His older cousin, Charlie, is an atheistic science teacher, and on the way to their grandparents’ Iowa farm he informs Isaac that his dad died because there is no God and life has no higher meaning or purpose. Chance and natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Only this and nothing more, he says. But during their stay on the farm, Isaac’s grandfather offers a different vision of life, with evidence drawn from science, philosophy, and theology. 

Serious Topics

Q: The Farm at the Center of the Universe is a novel for young people that delves into serious topics — the death of a parent, conflict with relatives, the question of whether God exists. At what age are kids ready to tackle issues like these?

A: There may be a few precocious preteens ready for this novel, but we’d say it’s more geared for teenagers and young adults. On a side note, we should mention that while the Isaac character grapples with some heavy issues, there is a good bit of humor and light-heartedness in the novel. 

Q: Should parents deliberately raise these issues with their teens? If so, why?

A: Absolutely they should. First, sometimes tragedies happen. We can’t prevent that, but we can equip our kids so that when they do face something earth-shattering, they face it with resilience and with some measure of familiarity. Not that they won’t still struggle in the face of personal loss, but maybe they won’t be completely blindsided.

Second, kids will encounter these issues in school or on the Internet, or in conversations with friends, and often it won’t be in a way friendly to religious faith. A teen who hasn’t been equipped to deal with these issues is likely to fare poorly when confronted with them in a hostile environment. This is why we were careful not to present weak strawmen versions of the arguments coming from the atheistic evolutionists. We resisted the temptation to give the Charlie character the stupidest arguments for Darwinism and atheism that you find circulating out there, and instead gave him some of the favorite arguments of public atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. That’s important because when teens get confronted with arguments for evolutionary atheism in school or on the Internet, they need to be prepared to deal with the best arguments. The good news is that even the best arguments for evolutionary atheism collapse under scrutiny, and this novel makes that clear.

Q: Tell us more about the grandfather character in the novel.

A: The granddad is the novel’s primary defender of intelligent design and belief in God. He’s a bright, curious retired chemistry professor. We were able to draw upon Guillermo’s extensive scientific knowledge as an astrobiologist, but we also got feedback from others, including biologist Michael Behe, physicist Brian Miller, geologist Casey Luskin, and physician Howard Glicksman. So the grandfather character really knows his stuff! 

Two Ways to Read

Q: Would you recommend that parents read this novel with their teens, or can the kids read it alone?

A: We wrote it to work either way. Some families have a culture of reading stories together. This novel would work well that way. But a lot of families never have, or they set that habit aside after the kids learned to read on their own. If that describes your family, just turn the teenager loose with the novel and then discuss it with him or her. Or get a second copy and read your copy while they’re reading theirs. Maybe agree to read a chapter a day and then discuss it in the evening. Each chapter is only about 2–3,000 words and reads pretty quickly. 

Q: The grandfather in the novel connects the fun things they’re seeing and doing on the farm and in the woods with “big picture” issues. You two are both parents. Did you follow this method with your own kids? 

A: We’ve tried to, for sure. Seizing those “teachable moments,” to borrow the old phrase, is something that takes creativity and intentionality. Sometimes it goes better than others. In terms of finding fun science lessons in the everyday natural world around us, that’s definitely modeled on Guillermo. Years ago, my family and I (Jonathan) went on a day trip with Guillermo to a national park in Washington State that contains Mount Rainier. Everywhere we turned on the hike Guillermo had some fun observation or insight. Sometimes he connected it to intelligent design. Sometimes he just reveled in the wonder of the thing. By day it was the plants and animals around us. By night it was interesting facts about the night sky.

By the way, there’s definitely a lot of the Cuban-American Guillermo in the Cuban-American grandfather in the novel. And there’s some of Guillermo’s Iowa-born and -raised wife, Joan, in the American grandmother character.

Learning How to Think

Q: Would you say that this novel, this way of sifting through the evidence for intelligent design, helps kids learn not just what to think, but how to think?

A: Yes. Some teens make the mistake of thinking that if they can’t come up with a good answer to an atheist argument right off the top of their heads, there likely isn’t a good answer. This novel doesn’t always give the rebuttal to the atheist cousin’s arguments right away. There are places where the main character, Isaac, has to wrestle with the arguments himself and often doesn’t have a good answer at hand. He eventually gets help from his grandfather, but we wanted the novel to model, at least to some degree, the real-world process of wrestling with tough questions and not always having good answers instantly, much less pat answers. Another way the novel helps readers improve their thinking skills: the grandfather offers specific tips on reasoning soundly and spotting logical fallacies. 

Q: This novel is convicting as far as family life. It shows the importance of spending time together, making space for conversations, and even deliberately raising hard questions. What would you say to parents in this age of smartphones, streaming services, and social media?

A: There’s enormous peer pressure to let your kids mainline the Internet, including social media. It’s a handy babysitter, and a kids’ friends are likely to all be on social media. But when elite schools in places like Silicon Valley are banning smartphones and iPads, you know there is something unarguably damaging about the degree of exposure this generation is getting to screens and the Internet. Our advice is to do the hard thing by dramatically curtailing time allowed on screens and smartphones, create big islands of time away from screens, model some of this behavior yourself, and create quality and quantity just to do life together with your kids. There are a lot more teachable moments when there are more moments together, period — it’s that simple. 

Since in many cases an actual addiction has formed, don’t expect the transition to be easy, but we have heard numerous stories of the extraordinary pay-off from schools and families that make the transition. A final suggestion: Don’t be shy about aggressively monitoring and limiting where your kids are going on the Internet. When we were kids, you mostly had to go looking for the bad stuff. Now the bad stuff is constantly searching them out and trying to get them hooked.

Biographical Elements?

Q: Even though this novel primarily focuses on nature and what the natural world suggests about the existence of God, there are other interesting points for discussion. The main character is adopted. The grandfather is an immigrant. Why did you choose to include those elements?

A: Some aspects of the novel have a biographical component. We’ll let readers guess which aspects are based on personal biography and which ones are purely fictional. But the material with a biographical source isn’t just tacked on. It’s woven into the overall story in a way that allowed us to deepen the exploration of the whole chance-versus-design theme at the heart of the novel. 

Q: What is your hope for this novel — that is, besides it selling like gangbusters? 

A: We wrote the novel to expose readers to a wealth of scientific evidence for intelligent design, and to answer common arguments for atheism. But beyond this, we hope that the novel will awaken the reader’s sense of wonder at the marvels of creation. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it memorably: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”