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.

Is Physics Theology? or, Physics and Metaphysics: God's Universe, by Owen Gingerich

Owen Gingerich is a retired Harvard professor and Smithsonian Institution astronomer. These days he writes articles about global warming and gives lectures about Copernicus. He also wrote a book called God's Universe. The introduction sets the tone for the whole book by pointing out that naturalistic explanations of how things happen neither contradict nor confirm teleological explanations of why they happen. Yet Gingerich also rejects the non-overlapping magesteria (NOMA) model proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, wherein science sticks to how and lets religion deal with why.

Gingerich opens this series of talks by explaining that for him,

"a final cause, a Creator-God, gives a coherent understanding of why the universe seems to congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life.... Somehow, in the words of Freeman Dyson, this is a universe that knew we were coming. I do not claim that these considerations are proof for the existence of a Creator; I claim only that to me, the universe makes more sense with this understanding." (p. 12) 

And this statement is typical of Gingrich's tone. He is not strident, he is not doctrinaire, and he does not seem to be trying to bend facts to fit his theology, nor bend theology to fit the latest scientific findings, nor yet to wall the two fields off from each other. 

In the first lecture included in this book, he demonstrates at some length how the Copernican principle, also called the principle of mediocrity, is both an essential aspect of a certain perspective on physics and a strong basis for the conception of the universe as having been designed to support life. And yet he demonstrates that it has never been found useful to solve any actual question in astronomy! From there he meanders over to the tantalizing possibility that we are not alone in the universe, as expressed everywhere from Star Trek to SETI. His sense is that although the Copernican principle almost requires that there be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, attempts to communicate with it, as the SETI project does, are, paradoxically, deeply anthropocentric. They assume that ET not only exists but developed along lines so similar to ours that we will be able to find a point of contact.

Yet evolutionary theory presents us with a path to consciousness that is truly a garden of forking paths, a virtually infinite number of possible outcomes. How many dice had to be rolled the right way for life to even exist at all? And how many more for the emergence of the human brain, which Gingerich calls "the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos"? Therefore, intelligent life was not inevitable on this planet, nor on any other, and the forms it could have taken here or could take elsewhere are by no means inevitable.

Gingerich then, supported by Paul Davies, provides this rather unexpected summary of "two diametrically opposed worldviews":

"The one view, that intelligent life emerges at best very rarely through extraordinary and improbably contingencies, encapsulates a strict Darwinian understanding: humankind is a glorious accident. The other view, that the universe is abundantly inhabited by intelligent creatures, carries the hidden assumption of design and purpose, in other words of teleology." (p. 40)

So you would think that Gingerich, who has already said he finds theism to be the most compelling explanation for the why of the universe, would come down in favor of the principle of mediocrity, that is, the idea that our solar system, our intelligence, our very self-awareness is not unusual but is the natural consequence of a universe designed for life by a life-loving God. And yet Gingerich concludes, "We human beings are the most extraordinary creatures we know about, and part of our glory is that we can imagine we are not the most remarkable creatures in the entire universe."

Reading Gingerich does not make me feel like I understand everything, or, for that matter, anything, about physics. It makes me feel like I can fearlessly learn more and more, never fearing that I will come to the end of what can be known, because, to rip a verse right out of its context, "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!" (Romans 11:33)

210-219: Is God Necessary?

The Dewey numbers 210-219 are reserved for the intersection of philosophy, science and theology. Allow me to contrast a sample of the county library's holdings in this section:

with some from our church library:

I'm always up for CS Lewis or John Polkinghorne, but I also selected a couple of items from the public library. 

Honey from Stone, by Chet Raymo, is subtitled "A Naturalist's Search for God." It makes me wonder whether I could be reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in this Dewey decade. It recommended itself to me primarily because of its lovely woodcut illustrations. The search takes place on the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland, a geography about which I know absolutely nothing. The book was published by the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastic order of the Episcopal Church about which I also know nothing. So, prime opportunity to branch out if this is the book I actually read.

God's Universe, by Owen Gingrich, is a slim volume published by Harvard and recommended by Polkinghorne. It looks like it might be appropriate for devotional reading, and, in any case, at 120 small pages, it would be faster just to read it than to try to guess exactly what the author is at. This may be exactly the kind of book I've been looking for-- an intersection of physics and theology. It seems so likely to me that physics IS theology, I've been surprised how much difficulty I've had finding books that would explain it to me.

