Intelligent Design and the Artist's Soul, in Three Acts
In his
article "Five Streams of the Emerging Church," Scot McKnight identifies
with Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger's description of emerging Christians.
One of the nine hallmarks of such Christians, according to the authors,
is that they "create as created beings." And it is this theme I would
like to explore with reference to Darwinian evolution and intelligent
design (ID) in a series of two posts. We will consider how to
consider ID, assess conceptions of God in this debate, and we will reflect upon aesthetics and Darwinian theory.What to make of intelligent design?
Questions for our readers: What do you make of intelligent design? How do you define it? Do you think we have too often used sloppy definitions of it?
Years ago, before I had heard of Neil Postman, before I had given much thought to the role pictures play in our mental life, I read Edward Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods. Upon putting it down, I was struck by one simple fact: Everything I thought I knew about The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 'just ain't so.'
With reflection, the disturbing fact emerged that I had absorbed the black-and-white images of "Inherit the Wind." Sure, I knew it was a play. Yet apparently the part of my brain overseeing history is not divorced from the part processing art. Plato was right. Art can be dangerous, for it provides a window into the soul.
The same cautionary tale applies to the Christian in the case of ID. We had better be careful that we assess facts, evidence, and narrative carefully rather than absorbing the assessments of our secular peers by osmosis.
It is impossible for the thinking Christian to put down all the invisible cultural baggage he or she carries--both Christian and secular narratives--in order to consider ID's claims on their own terms. But we can try to clear confusion. So let's start with what ID is and is not. Contrary to popular assumptions, ID is not Biblical creationism. It does not get into the recesses of Old Testament exegesis, nor is it meant to reveal the full nature of God.
ID is more modest, asking a simple question: When all of the scientific (not religious) evidence is put on the table, are certain features of nature better explained by an intelligent cause or by unintelligent causes like natural selection?
Now where does the artist fit in? Well, let's put down our culture war armor for a moment. Let's drop the usual visuals. We are not dealing with men in white lab coats versus backwoods basement Bible-thumpers. My friends in the ID movement have doctorates from Cambridge, The University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, CalTech, etc. They've done post-docs at Columbia, Harvard, and other major institutions. So let us re-imagine the narrative for a minute, wipe away the horizion, you and me.
Let us see the ID theorist the way we see an art historian at The Smithsonian who has just received a heretofore lost and unsigned Renaissance masterpiece. She must do some detective work. Are there not systematic and scientific ways for the art historian to learn about the cause(s) of this painting?
I propose that this is the way we should view the ID theorist. Returning to nature, in this view we see the ID theorist looking for positive signs of intelligent design and running tests to see if mere material causes are adequate to explain the artifact. In the case of the painting, material causes will never be adequate. Perhaps nature is like this, too. We should not judge this a priori. This is not a question of proving God's existence or of Biblical fundamentalism. This is about what sorts of causes are necessary to explain certain features of nature. The emerging Christian knows God is the ultimate author of nature, so perhaps this will be scientifically detectable, or perhaps it will not. We should encourage scientists to find out.
The sensitive-souled Christian will not let the Scopes narrative--and the charge that consideration of design in nature is somehow anti-intellectual--get in the way this legitimate pursuit for the causes of natural phenomena.
Next week we will look at God and Beauty in light of Intelligent Design.
With reflection, the disturbing fact emerged that I had absorbed the black-and-white images of "Inherit the Wind." Sure, I knew it was a play. Yet apparently the part of my brain overseeing history is not divorced from the part processing art. Plato was right. Art can be dangerous, for it provides a window into the soul.
The same cautionary tale applies to the Christian in the case of ID. We had better be careful that we assess facts, evidence, and narrative carefully rather than absorbing the assessments of our secular peers by osmosis.
It is impossible for the thinking Christian to put down all the invisible cultural baggage he or she carries--both Christian and secular narratives--in order to consider ID's claims on their own terms. But we can try to clear confusion. So let's start with what ID is and is not. Contrary to popular assumptions, ID is not Biblical creationism. It does not get into the recesses of Old Testament exegesis, nor is it meant to reveal the full nature of God.
ID is more modest, asking a simple question: When all of the scientific (not religious) evidence is put on the table, are certain features of nature better explained by an intelligent cause or by unintelligent causes like natural selection?
Now where does the artist fit in? Well, let's put down our culture war armor for a moment. Let's drop the usual visuals. We are not dealing with men in white lab coats versus backwoods basement Bible-thumpers. My friends in the ID movement have doctorates from Cambridge, The University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, CalTech, etc. They've done post-docs at Columbia, Harvard, and other major institutions. So let us re-imagine the narrative for a minute, wipe away the horizion, you and me.
Let us see the ID theorist the way we see an art historian at The Smithsonian who has just received a heretofore lost and unsigned Renaissance masterpiece. She must do some detective work. Are there not systematic and scientific ways for the art historian to learn about the cause(s) of this painting?
