I am a Christian Too

I really think this intelligent design debate is a distraction from the important issues for Christians, say, ending extreme poverty in Africa. But there are a lot of interesting things being written on the topic worth blogging about. Here are a couple more.

First, Fred Clark, aka Slacktivist, has an excellent rebuttal to a piece by Jacob Weisberg in Slate. Weisberg seems to have the opposite reason than Christian fundamentalists for insisting that one can’t both be a Christian and believe in evolution — he wants to shoot down Christianity, not evolution. This is the real downside for the intelligent design argument: since evolution is demonstrably true, then Christianity must be false. Also be sure to check out Fred’s follow-up post as well (I will never look at a beetle, or an ostrich, in quite the same way again.)

And then, not able to avoid the ID debate, I cracked open my print copy of the New Republic, and caught an article with the most comprehensive rebuttal to ID I’ve seen. Maybe this is old news to some of you — it’s been on the web for a week — but I had missed it until now.

In the article, Jerry Coyne covers the scientific evidence for evolution and against intelligent design:

Insofar as intelligent-design theory can be tested scientifically, it has been falsified. Organisms simply do not look as if they had been intelligently designed. Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? Would an intelligent designer produce animals having a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, at exactly the time when reptiles are thought to have been evolving into mammals? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus? Or an appendix, an injurious organ that just happens to resemble a vestigial version of a digestive pouch in related organisms? Why would the designer give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes? Why didn’t the intelligent designer stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species? And why would he make the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different? Why, about a million years ago, would the designer produce creatures that have an apelike cranium perched atop a humanlike skeleton? And why would he then successively replace these creatures with others having an ever-closer resemblance to modern humans?

Coyne then goes on to the motive of proponents of intelligent design. He quotes a Christian journalist’s description of the strategy of Phillip Johnson, a retired law professor and ID advocate:

Johnson calls his movement “The Wedge.” The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism v. evolution to the existence of God v. the nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to “the truth” of the Bible and then “the question of sin” and finally “introduced to Jesus.”

Of course the problem with this strategy is that Darwinism is not inherently atheistic, unless one insists on adhering to a theology that shrinks God to a tinkerer in a workshop instead of the creator of all that is, seen and unseen. As Coyne points at, and many of us Christian bloggers and commenters exemplify, it is entirely possible to be Christian and to accept evolution as scientific fact.

So why does the ID crowd cling to this antipathy to evolution? Coyne has an answer:

The real issues behind intelligent design–and much of creationism–are purpose and morality: specifically, the fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God’s creation but a contingent product of natural selection, and so we lack real purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle. Tom DeLay furnished a colorful example of this view on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 16, 1999. Explaining the causes of the massacre at Columbine High School, he read a sarcastic letter in a Texas newspaper that suggested that “it couldn’t have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.”

Coyne points out that belief in evolution doesn’t really lead to anarchy: Europe is far more secular than the US, but relatively more peaceful. But this isn’t about a rational fear of increasing crime rates.

I believe the fight against evolution is a symptom of a fear of the loss of moral certainty in life, or what Paul Tillich in The Courage to Be calls “the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness”. It is a terror of falling into a moral abyss with no bottom. Despite the IDers assertion that their objection to evolution is because of their faith, it is based on fear, which of course is a failing of faith.

I’m not about to criticize anyone for struggling with doubt about their religious beliefs. It is part of being human. Which is kind of the point. Instead of fighting in the school boards, we Christians can accept doubt as part of the natural religious experience. Biblical literalism can’t give us stronger faith, only God can do that. We can confess our doubts to God, and let God nurture us and give us the courage to accept the world as we find it. And as God increases our faith, fighting over evolution will seem a lot less important.

Given my recent posts on Intelligent Design, both serious and satirical, I can’t resist blogging on a piece from that outstanding journal of high-brow nonsense, The Onion. Bruce at Mainstream Baptist points to The Onion article on the new evangelical theory of “Intelligent Falling”. Choice excerpts:

Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

….

“Let’s take a look at the evidence,” said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden.”In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, ‘And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.’ He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, ‘But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.’ If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling.”

…

“Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the ‘electromagnetic force,’ the ‘weak nuclear force,’ the ’strong nuclear force,’ and so-called ‘force of gravity,’” Burdett said. “And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus.”

The scary thing is that I don’t really find that last paragraph all that satirical!

The LA Times has an opinion piece today by Michael McGough on intelligent design titled Bad science, bad theology. In it, he explains why Christians do God a disservice by insisting that God is the designer and maker of the universe.

“The Christian confession of God as creator,” [Catholic theologian Luke Timothy Johnson] writes in “The Creed,” “is not theory about how things came to be, but a perception of how everything is still and is always coming into being.

“God’s self-disclosure in creation, therefore, is not like the traces of the watchmaker in his watch. God is revealed in the world first of all not through the ‘whatness’ of things but through the ‘isness’ of things. That anything exists at all is the primordial mystery that points us to God.”

Johnson sees this vision of creation as being “entirely compatible with theories of evolution.” He adds: “The theories of the natural and biological sciences address, and can only address, the interconnecting causes of beings that have been or are now already in existence. They cannot account for existence itself.”

And although Johnson doesn’t refer specifically to intelligent design, he calls its close relative, creationism, a “failed enterprise lacking … intellectual integrity.”

For atheists, the distinction between these accounts of the doctrine of creation and intelligent design might seem a distinction without a difference. After all, they both see a God of some sort behind or under (pick your metaphor) physical reality. Yet for many Christians, it is not only possible but necessary to reject the idea of God as the watchmaker, the mere Intelligent Designer, who walks away from his work. [emphasis mine]

Apologies up front for getting metaphysical, but here is another way to think about it. God does not act within time, God is not subject to the passing of time as we are. Time is a creation of God’s, along with the spatial dimensions of the universe. The Big Bang does not imply that God stretched out a finger at some point in the past to start the universe and then retired. In a single creative act, God created the universe from the very beginning of time until the very end of time. We are now living in the midst of God’s creative act, and through God’s grace, are allowed to be co-creators with God.

Science has clearly demonstrated that evolution is part of God’s creation. But humans didn’t arise as a mere random event, as a non-theist would have it. And evolution didn’t require God’s constant tinkering with its mechanism over time to make sure it led to us. Humans arose because God created, or rather creates, a universe that seamlessly and inevitably stretches from the Big Bang to the formation of stars, planets, the earth, complex organic compounds, single-celled organisms, vertebrates, humans, and God only knows what’s next, until literally the end of time.

Each moment in God’s universe flows into the next and the next and it could not be otherwise, because God’s creation includes time and cause and effect. But God does not operate within time, and God’s creative act doesn’t extend across time. As it was in the beginning, God’s creative act is now, and forever shall be. Intelligent Design completely misses this incredible wondrousness of creation.

Like McGough, I think that Intelligent Design turns an omnipotent God into a tinkerer, an artisan in a workshop. God is so much more than that.