If there is one thing that characterizes a good deal of the intelligent design debate, it is how sadly unintelligent it is. Far from evolving, the polemic from both scientists and religion leaders could give rise to a new meaning for regression analysis.
All of which serves only to distract people from the central message and mission of Christianity to proclaim God’s love in a broken world that is confusing enough without this distracting muddle.
On the one side are some U.S. school boards whose narrow reading of the Bible turns God into a fumbling magician who pulled the present world out of a hat a few scant millennia ago.
Such a reading is more likely to propel intelligent people to David Hume’s side. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher wondered if this world was the work “of an infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance?”
Today, British scientist Richard Dawkins is equally dismissive of Christianity but then he creates his own belief system in the unseen “meme” — literally a figment of his imagination he hopes to plant in everyone else’s mind.
For more than half the world’s population there is no question the universe is designed by an Intelligence. Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe this, and Hindus and Sikhs also believe in divine, ordered creation.
Few teachers of these religions find the notion of the Earth being billions of years old conflicts with their faith. In fact, it is a relatively modern notion in Christianity that the Bible be read as a simplistic history book to conclude, as James Ussher did about 350 years ago, that the world began in 4004 BC. (He also thought it would end 6,000 years later — in 1996.)
Take Augustine, who has influenced Western thinking since the early fifth century. He wrote volumes on Genesis, pondering, among other things, the subtle question of what is meant by “days” in the text.
Nine hundred years later, thanks in part to the recovery by Muslim scholars of the extant works of Aristotle, one monk, Roger Bacon, laid a significant part of the foundation for the modern scientific method. His contemporary, another monk, Thomas Aquinas, proposed a number of arguments he regarded as evidence of God’s existence. The fifth is the one that all things move towards a goal and so there must be an intelligent designer who directs these things, and that is God.
Faith does not preclude scientific discovery and science does not preclude having faith. And today’s scientists who are persuaded that the odds of this world existing points to an intelligent designer are not bad scientists, although what they say goes beyond what science can test and so is perhaps not unscientific but non-scientific.
Likewise, the theory of evolution is just a theory like any other in science, except that some are more likely than others. Did Darwin and some of his followers have an anti-religious bent? Yes, probably. But so what? One doesn’t have to believe all the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings of Darwin to accept that the modern theory of evolution (which does differ from Darwin in places) is a reasonable, if unfinished explanation of the development of life.
In fact, both the scientists and religionists in this debate employ dubious philosophical reasoning. But rather than taking up this polemic, Christians ought to address the more profound question that troubles the modern mind: How do we account for evil in a world created by the God of love we proclaim? Glib or dogmatic answers will drive away at least as many as they satisfy.
Equally, scientists ought not to fear faith among their members. Science can’t prove or disprove God’s existence. But this debate allows scientists to avoid difficult ethical questions about cloning, genetic manipulation, weapons development and ever more sophisticated methods of tracking people’s movements around the world.
Humans are bound to develop technologies and they are equally bound to hold religious beliefs. If Christianity is to be relevant, it cannot become a refuge for unintelligent discourse. It must embrace and engage the world of thought and science to make sure that all God’s children are cared for and have the chance to live peaceful, healthy lives.
After all, it is our belief that we are stewards of all creation.