In Praise of Learning Things You Are Pretty Sure Are Not True: Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero

After listening to Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero, here is what I know:
The United States will always be a secular state by law because of the establishment clause. It will always be a religious country by choice because of the free exercise clause. So everyone can stop panicking. The Religious Right (whoever that is) will never make the US a theocracy, and the Godless Commies (or whoever today's Great Satan is) will never outlaw Christmas.

The reason nobody knows anything any more is not because of the Godless Commies. It's because of the Godfearing and truly nice people who thought it would be a good idea to focus on where we agree, not on those pesky doctrinal points that divide us. So back in the first half of the 20th century, Protestants united against Catholics, which meant they had to stop arguing about baptism and predestination. Then Protestants and Catholics united against everyone else, which meant they had to stop arguing about whether salvation is by faith or works and what to do about Mary. Then Jews joined the party and we started hearing about Judeo-Christian values, which meant we needed to stop talking about Jesus (VERY divisive!). And then, after the excesses of post 9-11 hostility towards Muslims, it just seemed so... well, so mean to insist that Islam was substantively different from Judaism or Christianity. After all, it's nice to be nice, and we can all hold hands and feel terrific. And so, while loss of consensus in schools meant no more Bible reading there, a desire to seek greater consensus among people of faith stripped weekend and evening religious teaching of its meatier content.

The fact is, people of faith don't all believe the same thing. We may not even be interested in the same goals. And the more we know about each other, the less we might agree! So, much more pleasant to focus on the big picture. And the more diverse America gets, the smaller the big picture is, until we reach the least common denominator of faith: a "Universe" which we all agree we live in and that we all hope is somehow benevolently disposed. Next thing you know, Christians think Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and Muslims think God got married, and we can't even have a conversation that makes any sense. And that's not even counting the growing number of Americans who claim no religion.

But Prothero argues that, like the students in Modesto, California who take a world religions class, we should all pull up our socks and just learn some facts. Even if a given religion, or religion in general, is not important to us, it is important to the people around us. Newsmakers are constantly giving Bible references and claiming religious motivations and practicing their unfamiliar customs in our civic spaces, so it would be worth knowing something about how their religions work. This is the case for religious literacy.

Here's the case against it: We will learn that Islam and Christianity and Judaism cannot all be true, at least not in all particulars, because, for example, they take mutually contradictory views on the identity of Jesus. We will discover that not all disagreements stem from misunderstanding; some of them spring from extremely accurate understanding!

But we're all grown-ups here-- can't we face the fact that people hold differing opinions? Are we that insecure -and that ignorant- of what we claim to believe that we are afraid to even hear other ideas?

As for me, I learned some facts about my own religion from Religious Literacy. Most startling was that the letters of Paul were written before the Gospels, and that Protestants and Catholics divide up the 10 Commandments slightly differently. I also learned some facts about other religions-- I think I almost can explain the difference between Sunni, Shiite and Wahabi Islam, and (at least today) I know the Four Noble Truths, if not the Eightfold Path, of Buddhism. Take this quiz and see if you know enough religious facts to read a newspaper intelligently!

Remember: you don't have to believe an apocalyptic interpretation of the Bible to learn what it is. You don't have to belong to any of the major sects of Islam to benefit from knowing what they are. "The truth will set you free," that's from Jesus Himself. It doesn't sound like He's afraid of information, and you don't need to be either.

200-209: Introductory Remarks about Religion

Many people complain that Dewey's system reflects a limited worldview, and point to the fact that 86% of the digits of the 200's are allocated to Christianity as an example thereof. Of course this is not a completely unreasonable observation; it never occurred to Dewey that English-speaking people would not be much more interested in the Bible than in, say, the Tao Te Ching. However, a quick glance at the 200s in my local library demonstrates that modern librarians are not limited by Dewey's assumptions, and that any religion that has left any record at any time anywhere can be studied in this Dewey decade. Below please find just a small sample of our county library's holdings in this department:

Even though they were available, I did not choose a book about creation stories, goddesses or animals. I chose Spirits Rejoice: Jazz and American Religion, by Jason Bivens, from the New Releases shelf, because my son-in-law is a jazz drummer. Check out the link; it provides a soundtrack to the book! I also chose Religious Literacy, by Stephen Prothero, because it was from the audiobooks collection. Turns out we already own a previous work of his, God Is Not One, dedicated to his theory that all religions are not, in fact, different paths up the same mountain, but rather climbing completely different mountains. 

