Audience of One

Creation

This morning, while talking to a colleague at the library, he made reference to the first chapter of Genesis, citing it as the Hebrew equivalent of “unintelligible business jargon”. On the contrary, I feel the account to be lucid – God created. However, there is more in the passage – there is a whole area of debate in Christian circles over what the correct interpretation is. To go into that at length would take far too long so I won’t attempt it. However, last night I heard a talk by Denis Alexander, a Cambridge academic, who is one of the most prominent Christian critics of the intelligent design movement, part of which I will attempt to report here.

Dr Alexander split his talk into two parts, the latter of which was about intelligent design. In the first part, he explored the concept of design in biology, and came to the conclusion that the concept is not useful in scientific study. Believing in a designer does not help form any new theories of biology, nor does it suggest any new experiments. He explained, concisely, how evolution works, and showed that, far from being a chance process, evolution has very predictable outcomes. He explained many different methods of evolution, from gene duplication and mutation to merging populations. Unfortunately I am not biologist enough to reproduce his explanation – I am sure there are many books on the subject. (One of his own, Rebuilding the Matrix, was on sale at a bargain price, but I’ve yet to begin it.) He also talked of where the notion of design should be discussed, if it isn’t necessary for biological study. Design belongs in the religious and philosophical sphere, rather than the scientific.

One of the points he returned to were two arguments related to design. He explained the concept of natural theology (from Romans 1:18-20), and said that this was accepting design first and foremost, and arguing that there must be a god. This is in the Bible – it is a valid argument. However the other argument starts with the existence of God, as revealed in Scripture, and argues that the world was designed.

In the second part of his talk, he explored the intelligent design (ID) movement. The thesis of the ID movement is that there are some biological mechanisms that could not have formed using the Darwinian idea of natural selection – they are “irreducibly complex”. The often-quoted example is that of a bacterial flagellum (a bacterial “outboard motor”). It has over thirty constituent proteins that work perfectly together, but are useless if only one isn’t present. The ID proponents argue that such irreducibly complex systems point to the presence of a designer. Evolution explains most of life – but the creator has intervened at particular points. (There were various quotes to back this up, notably from Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box.)

Dr Alexander started by arguing that ID is not a valid scientific theory. Theories can be tested – ID cannot. Theories also lead to experiments, whereas ID does not. He then went onto explain how, during the past few years, scientists have discovered evolutionary pathways that could lead to the development of the flagellum, and other irreducibly complex systems (gene duplication being one such method). He also argued that life is so complex, that there is almost no system that does not fit the ID proponents’ definition of an irreducibly complex system.

His final point showed that the ID movement, rather than espousing a form of natural theology (“nature reveals the creator”), had actually a very poor understanding of the Bible’s teaching of creation. It is interesting that the Bible never mentions nature, but always creation. God continually upholds his creation – he didn’t just sit back and let evolution take his course. This seems to be what the ID movement are suggesting, however. Dr Alexander concluded that, whereas the ID movement believed in a “god of the gaps”, he believed in a God of everything, who had used evolution to create everything in the world.

Somehow relating the talk without relating the arguments in detail doesn’t quite lend itself to discussion. I really should have taken notes. I have his book to read though.

The most interesting thing I learnt in the talk was the creation theology of the ID movement. Philip Johnston, the founding father of ID, has written about “theistic naturalism”, a description of how evolution took place under God. Of course, naturalism by definition means without God, so the phrase is somewhat of an oxymoron. We can talk about “theistic evolution”, but not “theistic naturalism”. Evolution is not necessarily a naturalistic process. Dawkins and his ilk may feel evolution proves naturalism, but the hallmark of the creator seems to me to be stamped over the whole concept.

(For the record, I believe the Genesis account of the six days of creation to be a poetic explanation of creation for a nation with no concept of science. It was not written to explain how exactly the world was created – the Bible is not a scientific textbook. It was written to show that God created, and he created everything.)

Matthew @ 21:11, March 11, 2006 to Science/Nature | Comments (1)