This is the almost the same article/post as one posted on my other blog: Javascripture.
Not long ago a couple events coincided within the span of one week: an article on Naturalism and Intelligent Design written by my brother (a pastor) in his church’s newsletter, and a challenge from a fellow small group member who is working on an article on what it means to be made in the image of God. Perhaps to some people the issues seem unrelated, but I think they are related. An excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall, as well as a few excerpts from C. S. Lewis’s Miracles have formed some of my thinking, as well as a sincere desire to address the ongoing debate within public schools whether to allow Intelligent Design theories to be taught within our Science classes. I hope this hasn’t scared you away, as a reader. Perhaps you’re wondering which camp I’ll land myself in. I hope that is enough to keep you interested.
The first couple chapters of Genesis are considered the Creation chapters. In much abbreviated language the Creation of the Earth is depicted, along with the especial Creation of humanity as residents of Earth. Some people might hope I would say figurative or metaphorical language instead of abbreviated, but I don’t think those words would be accurate. A metaphor is figurative language that compares two quite different things by mentioning one particular quality they both appear to possess. To say: “Zach is a cheetah on the track” would be to use a metaphor indicating Zach is a fast runner, not to imply he’s a great cat. However to say that “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind’ and it was so.” (Genesis 1:24) is not to use a metaphor. It is to say, however, that these creatures: namely the entire Animal Kingdom (and all subsequent phyla, genera and species), were created intentionally and specifically by someone outside of Nature. I say that the Genesis narrative uses abbreviated language because it doesn’t intend to be scientific in the least. Indeed the order of events is highly suspect as well. The creation of plants (on day three) could hardly have preceded the creation of planets (on day four) as well as another particularly important celestial sphere, the sun, in so far as we are knowledgeable that plants manufacture their own food through photosynthesis, a process entirely dependent on light: particularly sunlight. Immediately the reader might surmise that I am fully entrenching myself in the Naturalist/ evolutionary camp as I call into question the scientific soundness of the Genesis account. To which I would wholeheartedly assent that the Bible in no way purports to be a scientific manual. But I do not think it meant to be metaphorical here either. It was simply stating, in massively abbreviated form, that there was and continues to be an intelligent design behind Nature and the things that have come into being. To that I likewise wholeheartedly concur.
The Genesis account goes on to say that humanity is created in the image of God: Humanity is the Imago Dei. “Then God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27) Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: “There is no transition here from somewhere or other, there is new creation. This has nothing to do with Darwinism: quite independently of this man remains the new, free, undetermined work of God. We have no wish at all to deny man’s connection with the animal world: on the contrary. But we are very anxious not to lose the peculiar relationship of man and God in the process.” (Creation and Fall, McMillan Co., 1959, p.36) The Genesis story tells about the purpose of humanity’s creation, not biologically how it came about. The Genesis passage speaks of humanity as being given originally a unique gift by God, unique among all the creatures. We are granted a relationship and responsibility “to rule” over the rest of creation, and we are created in His image. What that “image” is exactly, has been debated for years: our freedom of will, our ability to create, our ability to love sacrificially, our possessing a soul or spirit are among various interpretations, none that are exclusive of one another.
But not long after receiving this gift of creation and formation in His image, being God’s reflection, humanity decided to reject the gift and grab a position, a power, an ability. We said we will be like God “knowing good and evil.” This acquisition of knowledge was and continues to be a usurpation—a desire to be equal with God. It is a desire to wrest our future from the Creator so that we might establish an alternative based on our ambition. We act as if we are like God and act as if God does not exist, or is inconsequential at best. In some primordial past we became “sicut deus”: like God by our own power, lifting up the acquisition of knowledge, and judging between good and evil. Nonetheless, our original creation in the image of God was/is something unique among the created order, something that sets us apart and now, unfortunately, (through a primal estrangement called “the Fall”), at odds with the rest of the natural order.
The issue of “imago dei” (being created in the image of God) leads inevitably to the present controversy in our society between a creation-centered view of the Earth and a naturalist-evolutionary-based view of the Earth.
