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198 guiding and controlling intelligence. More than a century later, astronomer Fred Hoyle suggested that an intelligence that preceded us put together, as a deliberate act of creation, a structure for carbon-based life.*! We have seen a revival of this idea in the theory of intelligent design, which infers the existence of a powerful, intelligent agent without any specific reference to God. Intelligent design assumes that apparent order in nature reflects a rational mind at work. According to this theory, our universe shows deliberate fine-tuning in its fundamental parameters, such as the ratio of respective strengths of the four fundamental forces. If the ratios were only slightly different, our universe either would never have developed any elements beyond helium or would have collapsed almost immediately. Intelligent design advocates step in where science, as they see it, has not fully explained complex phenomena such as life. Biologist Michael Behe, noting that the public believes overwhelmingly that life was designed, argued that we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. It is this profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain (emphasis added). “Since we know of no other way that these things can be produced,” he commented, “then we are rational to conclude that they were indeed designed.” Critics of intelligent design respond that the “it must have been designed” argument is just a way of avoiding the toughest scientific problems. Intelli- gent design proponents do not claim to have a coherent scientific theory about how life changed over time; the most they will claim, said Dawkins, is that there is no argument against intelligent design. “If 97% of all crea- tures have gone extinct,” observed anthropologist Irven de Vore, “some plan isn’t working very well.” Others have argued that intelligent design theory is repackaged Cre- ationism, the thinking person’s Creationism, or creationism stripped of its explicitly Christian biblical background. To critics, the essential but often well-disguised purpose of intelligent design is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans.“* Having banished the guiding hand of God from the biosphere a century and a half ago, commented Davies, biologists are reluctant to let it reenter in the guise of a law of nature. However, if it turns out that life does emerge as an automatic and natural part of an ingeniously biofriendly universe, something like design would seem more plausible.** The Catholic Church and Design Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna, who was the lead editor of the Catholic Church’s official Catechism, spelled out a design argument in 2005. He rejected the neo-Darwinian version of evolution—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection. Schon- Thinking Outside the Box