Is Intelligent Design a 'God of the Gaps' Argument?

Few charges against intelligent design (ID) are made more often than this one. A design theorist points to a molecular machine or the information in DNA and says it shows the work of a mind. A critic replies that this is the old "God of the gaps": a confession that science cannot yet explain something, dressed up as evidence for God. When science fills the gap, the critic adds, God will have to move again, as he has many times before.

The charge deserves a careful answer, for two reasons. The first is honesty. If ID really is an argument from ignorance, the site should say so, whatever that costs an argument it generally favors. The second is theological. Some of the sharpest critics of "gap" reasoning were Christians, and their objection was not only that such arguments tend to fail. They thought a God who lives only in the gaps is not the God of the Creed. An Orthodox Christian has reason to take that seriously.

In brief

The phrase grew out of Christian writing. The evangelist Henry Drummond warned in 1894 against believers who scan science "in search of gaps" to "fill up with God." The Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison in 1944 that it is wrong to use God "as a stop-gap," and the Methodist mathematician Charles Coulson is often credited with making "God of the gaps" a common label in 1955. History gives the warning teeth: Newton's suggestion that God must correct the planets was undercut by later astronomy. Stephen Meyer, a leading ID theorist, replies that the design argument is an inference to the best explanation: we know from experience that minds produce functional information, so information in the cell points to a mind. Critics answer that ID still depends on claims that evolution cannot do something and makes no independent predictions about its designer. The fair verdict is mixed: in its careful form ID is not simply a gap argument, but its force still depends on a negative premise that future research could weaken. For Orthodox Christians, belief in God the Creator does not stand or fall with any gap, because the Church has always seen God's handiwork in the order of creation as a whole.

Thesis: Intelligent design, stated carefully as an inference to the best explanation, is not a pure God-of-the-gaps argument in its logical form, yet its evidential weight rests on a contested premise about what unguided processes cannot do, so Christians should hold its biological claims modestly and ground their faith in the Creator of all things rather than in the present limits of science.

Where the phrase came from

Henry Drummond (1894)

The Scottish evangelical writer Henry Drummond, who accepted evolution as God's method, gave the idea its classic form in The Ascent of Man, from his 1893 Lowell Lectures in Boston:

There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps—gaps which they will fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps?

Drummond's complaint was theological as much as practical. "If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge," he asked, "where shall we be when these gaps are filled up?" He also argued that reserving special points for divine action "virtually excludes God from the rest of the process," because "If God appears periodically, he disappears periodically."¹

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1944)

Fifty years later the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison, reached the same conclusion while reading a book by the physicist C. F. von Weizsäcker on the world view of physics. In a letter dated 25 May 1944 he wrote that the book had shown him "how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge." His remedy was not to retreat from science: "We should find God in what we do know, not in what we don't."²

Charles Coulson (1955)

The phrase itself became common through Science and Christian Belief (1955) by Charles Coulson, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and a Methodist lay preacher. Coulson is often said to have coined "God of the gaps," though the reference works that say so hedge the claim, and the idea is plainly older.³ We could not open a copy of Coulson's book, so we do not quote it here.

The God-of-the-gaps objection, then, was not invented by skeptics. In its best-known early forms it was a warning by Christians to Christians.

What a gap argument is, and what is wrong with it

A gap argument has a simple shape: science cannot (yet) explain X, therefore God did X. Logicians call this an argument from ignorance, because the only premise offered is something we do not know. Ignorance is temporary and local. A gap in one decade's science may be closed in the next, and when that happens the argument fails and can leave the impression that God has been refuted.

Drummond and Bonhoeffer saw a second, deeper problem. A God who is found only where explanation runs out becomes one cause among others, competing with gravity and chemistry for room. That picture fits poorly with the Christian confession of God as "Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible," the source of the very regularities science studies.⁴ The theological objection would stand even if a given gap never closed.

When gap arguments have failed

Newton's planets

The best-known case involves Isaac Newton himself. In the last query of his Opticks he argued that "blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick," and he suggested that small irregularities from the mutual pull of planets and comets "will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation."⁵ The passage's main argument concerns the original ordering of the system, but Leibniz, among others, read it as saying that God must from time to time correct the planets.

