Intelligent Design as Science, for Christians, Atheists, and Agnostics
In an earlier post I talked about intelligent design and had a dialog with Dr. Pimple in the comments. One theme that came up was a common one in ID discussions– what is scientific? I find that theme misleading, actually, because it seems to me to be all about semantics, or perhaps rhetoric (if “scientific arguments” are supposed to be “good arguments”). What we are after is the truth, not science, if the two differ.
A prime example is this. Suppose you believe that God exists, believing this as firmly as that the earth is round. If you do, then you should rely on both of those facts in understanding the world. In particular, you should find the intelligent design argument irresistable. Everybody acknowledges that there are things that standard evolutionary theory does not explain as well as we would like. If God exists, then we have an easy explanation for apparent improbable coincidences, with no need to postulate any new forces: God manipulated genes so as to generate the apparent coincidences.
Someone who accepted God as fact, but refused to use that fact in his scientific theory would be behaving irrationally. Why throw away useful information? It should not matter whether your information comes from experimentation, observation, reading scientific journals, or direct inspiration so long as you believe the information with the same confidence.
That confidence, of course, is usually a big problem. I believe in God, and I rely on the belief very heavily—I would perhaps even die for it— but I do not have the same confidence in that belief as I do in the world being round. My belief in God is far more important, but it is a trickier fact to ascertain, and I can more easily imagine coming across information that would change my belief in God than my belief in the round world.
It is also a problem that God’s existence is not so generally accepted as most facts used in science. While it would be foolish for me not to use the data that God exists in thinking about evolution, it would be equally foolish for someone to use that data if he thought it was false, and were sure God did not exist. There are, in fact, three classes of people:
1. People who believe God exists. These people might, for example, have come to their belief as a way to explain the existence of the Bible and Christian history, or by direct experience of the divine. For them, intelligent design is an easy theory to accept, since they do not need to add any new important beliefs to how they explain the universe. If God exists, it is a small step to say that He cares about how the world works and tweaks it occasionally.
2. People who believe God does not exist. I do not mean agnostics here, or those who simply believe that there is no evidence for or against God, but true atheists– someone, perhaps, who believes that since the world contains so much unhappiness, there cannot exist a God. For these people, intelligent design is a failure as a theory because it contradicts a basic fact.
3. People who do not believe God exists, but are equally unwilling to assert that He does not exist. This is the typical position used in science, history, and academia generally, though for most topics (Biblical studies and ethics being two exceptions) none of these three positions matters to almost any scholarship that is done.
It is to the agnostics that the intelligent design controversy is addressed by both sides, so it is discussed using their assumptions. Agnostics do have a difficult tradeoff to make. Accepting the Intelligent Designer fixes up problems with evolution and cosmology, but it requires an important new assumption, the Designer’s existence.
Much of the interest in the debate is sparked by the wedge that Intelligent Design provides for Christianity. The Intelligent Designer does not have to be the Christian God, but once accepted it makes belief in the Christian God easier. Some people find this threatening, and others find it inspiring. But that is really a separate debate, where instead of theology helping to improve the subjects studied by science, science helps to improve the topics studied by theology.