I've never read God Is Not One and wondered why we owned it, but now I am more intrigued. After starting Religious Literacy, I realize that although I might be able to pass Prothero's little literacy quiz, I really don't know enough about the world's other religions, and maybe not even enough about my own, to properly compare and contrast! So whatever Dewey's original intent or limitations, his system has proved effective at organizing and presenting knowledge in such a way that when I go to the library, I get my limitations and prejudices challenged. 

PS: "JOHO" has a great summary of the complaints against the Dewey decimal system with respect to its handling of religion, along with the reasons that the system still works. Some people like the Library of Congress system better, but the reality is that it is not commonly used in local libraries, so, here we are.

190-199: Modern Philosophers One by One

Since "modern" philosophy picks up pretty much in the 17th century, I could have read about John Locke (from Lost) or Thomas Hobbes (not the tiger), but I went with Kierkegaard, because my husband has been studying him.

My husband's a huge fan. He likes the way Kierkegaard engaged with Socrates. He is interested in how Kierkegaard wrestled with his faith and with the difficulties of his upbringing. What he recommended I read had the inviting title of Kierkegaard for Beginners and was part of a series called Beginners Documentary Comic Books, so that sounded promising. But they aren't really comic books. At least Donald Palmer's overview of Kierkegaard was not. It had more of the vibe of an Usborne book, with pictures and text jumping all over the page, except that the pictures were just black and white line drawings, and rather snarky and unattractive ones at that.

So maybe it was just the graphics of the book, but as I was reading I couldn't help but be reminded of a student's summary of Sartre's comments on the burden of freedom: "So this guy just was depressed and negative and wanted everyone else to be depressed too." Palmer certainly made it seem as if Kierkegaard's philosophy was an effort to take his own maladaptive attitude towards life and make it normative. He presented him as the originator of the sentiment that if you are not depressed, you are not paying attention. As a (sometimes) depressed person myself, I do tend to feel that way, but at the same time we have to recognize that God made people with sunny dispositions for a reason!

Let's give Kierkegaard some credit, though, for inventing a phrase that I use a lot to describe my gloomier states of mind: "Existential Angst." It turns out I've been misusing that phrase, though. It doesn't mean exactly, "having trouble with the fact that you exist and that everything else exists and how sort of complicated and difficult everything appears at the moment." It is more accurately described as "the dread you feel when you realize that you are capable of doing and free to do absolutely anything, no matter how obviously bad an idea it is."

I have certainly experienced that sensation as well, although not as frequently. Based on how people react when I try to explain what it's like, I can state definitively that this sensation is not a universal experience. Most people, oddly enough to me, do not, when they find themselves standing at heights, consider that they might suddenly fling themselves down. Most people, apparently, have never driven down the road and vividly imagined crossing the yellow line into oncoming traffic. And unlike Kierkegaard, I say there is nothing wrong with those people! He and I should leave them alone and let them stay in their sunny land of unicorns and rainbows!

So I come to the end of my journey through Philosophy and move forward into Religion with a renewed sense of why I need transcendental help. It's been fun, but humans just talking to each other about The Meaning of It All can't help but have limited perspectives...

180-189: Philosophers, Ancient, Medieval, and Non-Western, Still Arguing

Out of all the thick treatises and skinny "Aristotle for Dummies" overviews in this section, the only book that appealed to me was Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. Rebecca Goldstein, the author, exposits five aspects of Plato's work, and then places him in five settings that allow him to expound-- or rather to inquire-- on these topics in contemporary context, supporting the thesis of her subtitle. It's more fun than Sophie's World, which, sorry pretentious millennials everywhere, I could not finish, and more inviting than, say, The Story of Philosophy, of which I may not have read every word.

Philosophy is, by definition, the love of wisdom, and Plato believes that it is inherently a Good Thing that leads to goodness. In fact, Plato says truth, beauty and goodness are the braided heart of the universe, the cause and purpose of the world's existence. Goldstein summarizes this way: "Simply to care enough about the impersoal truth, devote one's life to trying to know it, requires disciplining one's rebellious nature, which is always intent on having things its own way..." Our lower natures don't want objective truth, but only the knowledge that will support our own agendas, so simply seeking reality is a corrective to that egocentric self-indulgence. Goldstein portrays Plato as a huge fan of Google.