One of the first sharp critics was not an atheist. In November 1715 the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz mocked the view that "God Almighty wants to wind up his Watch from Time to Time: Otherwise it would cease to move," adding that a Creator obliged to mend his work like a clockmaker would be "so much the more unskilful a Workman."⁶ Leibniz's objection, like Drummond's, was that this was a poor view of God.

Science then moved. In 1786 Pierre-Simon Laplace showed that the eccentricities and inclinations of planetary orbits remain small, constant and self-correcting under gravity.⁷ The "Reformation" Newton thought might be needed was not needed for the reasons he gave. A modern twist keeps everyone humble. In 1989 Jacques Laskar showed numerically that the solar system's motion is chaotic over long periods, and a 2009 study by Laskar and Mickaël Gastineau found that about one per cent of 2,501 simulated futures led to Mercury's orbit becoming eccentric enough for collisions within five billion years.⁸ Laplace's confident stability was itself provisional. Neither result, however, suggests that God must intervene to keep the planets in order.

The "death of vitalism"

A second popular example is that Friedrich Wöhler's synthesis of urea in 1828 proved, at a stroke, that living chemistry needs no special "vital force." Historians now treat that tidy story as a myth: vitalism faded gradually, and Wöhler's experiment did not end it overnight.⁹ Even so, claims that living matter required a special force beyond chemistry did give way, slowly.

Claims made in the Dover case

The 2005 federal trial over ID in Dover, Pennsylvania produced a more recent example. The judge recorded expert testimony from two scientists, Kenneth Miller and Kevin Padian, giving "multiple examples where Pandas asserted that no natural explanations exist, and in some cases that none could exist, and yet natural explanations have been identified in the intervening years."¹⁰ Of Pandas and People was the ID textbook at the center of the case. {{strong: Several specific "no natural explanation" claims in ID literature have been answered, at least in outline, by later research.}}

The flagellum: a gap disputed, not closed

The bacterial flagellum is ID's most famous example of what Michael Behe calls irreducible complexity. In 2006 Mark Pallen and Nicholas Matzke argued in Nature Reviews Microbiology for viewing flagella as evolved rather than designed, and the National Academy of Sciences has pointed to the close similarity between some flagellar proteins and proteins certain bacteria use to inject toxins into other cells. Pallen and Matzke's abstract is candid that they "speculate as to how an experimental programme focused on this topic might look."¹¹ That is a fair picture of where things stand: critics have a plausible evolutionary outline, design theorists say the outline leaves the hard steps unexplained, and neither side has a complete step-by-step history. We treat this debate at length in Irreducible Complexity: The Bacterial Flagellum and Its Critics.

The historical lesson is real but limited. Gaps have often closed. That does not prove every gap will close, and an honest reader should not turn a trend into a law. Some questions, such as the origin of life, have so far proved stubborn (see Where Does Origin-of-Life Research Stand?).

ID's reply: an argument from knowledge

Design theorists deny that the charge describes their argument. Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, gives the most careful version. He grants the negative half openly: "the lack of an adequate materialistic cause does provide part of the grounds for inferring design." But, he insists, "this lack is only part of the basis." Design theorists, he writes, infer design "not just because natural processes do not or cannot explain" biological information, "but also because we know based upon our uniform experience that only intelligent agents produce these effects."¹²

Meyer's illustration is archaeology. We would not accuse an archaeologist of a "scribe of the gaps" fallacy when, after ruling out a sandstorm, he concludes that a human scribe carved an inscription.¹³ On this view, design is an inference to the best explanation, the kind of reasoning the philosopher Peter Lipton analyzed at length: we compare rival hypotheses and accept the one that would, if true, best explain the evidence.¹⁴ Meyer develops the argument for the origin of the first cell in Signature in the Cell (2009).¹⁵

This reply has real force against the crude version of the charge. {{moderate: When ID is stated as an inference to the best explanation that appeals to known causal powers of minds, it is not a pure argument from ignorance in its logical form.}} The site's own Design as an Inference, Not a Science-Stopper and Science Recognizes Design Inferences summarize that case.

The strongest objections

Critics answer Meyer at several levels, and they deserve to be heard at full strength.

"The positive argument is really the negative one"

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), Judge John E. Jones III held that "ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed." He added that ID proponents "primarily argue for design through negative arguments against evolution," and that "arguments against evolution are not arguments for design." He also recorded Padian's remark that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."¹⁶ ID's defenders reject the court's reasoning (we weigh the ruling and its critics in Is Intelligent Design Science or Creationism?), but the point about logic stands on its own.