Within our schools and universities we have two competing world views currently embroiled in the science debate: intelligent design versus naturalism/evolution. Both of these viewpoints or positions of inquiry begin with certain presuppositions. The naturalist scientific community has denounced intelligent design as pseudo-science that is being used by fundamentalist Christians to push a literal interpretation of the Bible. The creationist supernaturalist scientific community has denounced evolution as a presumptuous, anti-religious theory rife with gaps in proof and logic that flies in the face of the facts that cry out evidence that there is order and design, balance and benefits, cooperation and complexity within Nature, on the Earth, throughout all living creatures. Such complexity, interdependence and balance cannot be adequately explained without the presence of a Creator Whose purposes aren’t simply random.
I will be frank in stating I find myself apparently with feet in both camps. Some might say my heart dwells in the Creation camp and my analytical mind in the Evolution camp. I could be denounced as a fence sitter. Biblical literalists might ask how I can believe dinosaurs lived 160 million years ago and uphold scientific theories dating the Earth’s age at over 3 billion years. You see, I’m not a Young Earth adherent. But at the same time I am a supernaturalist, not a naturalist. In other words I don’t believe that all that is in Nature (the evident world comprehended empirically through our five senses) came about by itself, randomly, haphazardly, accidentally, only by chance and through an interminably lucky process of natural selection.
A Naturalist believes that every finite thing or event must be explicable in terms of the Total System (which we call Nature.) In other words only Nature exists. Any cause happens from within the system. “The Naturalist believes that a great process, or ‘becoming,’ exists ‘on its own’ in space and time, and that nothing else exists… The Supernaturalist believes that one Thing (Being) exists on its own and has produced the framework of space and time and the procession of systematically connected events which fill them. This framework, and this filling, he calls Nature.” (C.S.Lewis, Miracles, p. 14). Now it may be argued that I have taken my thoughts completely away from Science and dove head first into Philosophy. This is true, but so have many scientists, because they cannot succeed in doing their work in a “vacuum.” To be an evolutionist, for example, is to be a philosopher, of sorts. One may find many separate fossils that show various bone structures, impressions of feathers or scales, and unwittingly—or very wittingly—desire to fill in the gaps with assumptions of mutations, gradual change and natural selection of the most efficient mutations, that most fortunately keep getting passed on to subsequent progeny. Finding and describing the fossils is science, while speculating and prescribing a necessarily blind, unguided chance randomness that links two separate fossils is philosophy, just as speculating and prescribing a necessarily intelligent design guided not by chance but by a purposeful Designer is philosophy. I would submit that the desire of scientists to exclude philosophical wrestling with the implications of fossil records diminishes scientific inquiry rather than purifies it.
Much of the reading I have done on Intelligent Design (particularly by Michael Behe) is not original research, but a description of multiple biological processes that must necessarily coincide in order for a function, such as vision, to occur. He calls this irreducible complexity. Although I don’t think these interpretations of scientific findings proves intelligent design in any definitive, undeniable way, yet I do affirm they are enough for me to nod my head in agreement: life remains a mystery, but there are enough fingerprints strewn across the Earth to point to the Culprit of Creation, Who dodges us, hides behind the Periodic Table and crouches within Relativity and Entropy.
Is Intelligent Design Science? It all depends on what individual scientists will allow into the dialogue. So long as scientists see inquiry as a linear, lock-step process of question, hypothesis, plan, observation and analysis, then perhaps no. But once scientists allow questions of purpose, as well as reflections on complexity, balance, and intuition, then perhaps the evolutionists won’t fear the proponents of intelligent design. It can not be denied that many scientists do believe in God, but do they believe in Creation? Do they believe that evolutionary processes may be an explanation for how an ageless God tweaks His Creation over time, much like an artist’s style my ‘evolve’ or change over time, simply because the artist desires to try something new. Conjecture? Most definitely, but it makes more sense to me than assuming every change is random and accidental simply because I’m not allowed to mention God.
