A well-known Australian Science broadcaster and former Monty Python participant, Robyn Williams, has just published a book as yet unavailable in the UK. In it he pokes fun at those Scientists who believe that the universe must have a designer. He is a great admirer of Oxford academic Richard Dawkins and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author, the late Douglas Adams.
The book borrows its title from previous book by Mark Perakh called, 'Unintelligent Design'.
I assume both authors understand the oxymoronic nature of their chosen title - design logically infers intelligence. If they do understand, then their ridicule of other scientists and lay observers is remarkably condescending and insulting. Are they suggesting that those of us who see strong evidence for design in the universe are unintelligent in reaching that conclusion? Or do they believe that the natural universe can only be understood as a mindless, chaotic system and that pure chance alone led to the creation of this planet earth and its foremost species, humanity? I suspect they mean both, and neither meaning is free of first category philosophical fallacies.
A Young Earth?The Intelligent Design movement tends to shoot itself in the foot when it insists that the earth was created some 4,000 years ago and the creative process took six literal 24-hour days. In doing so they risk repeating the gross error made by the Church in reaction to Galileo's observation that the Earth is not the centre of the universe in a physical sense. The empirical evidence against a recent creation is simply so far against such an interpretation of Genesis that ID proponents would do better to look at the text a little more closely. The word 'yom' which we translate as 'day' is used in three distinct ways in Genesis chapter 1 and a simple study of the context in which the word is used each time shows quickly that it cannot mean 24-hour days. 'Yom' can equally describe a great expanse of time.
The arguments have been fully expounded and more elegantly expressed by others elsewhere but I will follow a few ideas here to illustrate my point. Each of the 'days' of creation is described using the following linguistic structure:
'there was evening and there was morning, one day'
This expression became the standard way that the Hebrew nation described a normal day but the description is odd: why put the period of darkness ahead of the period of light? The main purpose of this chapter is to show the bringing of design and order out of chaos and in doing so to show us something of the identity of the author of that work. If you were describing a human day, would you not say, 'there was morning and there was evening'? That the phrase is carefully crafted by the Holy Spirit to place the period of darkness before the period of light suggests that a process of chaos is being brought under control - what was dark, frightening, lifeless and non-comprehensible is being brought into the light of morning that offers life, and comprehension. The Hebrew expression for a day contained within it a reminder of creation and the 'days' of creation. It is simply a leaving of the dark and a coming of light and that is the first created element in the history of the chapter. In one verse 'yom' is used specifically to mean light as opposed to dark. In another, describing the seventh day, the day never ends meaning we must still be within its boundaries.
Until exponents of ID face this issue, believers will always suffer at the hands of the atheistic and agnostic scientists and commentators: it makes us look ridiculous.
Science without BeliefThe real argument lies not in a perceived dichotomy between Belief on the one hand and Science on the other - there is no unbridgeable gap. Both views are based on Science fact and Belief, and this is as true for Richard Dawkins as it is for the Christian who claims a God-created universe.
If you engage in discussion on the Internet or in the press with non-believers on the matter of ID, there is always a chorus of protest when you suggest to Scientists that theirs is a view based on faith and not just empirical evidence and logic, but I repeat that it is so.
They don't accept they are 'religious' believers because they are often blind or unwilling to face the philosophical environment in which they reach their agnostic conclusions. It is much simpler for them to argue that because Intelligent Design invokes a creator God, so the teaching of it belongs in the Religious Studies classroom, than to accept that theology and philosophy should be a vital ingredient of any Science classroom. They forget that without a personal faith in the existence of natural laws of Physics and Chemistry, it is impossible to do Science - they simply could not begin to do it.
Indeed, all disciplines including Mathematics and Science, all Philosophy and Theology must start somewhere. There must be a first cause or premise. In the latter disciplines we call our constructions 'arguments', whilst in the former disciplines they call them theories, but the process is the same. You take a starting point that can only ever be assumed rather than proven, collect empirical facts as best you can and then make a theory based on that. Science grows by a tri-partheid series of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and so does philosophy. This is the famous Hegelian triad method of human advancement. Someone proposes a theory, another propose a contradictory thesis and out of this we try to find a common theory or synthesis that explains both. That synthesis then attracts another antithesis and the process begins again. But the main point here is that the first cause is always a matter of belief and conjecture; it can be nothing else.
Intellectually,
it is impossible for this process to produce anything more than a
less-unfocused picture of reality than we had before, and this is
because we cannot know about that all important initial premise, the
first cause assumption that all arguments and theories begin with. If
you have ever wondered why different scientific research groups come up
with different conclusions on the same problems this is why - it is
invariably because each group starts with a different reference point,
a unique set of parameters. And inseparable from these parameters is
world view.
The theist will always start with a first cause called creator God, whilst the non-theist will always begin with the first cause of pure mindless chance.
So what about teaching ID in the science classroom? If Darwin's theory of evolution is just that, an unproven theory, and it is, then it has no better claim to be scientific than Intelligent design. Both theories are conclusions based on the same empirical facts, out of the same laboratories, out of the same universities and research centres, so what makes one suitable for teaching our children? It can only be the world view paradigm which pleases the law makers and not rational thought.
We have a fight on our hands, to get our politicians to accept their hypocrisy and to stop force-feeding our children and grandchildren atheist propaganda in the Physics, Chemistry and Biology laboratory. They are outraged at our insistence that our world view should be represented, but don't apply their own standards and accept that we are outraged by their insistence that only their world view should be timetabled.
Preparation
There are plenty of books and web sites that are out there is help the Christian stand the gospel ground on this matter. We suggest you start with the following:
Get to it folks. St Paul tells us in Titus 2 that we, God's people, should proclaim the message clearly and that we should, 'let no one disregard you'. Well, let's do it.