The National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine made the same point in 2008. Even if creationist "negative arguments against evolution were correct, that would not establish the creationists' claims," they wrote; it would be wrong "to conclude that because there is no evidence that it is raining outside, it must be sunny." The same report states flatly that "the claims of intelligent design creationists are disproven by the findings of modern biology."¹⁷ Design theorists dispute that judgment, but it is the considered view of the leading American scientific body.

Response. Meyer agrees that a negative premise is part of the argument; he denies it is the whole. The fair reply to the court and the academies is that ID's careful form is not a two-option dichotomy, because it adds a positive claim about known causes. The fair reply to Meyer is that his positive premise does much less work if the negative premise fails. If an unguided pathway to a given structure were found, the uniform-experience claim would be refuted for that case. The argument's strength therefore still rises and falls with a gap.

"Uniform experience" is not what it seems

The philosopher Elliott Sober, writing in The Quarterly Review of Biology in 2007, presses a different point. To be tested, a hypothesis needs auxiliary assumptions that let it predict something its rivals do not, and those assumptions need independent support. For human designers we have such support: we know their goals and abilities. For ID's unnamed designer we do not, and Sober notes that some ID proponents concede as much. His conclusion, as the paper's abstract puts it, is blunt: although ID comes in several forms, "ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory."¹⁸ Sober is fair to ID in one respect worth noticing: he argues that two common criticisms, that ID is unfalsifiable and that imperfect organs refute it, do not work as usually stated.

Response. Sober's objection bears on how far the archaeology analogy reaches. The archaeologist knows a lot about scribes. A design theorist can answer that we often recognize the effects of intelligence without knowing who the agent was. That reply is reasonable for detecting design. It is weaker as a scientific theory of how and when a designer acted, which is what critics say ID has not supplied. We judge that this objection is serious and not answered in full.

Christian critics: "a gap argument with a crisis coming"

The Christian geneticist Francis Collins argued in The Language of God (2006) that "Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps," and he applied this warning to ID.¹⁹ Collins and other Christians who accept evolution as the means of creation argue that ID, by tying belief to particular unexplained structures, repeats the mistake Drummond warned against.

Response from ID's side. Paul Nelson, a design proponent, replied that Collins's own central argument, that selfless love cannot be accounted for by standard evolutionary theory, has the same shape: "This mode of reasoning resembles exactly what Collins elsewhere derides as God‐of‐the‐gaps thinking."²⁰ The point is fair. Almost every argument from nature to God contains some claim that a feature of the world is not fully explained by something else. The question is never whether an argument has a negative premise, but how well supported that premise is and whether the argument also offers positive reasons.

The mirror-image temptation

A caution runs the other way too. To say "science will explain this one day" about every open question is a forecast, perhaps a reasonable one given the history above, but not itself evidence. Honest critics and honest design theorists can agree that open questions should be labelled as open.

The Orthodox position

Dogma. The Church confesses one God, "Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible." God is the Creator of everything that exists, not a cause that steps in where other causes stop. The Orthodox prayer to the Holy Spirit that opens the usual daily prayers addresses him as the one "Who art everywhere and fillest all things."²¹ A God who fills all things has no need of gaps to find a place to stand.

Common tradition. Scripture and the Fathers teach that creation makes God known. The Septuagint's Wisdom of Solomon says that "by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionably the maker of them is seen" (Wisdom 13:5, Brenton), and St Paul writes that God's "invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Romans 1:20, NKJV).²² St Athanasius argued in the fourth century that "Creation, as though in written characters, declares in a loud voice, by its order and harmony, its own Lord and Creator," and observed that "the artist even when not seen is known by his works."²³ St Basil the Great called the visible world "a school and training place where the souls of men should be taught."²⁴ The Fathers argue from the order and beauty of the whole, the lawful harmony that makes science possible, not from the places where natural explanation breaks down. In that sense the patristic argument is the opposite of a gap argument. The site's A Universe Astonishingly Right for Life and Can Naturalism Account for Reason? follow this line.

Theological opinion. Whether particular biological structures show signs of design that unguided processes could not produce is a scientific and philosophical question, not a doctrine of the Church. No council has defined it. Orthodox Christians hold a range of views on evolution and on ID, as we discuss in Can a Christian Accept Evolution? An Orthodox Christian may find Meyer persuasive, or may side with Collins, without departing from the faith. What the faith forbids is making God's existence hang on the outcome.

