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February 2006 |
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Intelligent DesignThe Intelligent Design movement has attracted not a little controversy amongst Christians. Alastair Richardson examines the issue. A little over fifty years before Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, Archdeacon William Paley famously proposed the ‘watch on the heath’ argument for the existence of the Creator in his book Natural Theology. In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for any thing I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever….. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; …..when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose . . . This mechanism being observed . . . the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker. Natural theology has become the name given to our attempts to deduce what we can of the Creator from the creation, when reading His ‘Book of Works’, but Paley’s argument was seriously challenged when evolution by natural selection provided a plausible alternative mechanism to explain the very features that Paley held up as evidence of a Designer. This was not the first example of God’s sphere of influence being apparently reduced by scientific discovery; the movements of the planets were clearly God’s business until the laws of gravitation were understood. The ‘God of the Gaps’ is the phrase used to describe this phenomenon, and it was paradoxical that Paley’s attempt to defend the Christian faith, in fact made it more vulnerable to the Darwinian challenge. The last decade or so has seen the emergence of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement and, with it, controversy about the status of these ideas and where they might fit into science and education. ID sounds attractive initially; don’t the heavens declare the glory of God’? Doesn’t the complexity and beauty of the natural world excite our wonder and direct many of us towards God? Shouldn’t Christians be supportive of a suggestion that places God where He should be? Well yes, but closer examination of ID shows that it has the same fatal flaw as Paley’s natural theology.ID proposes that there is scientific evidence to show that an intelligent being has been involved in the emergence of living organisms. This is based on two main planks: the unlikelihood that the complexity of living organisms, or structures within them, could have arisen by ‘chance’, and the existence of what is described as irreducible complexity. Living organisms are undoubtedly complex, but at the organism level, Darwinian evolution gives an effective explanation, accepted by the vast majority of biologists, be they Christian or atheist, of how complex organisms arose from simpler ones. ID proponents give much attention to small-scale structures, for example the minute, hair-like flagellum that drives a bacterium through the water. The flagellum is a micro-machine made up of even tinier sub-units, and it has a consistent structure, not just in bacteria, but in most other organisms, including the cilia that are sweeping mucus out of your lungs as you read this. On the one hand ID says that this structure is too complex to have arisen by the chance assemblages of its components, and on the other that it is irreducibly complex, i.e. that the absence of any one of its sub-units would render the whole thing useless. The implication is that an intelligent designer is required to explain their origin because the accumulation of small changes in conventional evolution is incapable of doing it. The argument would have more strength if it were true that there is only one design for cilia and flagella, but in fact there are several other types and, just as with whole organisms, they can be arranged to suggest a pathway that an evolutionary process might have taken. The flagellum is not irreducibly complex and neither are the biochemical systems that the ID proponents discuss. But there is a deeper problem. If it is suggested that an Intelligent Designer is needed to produce, for example, the flagellum, but then an evolutionary explanation emerges, the need for the Designer disappears and the God of the Gaps shrinks a bit more. ID is not only bad science, it’s bad theology as well. It’s not difficult to see why people are attracted to an idea that purports to provide real evidence of God’s hand in creation. The biological study of evolution is so often conflated with atheistic materialism that the two (quite wrongly) become synonymous, and acceptance of evolution is assumed to mean the abandonment of faith. However, I suspect that many are uncomfortable with the statements of the ‘creation scientists’, and perceive ID as a middle way that allows some rapprochement between Darwinian evolution and the work of the Creator. But an idea that just places God back in the gaps, as Paley did, is no solution. Much better to see God’s hand in the whole creative enterprise, from the Big Bang to the modifications to species that are going on around us today. |
Photo Michael Osterreider, iStockphoto.com |
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