Intelligent Design vs. "intelligent design": in Praise of Questions (More on God's Universe)

Gingerich starts his second lecture by talking about miracles, and whether Hebrews 1:3 means that God is constantly working miracles in the universe to keep it running. That was Newton's belief, but "Leibniz replied that it was a mean notion of the wisdom and power of God which would imply He could not have gotten the universe right in the first place"! He then examines various aspects of organic and star chemistry that make possible the extremely long lifespan of the universe required for consciousness to come about via evolution. Here is a vision of God as Creator not of a painting or a drawing but of a "machine that would go of itself," of a sort of perpetual motion kinetic sculpture. And indeed, what does every child like best at the museum? The interactive art and the art that has a component of engineering to it. If God's Creation requires His constant interference just to operate, it does become more of a performance piece, doesn't it? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose-- God can create whatever He likes, but to see Him, as William Blake did, as not the divine artist but as the divine engineer, is a glorious vision in this technological age.

But now, about Intelligent Design specifically. If evolution is the mechanism through which species arise, there are two big problems, one philosophical and one logistical. The first is that every child is not the same species as its parent. There may be a Scriptural issue with this idea, but more important, I think, is that it seems intuitively incredible or even repugnant on the basis of our own experience. Has a human ever given birth to a non-human? Our very laws depend on the impossibility of such an occurrence. Or has any domesticated animal in the history of farming ever produced an offspring not of its own species? Such an event is unrecorded, although Gingerich refers to the complexity of the structure of DNA to argue that this is theoretically possible.

The second problem is that, again, based on observation and on reasoning, we see that most mutations are harmful. "Everyone will agree," says Gingerich, "that on the basis of merely random mutations the process is extremely unlikely to come up with successful products." Gingerich goes on to provide the best elevator speech for Darwin's achievements I have ever heard. Darwin's way of resolving the latter issue was to posit lots and lots of time-- that the earth was very old-- and lots of lots of tries-- that life was very generous and given to prodigious rates of reproduction.
"Granted these two fundamental conditions, fecundity and antiquity, combined with mutations, [Darwin] then brilliantly argued that the competition inherent in natural selection would take care of the rest, even though he had essentially no information concerning how the variations themselves could arise," meaning that he had no knowledge of the structure of DNA.

Intelligent Design theorists do not dispute the antiquity of the universe and the earth, nor yet the fecundity of life. "At issue for them," explains Gingerich, again providing them with a better elevator speech than they ever wrote,

"is whether random mutation can generate the incredible amount of information content required to produce even the simplest of cells, and whether even the great antiquity of the universe could make this possible. Here science, dealing with extremely low probabilities balanced against vast numbers of opportunities, is frankly on very shaky turf."

Given that Darwinians and ID theorists both run aground only on the point of random mutations and natural selection as the mechanism for the origin of species, Gingerich finds himself unable to join the camp of the ID theorists even though and because he believes that a Designer is a more compelling explanation for the existence of the universe than time or chance. His reason is that "It might be that the physics and chemistry of life's origins are forever beyond human comprehension, but I see no way to establish that scientifically." He feels that ID theorists say, "God did it, that settles it," and thus end scientific endeavors, whereas if God is indeed conceived as a master engineer, the greater likelihood is that there is a mechanism for the creation of species, and that that mechanism is discoverable.

Gingerich does not allege that the ID theorists make an error in their science. He agrees that our current state of knowledge absolutely leaves room for God to intervene to steer the process of mutation and selection, as they postulate. What he objects to is their confusion of the question, "How can time, chance and possibly divine intervention produce species," which is a physical question, with the question, "Did time and chance alone produce species, or was the universe designed by an Intelligence that created time and chance in such a way as to produce species?" which is a metaphysical question.

"I am holding a fragment of the Allende meteorite in my hand, and I propose to let go. You will not be surprised by what happens. It drops to the floor. Why? I could say that it is God's will that the stone falls. I am not being facetious, for I firmly believe that God is both Creator and Sustainer of the universe....I could declare that part of God's sustaining power consists in the maintenance of the laws of the natural world. In fact, the very expression, "laws of nature," from the time of Boyle and Newton, derives from the concept of divine law, and it is probably not accidental that science arose in such a philosophical/theological environment. However much we might assert that the stone fell because of divine will, though, such a statement does not pass muster as a scientific explanation. What science requires is a broader explanatory schema..."

So the problem with Intelligent Design is not that it is wrong, or that it contradicts known, proven discoveries in the fossil record or in our observations. Its problem is that it is not answering the same question the unfinished theory of evolution is exploring! ID is talking about final causes, but the theory of evolution is talking about efficient causes, and for the exploration of efficient causes, "methodological naturalism" is the only functional research strategy. "As a philosophical idea ID is interesting, but it does not replace the scientific explanations that evolution offers."

Gingerich is not, however, an evangelist for evolution as the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, like Richard Dawkins.

"Evolution as a materialist philosophy is ideology, and presenting it as such essentially raises it to the ranks of final cause. Evolutionists who deny cosmic teleology and who, in placing their faith in a cosmic roulette, argue for the purposelessness of the universe are not articulating scientifically established fact; they are advocating their personal metaphysical stance. This posture, I believe, is something that should be legitimately resisted. It is just as wrong to present evolution in high school classrooms as a final cause as it is to fob off Intelligent Design as a substitute for an efficacious efficient cause."

Proverbs 25:2 has always meant to me that it is the job of a certain portion of humanity to figure things out. Some Christians talk about the dangers of thinking too much or asking too many questions, but I disagree strongly with that view. In my view, God gave some of us thinking, questioning hearts so the rest of us could live peacefully trusting what was so discovered. So I believe God may have appointed and gifted some scientists to continue to press the inquiry into the mechanical origins of life, just as he appointed and gifted some to learn more and more about the mechanical origins of disease. If Christians had all been content to accept, for example, childbed fever as the sovereign hand of God instead of the dirty hands of a doctor, we would still have a maternal infection rate of close to 20% instead of the 2% we now experience. Who knows what blessings may accrue as Christian scientists press their inquiries just as far as they can, assuming that the universe, created by a master engineer, is a rational, knowable place that will yield explanations to those who know how to ask.