Thoughts in a Haystack

God's humility appears to us as modesty or shyness, almost. I've tried to explain this to my kids in terms they can understand, referring them to the deer that sometimes browse in the blackberry bushes at the edge of our driveway. If we want to enjoy watching them, we have to be careful not to scare away our silent, beautiful deer with loud voices or sudden movements.

This observation about God's personality may explain why the evidence of design in the world is elusive to many people. 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.