In this last connection, you should read the biography of world-renowned George Washington Carver of Tuskegee Institute. Though world and industrial leaders tried to hire him away, he was content to keep working in his lab down in Alabama, spinning out the most amazing inventions, giving credit to God all along. For instance, Carver was stymied while inventing sandpaper; the sand kept scraping off. But then, by the scientist’s account, the Lord told him in a dream to boil the sand first, and upon waking he did just that, with great results. Carver was only too pleased to announce the providence of God in both the world and in his own scientific discoveries. But what did he know. He lacked even the intellectual sophistication of today’s editorial cartoonists and high biology teachers who sneer at ID.

“Friends of science” urge ID proponents to bring God talk up in Sunday School if they can’t help themselves, but, for goodness’ sake, they need to shut up about God on the public school field trip. Instead, they must stick to some version of “it just happened” – proteins clumped, enzymes flexed, primordial soup bubbled, winds blew, things mated, mutants soared and "Voila!," you have Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”  While they may not be able to say exactly how we got from trilobites to the Reformation using only natural selection, we just have to give them time. Time, that is, of two sorts: 1. Gazillions of years to allow for all the happy and unhappy accidents it took for raw carbon and other elements to form single-celled organisms and then develop into Harvard professors; 2. Gazillions of years (if necessary), for scientists to figure out the purely materialistic explanation. They demand a blank check wherewith to buy all the time they need, no matter how obvious it is to most that they’ll never succeed in marginalizing God’s contribution.

I’m reminded of the popular TV show, “CSI” (Crime Scene Investigation), where forensic scientists track down criminals who did the best to cover their tracks. Try as these felons might to swab up the blood, burn the documents or bury the weapons, the sleuths (I’ve always wanted to use that word since reading the Hardy Boys mysteries in my childhood) track them down, whether with black light, DNA analysis of a single fiber or hair or microscopic scrutiny of scratches on a shin bone.

Imagine a CSI cop announcing immediately that the corpse in the park “just died” and then shushing anyone who suggested it wasn’t just from natural causes. When a rookie suggests that someone else might have been involved, he’s quickly told that good CSI men don’t talk that way, that the only proper explanation involves something like a blood clot in the brain, a falling branch or potassium imbalance. To suggest otherwise is simply unscientific. Of course, it’s ridiculous, yet biologists get away this with sort of imperious behavior all the time.

In suggesting that a purely scientific explanation is possible, they, in effect, credit God with the most amazing cover-up in history. Though the Lord has created everything and sustains the universe with his unflinching attention, He has done so without giving away His activity. On their model, one can study the eye or the food chain for a lifetime and find not a trace of intelligence to it; it’s just chance circumstance. What a master God is at masking His providence! Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Signs everywhere, as countless scientists and poets have declared throughout the centuries.

But surely I’m missing the point. It’s not that scientists deny the existence of God. (Actually many of them do, from the vituperative Richard Dawkins to 90 percent of the National Academy of Sciences, who obviously favor agnostics and atheists in choosing their membership.) It’s that they have to stick to testable hypotheses while doing science. And, so their reasoning goes, God’s presence is not verifiable by experience.

But wait, in real life, CSI people don’t always get their man or woman. They don’t always succeed in confirming their hypothesis that someone did it. Does that make their claim unscientific? No, for there is conceivable confirmation of their claim if not actual confirmation. They can imagine what it would be like to catch the culprit.  But, so the argument goes, there is no conceivable way to confirm experientially a claim that God did the deed.

Actually, that’s not true. In the Judgment, before every knee bows and every tongue confesses, the Lord could say to scientists and non-scientists alike, “By the way, I made the universe.” That would be confirmation. Ah, they would say, but not during this present age, when science must do its work. Okay, try this. Say that one day at noon, every engine and motor shuts down. When people run outside to see what happened, a booming voice proclaims, “I am the Lord God and I have stopped things to announce my sovereignty!” (Something like a dramatic confession in the old Perry Mason courtrooms.)

Sure, but that would be a miracle, and not the stuff of science. But wait a second, they asked for conceivable verification, not conceivable verification using only ordinary physical laws. That would be adding a stricture, which, by definition, excludes intelligent design. It’s like proving the illegitimacy of intelligent design by stipulating the illegitimacy of intelligent design.

Besides, the noontime announcement would not simply be a physical miracle, like the arbitrary reversal of a river’s flow and the mid-January budding of a pear tree in sub-zero weather. God is not a thing. He’s a person, an all-powerful person, and He can do what He jolly well pleases when He jolly well pleases. And if your science makes no room for that, then so much the worse for your science.

You really don’t need astonishing mid-day announcements from the heavens to understand somebody is behind the universe. Most people can tell just by looking. And what’s so embarrassing about saying, as thoroughly scientific doctors often do, “There’s nothing that can explain this except divine action”? They know there is more to the universe than endoplasmic reticula, synapses and their ilk. And they don’t lose their licenses or reputations when they admit this – even in the hospital, and not just in Sunday School.