For instance, how could an eye just blindly evolve? Evolutionists say that it started with photosensitive cells that mutated to primitive depressions in the head near the simultaneously evolving brain. From there successive mutations added increasingly beneficial components (while not having any other component lost through unfortunate mutations…) Consider, however, that is it possible for this to happen over countless millions of years, creatures holding onto the possibility that eyesight will eventually be achieved once some random cells mutate into the lens, and others mutate into the iris, the cornea, the vitreous humor, and the retina complete with rods and cones. All must coincide, exist at once, simultaneously for vision to occur. The evolutionists insist that successive stages of “improving vision” must have occurred as successive beings needed differing degrees of vision. But such reasoning is philosophy. It’s assuming that accidental mutations have left us with so many benefits, and every other mutation (those involving literally millions of dead-ends) must have all died off, without fossil records. Where are the fossil records of millions of botched mutations: those with a tenth of an eye, or those that made it a bit further with an eighth of an eye, or those lucky mutations that lasted 100 million years with a half an eye? And how did the eye evolve? How did the body ‘know’ that things could be perceived visually, that there are things out there worth seeing, in focus, and in color? To be bombarded with photons does not mean one will evolve eyes. Earthly creatures have been bombarded with cosmic rays, x-rays, infrared rays, radio waves and a broad assortment of electromagnetic radiation for just as long (say a billion years) and no cells have ever mutated to perceive these things. Such belief in the beneficence of the purely accidental and capricious takes a leap of faith that the theist has no trouble taking because the theist believes there is a Designer, a Creator, a God Who desires and intends vision for some of His creatures—especially all the moving ones that aren’t microscopic. In all of this I have only considered one organ. Imagine all the organs together, which must simultaneously work together: circulation system, neural system, lymphatic, skeletal, digestive systems, and so on. It is from these reflections that the theory of irreducible complexity arises. This doesn’t even begin to tackle the grand questions: How did life begin? How does it continue? How does the arrangement of four molecules in DNA lead to textures of skin, colors of hair, the heart that pumps, the bile that oozes, one’s ability to laugh, the tone of a singer, or the wrath of a despot?
Science in itself can be simply an intellectual discipline used to efficiently discover the way things work in the natural world. Obviously Science isn’t meant to discover the way things work in the supernatural world. Scientists, however, get into trouble when they disavow the supernatural world, and say that only the empirically perceived natural world exists, ala our five senses, then try to relegate to the natural world all cause and effect, building systems to explain how things work while implying they have figured out why things work. If evolution (as a theory of gradual change over time) can simply be used by scientists as a descriptive, heuristic device that outlines biological adaptations within species and genera, and how creatures are related to each other, then well and good. But once scientists begin imagining a planet (unique within the cosmos) in which this all necessarily happened by accident, and that ‘happy coincidences’ for the mega-trillionth time keep occurring that are not ever intended or designed by a Maker, leaving us with a most remarkable, but completely accidental Earth, then evolution ceases to be a descriptive theory and becomes a prescriptive theory. Naturalism takes the place of theism as a belief system that drives and prescribes knowledge, filling in all the blanks and gaps with assumptions that somehow continuing evolution weeded out all the bad mutations (called natural selection) and kept only the good mutations.
C. S. Lewis wrote: “No, it is not Christianity which need fear the giant universe. It is those systems which place the whole meaning of existence in biological or social evolution on our own planet. It is the creative evolutionist….who should tremble when he looks up at the night sky. For he really is committed to a sinking ship. He really is attempting to ignore the discovered nature of things, as though by concentrating on the possibly upward trend in a single planet he could make himself forget the inevitable downward trend in the universe as a whole, the trend to low temperatures and irrevocable disorganization. For entropy is the real cosmic wave, and evolution only a momentary tellurian ripple within it.” (God in the Dock, W.B.Eerdmans, 1970).
But that is enough for now. Just some random ramblings in the continuing dialogue? Or did I design them that way? Someone might quip, it doesn’t matter, they aren’t intelligent anyway. To which I smile, and reply, “Perhaps.”