Goldstein's Plato would also be a huge fan of Nerd Night: Research Speed Dating Edition, which I attended last night. Researchers sat at tables, prepared to give the elevator pitch for their projects, while our mission was to pepper them with questions. I learned about everything from bumper sticker archives to whether Neanderthals wore jewelry (probably). So I was made to pay attention to things I thought I didn't care about and facts that did not fit tidily into my preconceived worldview, and apparently Plato did recognize great value in that practice. I wonder if the real Socrates would have been as enthusiastic about this event, though, or about Google for that matter, since the vision of Truth, Beauty and Goodness portrayed in the dialogues seems to take a lot of time to uncover and experience-- time that just about anyone who has to work for a living will be hard pressed to find.

In fact, Goldstein does bring up and never satisfactorily dismisses the charge that Plato was an elitist, setting up requirements for the Good Life that could only be met by the small percentage of the population that had the aptitude and the leisure to spend hours a day mooching around chatting. (Ironically, the Socratic method was very important to the developers of the Paideia Proposal, built on the decidedly non-Socratic principle that “All children deserve the same quality of education, not just the same quantity.”) Goldstein also devotes a whole chapter to the practice of pederasty in Athens, which strikes me as being a perfect example of elitism in the form of institutionalized sexual exploitation. 

I am the first to say that we can't usually judge or even label ancient behavior by modern sensibilities, but the very parameters of this Athenian mentoring system with a sexual component demonstrate that it was oppressive to children. The boys are actually instructed to, for all practical purposes, lie still and think of Athens while their mentors do what they like to their bodies. And I say that any time a person is told up front that his best bet is to dissociate, that is not a healthy situation. It's always been very difficult for me to take the Dialogues seriously when they tend to be framed with chitchat about so-and-so's hot new slave, and I think it's because that kind of talk just reminds me that the Athenians did not think that all their high ideals were for everyone. They believed that the mass of men, and certainly of women, existed only to serve them so they could have the leisure to contemplate said ideals. I believe that people of all income levels and IQs can be valuable and can live a good life.

Yet I agree that Plato does still matter, and philosophy does still matter. It is my experience that, although not everyone is constantly tormented by questions like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" or "How can we know that we actually know anything?" the existence of people who work on such questions is just as vital to our society's functioning as is the existence of people who know how to operate hydroelectric plants or the Federal Reserve. I wish that the inquiries of Plato's friend Socrates had pushed a little further into practical ethics and led that little group to advocate a more equitable society than the one they found themselves in, but Goldstein does make an excellent case that they were asking important questions and starting to pave the way to some useful answers. They did not remain bound by their society in every respect.

For example, Goldstein talks a lot about the question of "mattering." She references the "axial age," a time from 800-200 BC when peoples all over the world began asking themselves what it was all about. What is the meaning of life? What's the point if we're just going to die in the end? (The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible will get you inside the head of one axial age philosopher's questions, if you don't really understand what we are trying to solve here.) Many ancient peoples concluded that they mattered because of the tribe they belonged to. That was part of Athenian thinking on the subject: Athenians mattered because they belonged to the greatest polis on earth, and thus their glory and their virtue came largely from their participation in political life. Socrates, however, refused to participate in politics. Despite Plato's violent distaste for Homeric poetry, Socrates seemed to subscribe more to the Homeric view that "mattering" was a matter for the individual, and that 100% of one's significance came from one's own personal excellence-- in any field, whether athletics, intellect, war, or whatever endeavor might offer an opportunity to be outstanding.

Obviously, both these definitions of mattering are unacceptable to my democratic impulses. If significance comes from group affiliation, there is no hope for those born on the outside. If significance is only for the outstanding, there is no hope for the vast majority that must form the field in which the exceptional stand. The monotheistic answer-- that significance comes from being made in the image of God, being in relationship with God, fulfilling whatever role God put you in-- is the only one on offer in the Axial Age that contained the seeds of equality. I think too often, though, that modern believers still fall into the traps of tribal or personal exceptionalism. We think that we all have to be special, we all have to find our spectacular callings, or God will be displeased. Or we think that we are already special because of our denominational, political or national affiliation. I, for one, would like to live by what I profess to believe: that every person matters, every person deserves an education, every person deserves to be free, every person contributes, every person is important, regardless of his or her ability to excel or his or her membership in any particular tribe. 

Although I don't agree with Plato's (or Goldstein's!) answers to some of the questions posited in this book, I appreciate the spirit of inquiry that marks it and the thoughts it provoked. By the way, Plato at the Googleplex had the additional and rare virtue of being a page-turner about philosophy! Recommended!