I propose that this is the way we should view the ID theorist. Returning to nature, in this view we see the ID theorist looking for positive signs of intelligent design and running tests to see if mere material causes are adequate to explain the artifact. In the case of the painting, material causes will never be adequate. Perhaps nature is like this, too. We should not judge this a priori. This is not a question of proving God's existence or of Biblical fundamentalism. This is about what sorts of causes are necessary to explain certain features of nature. The emerging Christian knows God is the ultimate author of nature, so perhaps this will be scientifically detectable, or perhaps it will not. We should encourage scientists to find out.
The sensitive-souled Christian will not let the Scopes narrative--and the charge that consideration of design in nature is somehow anti-intellectual--get in the way this legitimate pursuit for the causes of natural phenomena.
Next week we will look at God and Beauty in light of Intelligent Design.
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Sarah,
I appreciated your comments here.
You said:
"I'm still curious as to how to distinguish a gap that can be reasonably expected to be bridged from an insurmountable obstacle, as this seems to be a crucial point of contention."
There is no clear distinction between them. In looking for it, we also need to remember to avoid the reverse God of the Gaps fallacy, which is to say that no reasonable inferences can ever be drawn from an absence of evidence.
Cheers.
RJS,
Are you not going to provide any support for your assertion regarding the critiques of ID? ("Irreducible complexity is best attacked by demonstrating that the supposed irreducibly complex systems are in fact not irreducibly complex. I think that this is rapidly being done. What more do you want me to say?")
Do you still stick with that assertion?
pds (#70),
In a comment here - no I am not going to provide support. But I am working on structuring some posts to give my position with support and start a discussion, so stick around.
And yes, I stick with that assertion. Irreducible complexity is a seriously, I would say fatally, flawed proposal.
RJS (#71),
Ok, thanks for addressing it. I do find it remarkable that you would make such strong statements, and then not support them with anything. Not a link, not an article? Surely, if it is "rapidly being done," someone has discussed it somewhere on the web.
I will keep my eye open for future posts, including the promised follow up by Logan Paul Gage.
Dear friends--
I join the discussion late, and will no doubt suffer the usual problems associated with doing so. I've read the original post and the comments with interest. Before adding my own, let me say that I'm pleased to see that the discussion hereon is to a quite impressive extent amicable, reasonable, and intelligent, without more than the occasional tiny hint of unpleasantness.
First, my own present view of things, to get that out of the way, includes the following:
1. The Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection, with some tweaks coming from science Darwin could not have predicted, remains a very strong and capable explanation of how living things on this planet have arrived at their current nexus, and of how they will continue to change over time in response to the changing world in which they live. There is copious evidence in support of this model, from widely variable fields.
2. As one extends thought about evolution by natural selection deeper into the crevices of the universe, or out into realms other than the biological, its grounding is less firm. For instance, although it seems that the basic principles could have supported the development of life de novo from the proper original conditions, there are problematic issues that must be dealt with there. First, the difficulty in knowing what the originating conditions must have been. Second, and here we start to see glimmers of the intelligent design argument, the chances that life would arise spontaneously without any outside help seem incalculable and, to some at least, insurmountable. Third, the chances of the universe existing in such a way, with such laws and constants as would be necessary, such as to support both the origination of life and its continuation, are truly incalculable and unknowable. Fourth, as one stretches further and further into the nooks and crannies, eventually one will want to ask, "Why?" That is a question that evolution and natural selection simply cannot address, as Darwin well recognized.
3. I believe that there is a reason for my existence beyond any explanation relying entirely upon chance associations of material bits.
4. I believe, through the grace of God bestowed upon me by the Holy Spirit, that God called me--all of us--into being through methods and mechanisms I cannot either completely understand or identify.
Now, a comment meant to politely challenge my ID friends:
From a post above by PDS (#15):
"Which is more probable based on what we know now: 1. that this happened by chance and known natural mechanisms or 2. that this was designed?" To conclude that design is the more probable inference is not a logical error.
I humbly submit that such a conclusion is, indeed, a logical error. The reasoning is thus: In order to determine which of two events is more probable, the chances of each must reasonably be determined. As is often noted, the chances of all the events necessary to give rise to [fill in the blank with one's favorite example] occurring are impressively infinitesimal. But what are the chances that such occurred by ID? The ID proponent suggests that because we see things that are known to be designed displaying significant reductions of the entropy contained within those systems or objects, anything having too great a reduction in entropy relative to what might be expected should reasonably be concluded to have been designed--this is the "irreducible complexity" argument. (And I apologize if my wording here is awkward or confusing.) But nowhere in that suggestion/argument by the ID proponent is a quantification of that likelihood.
What are, in fact, the mathematically expressed chances that ID had a role? Since that cannot be expressed--or at least has never been determined and expressed, as far as I know--it is impossible to rationally compare the probabilities of the two alternate theories and arrive at the conclusion that either is more likely than the other. Thus, it is, indeed, illogical to conclude that design is the more probable.
This may have been addressed hereon, and I apologize if I'm unknowingly re-plowing old ground. However, since in my review of the discussion, with its admitted patchiness in spots (my review, that is), I've not seen this point made nor addressed, I thought I'd enter the list.
Thank you all.
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