So the God-of-the-gaps warning and the design argument need not be enemies. Bonhoeffer, like Drummond before him, was right that we "should find God in what we do know." Design theorists are right that a mind leaves recognizable traces, and that reasoning from known causes is legitimate. The Orthodox view holds the larger frame: the Word through whom "All things were made" (John 1:3, NKJV) is present in the processes science describes, not only at their edges.²⁵ As our article Has Science Disproved Christianity? puts it, mechanism and ultimate explanation are not necessarily rivals.

What we can say confidently

• The best-known early statements of the God-of-the-gaps criticism came from Christian writers: Henry Drummond (1894), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1944) and Charles Coulson (1955).
• Arguments that rest only on what science cannot yet explain are arguments from ignorance, and several have failed as science advanced (Newton's need for divine correction of the planets is the classic case).
• The leading statement of ID by Stephen Meyer explicitly claims to be more than a gap argument, adding a positive premise about the known causal powers of minds.
• Meyer himself concedes that the absence of an adequate unguided cause is "part of the grounds" for the design inference.
• The National Academy of Sciences and the Dover court judged ID's arguments to be mainly negative and rejected them; ID's proponents dispute that judgment.
• Orthodox faith in God the Creator does not depend on any scientific gap. Scripture and the Fathers point to the order of the whole creation, not to its unexplained corners.

What remains disputed

• {{debated: Whether our "uniform experience" really shows that only minds produce the kind of functional information found in DNA.}} Design theorists say yes; critics say this begs the question about biology, the very case in dispute.
• Whether a designer hypothesis can make testable predictions without independent knowledge of the designer's goals and abilities (Sober's objection).
• How complete the evolutionary account of systems like the bacterial flagellum now is, and what would count as a sufficient account.
• Whether the history of closed gaps justifies confidence that the remaining ones, especially the origin of life, will close.
• Whether natural theology from biology is wise for Christians at all, or whether arguments from the order and intelligibility of the whole are the stronger path.

Conclusion

Is intelligent design a God-of-the-gaps argument? In its crude popular form, sometimes yes. In its careful form, not quite. Meyer is right that inferring a cause from known causal powers is ordinary reasoning, and critics who call every design argument an appeal to ignorance overstate their case. Yet the critics are also right that ID's weight still depends on a claim about what unguided processes cannot do, and such claims have a mixed record. The honest rating of ID's reply is somewhere between Moderate and Debated, which is how this site treats it.

For Orthodox Christians the stakes are lower than the debate's heat suggests. We do not believe in a God who hides in the shrinking spaces between scientific results. We believe in the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible, through his Son and in his Spirit, who is everywhere present and fills all things. If a gap closes tomorrow, nothing in the Creed is lost; there is only more of creation to give thanks for. St Basil's "school" for souls is still open, and the lessons continue in the laboratory as well as the church.

Notes

1. Henry Drummond, The Ascent of Man (first published 1894; 13th ed., New York: James Pott, 1904), 333-34, in the chapter "Involution." Checked against the archive.org scan of the 1904 edition. Back
2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter of 25 May 1944, in Prisoner for God: Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 141 (the letter runs 140-42). Back
3. C. A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief (London: Oxford University Press; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). On the attribution, see Adrian Hough, "Not a Gap in Sight: Fifty Years of Charles Coulson's Science and Christian Belief," Theology 109, no. 847 (2006): 21-27. Back
4. The Symbol of Faith (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), as given by the Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. Back
5. Isaac Newton, Opticks, 4th ed. (London: William Innys, 1730), Book III, Query 31. Back
6. G. W. Leibniz, "Mr. Leibnitz's First Paper" (extract of a letter of November 1715), §4, in Samuel Clarke, ed., A Collection of Papers, Which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke (London, 1717); Newton Project transcription. Back
7. J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, "Pierre-Simon Laplace," MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews. Back
8. J. Laskar, "A numerical experiment on the chaotic behaviour of the Solar System," Nature 338 (1989): 237-38; J. Laskar and M. Gastineau, "Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth," Nature 459 (2009): 817-19. Back
9. Peter J. Ramberg, "Myth 7. That Friedrich Wöhler's Synthesis of Urea in 1828 Destroyed Vitalism and Gave Rise to Organic Chemistry," in Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 59-66; see also Ramberg, "The Death of Vitalism and the Birth of Organic Chemistry: Wöhler's Urea Synthesis and the Disciplinary Identity of Organic Chemistry," Ambix 47, no. 3 (2000): 170-95. Back
10. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005), memorandum opinion of 20 December 2005, 72. Back
11. Mark J. Pallen and Nicholas J. Matzke, "From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella," Nature Reviews Microbiology 4 (2006): 784-90, abstract. Back
12. Stephen C. Meyer, "A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design," Religion - Staat - Gesellschaft 7; Discovery Institute reprint (PDF), 27. Back
13. Meyer, "A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense," 28. Back
14. Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004). Back
15. Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009). Back
16. Kitzmiller, memorandum opinion, 71-72. Back
17. National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, Science, Evolution, and Creationism (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008), 40-41. Back
18. Elliott Sober, "What Is Wrong with Intelligent Design?" The Quarterly Review of Biology 82, no. 1 (2007): 3-8. The quotation is from the paper's abstract (PubMed 17354991); the argument summary also follows the National Center for Science Education's account and the release reported by ScienceDaily, 23 February 2007. Back
19. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 93 (page as given by Paul Nelson, note 20). Collins calls ID "a 'God of the gaps' theory" in his chapter on intelligent design. Back
20. Paul Nelson, "No God-of-the-Gaps Allowed: Francis Collins and Theistic Evolution," Christian Research Journal 30, no. 2 (2007); online at equip.org. Back
21. "Heavenly King and Trisagion Prayers," Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. Back
22. Wisdom 13:5, in The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London: Samuel Bagster, 1844), via eBible.org; Romans 1:20, NKJV. Back
23. Athanasius, Against the Heathen 34-35, trans. Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 vol. 4 (1892), New Advent. Back
24. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron, Homily 1.5, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8 (1895), New Advent. Back
25. John 1:3, NKJV. Back

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. London: Samuel Bagster, 1844. Wisdom of Solomon, via eBible.org.
• Newton, Isaac. Opticks. 4th ed. London: William Innys, 1730. Project Gutenberg.
• Clarke, Samuel, ed. A Collection of Papers, Which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke. London, 1717. Newton Project transcription.
• Drummond, Henry. The Ascent of Man. 1894. 13th ed. New York: James Pott, 1904. archive.org.
• Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Prisoner for God: Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. Translated by Reginald H. Fuller. New York: Macmillan, 1959. archive.org.
• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005). Memorandum opinion, 20 December 2005.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Athanasius. Against the Heathen. Translated by Archibald Robertson. NPNF2 vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1892. New Advent.
• Basil the Great. Hexaemeron. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1895. New Advent.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Symbol of Faith" and "Heavenly King and Trisagion Prayers." oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Coulson, C. A. Science and Christian Belief. London: Oxford University Press; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.
• Hough, Adrian. "Not a Gap in Sight: Fifty Years of Charles Coulson's Science and Christian Belief." Theology 109, no. 847 (2006): 21-27.
• Collins, Francis S. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press, 2006.
• Laskar, J. "A numerical experiment on the chaotic behaviour of the Solar System." Nature 338 (1989): 237-38.
• Laskar, J., and M. Gastineau. "Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth." Nature 459 (2009): 817-19.
• Lipton, Peter. Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004.
• National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine. Science, Evolution, and Creationism. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008.
• O'Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. "Pierre-Simon Laplace." MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews.
• Pallen, Mark J., and Nicholas J. Matzke. "From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella." Nature Reviews Microbiology 4 (2006): 784-90.
• Ramberg, Peter J. "Myth 7. That Friedrich Wöhler's Synthesis of Urea in 1828 Destroyed Vitalism and Gave Rise to Organic Chemistry." In Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, 59-66. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Sober, Elliott. "What Is Wrong with Intelligent Design?" The Quarterly Review of Biology 82, no. 1 (2007): 3-8.

Sources from the tradition discussed (intelligent design)

• Meyer, Stephen C. "A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design." Religion - Staat - Gesellschaft 7. Discovery Institute reprint, discovery.org.
• Meyer, Stephen C. Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne, 2009.
• Nelson, Paul. "No God-of-the-Gaps Allowed: Francis Collins and Theistic Evolution." Christian Research Journal 30, no. 2 (2007).