DID YOU KNOW? Materialists Have Been Bashing Intelligent Design Since Greece and Rome
Dr. John West, Director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, explains in the following video that critics of the claim that the universe exhibits evidence of being designed have been attacking Intelligent Design (ID) ideas from the earliest days of the Christian church in the First Century AD and before that.
West points out that prominent ancient materialists, as well as contemporary, evolutionists have long argued that Darwin’s theory renders Christianity irrelevant because science has, is or will answer every possible question about the origins of the universe based on natural processes. No need for God, you see.
Democritus. (Screenshot from YouTube).
But God isn’t going away so easy as that, if for no other reason that neither evolutionary theory, nor the smartest atheist ever to walk the face of the earth, can answer the most basic and important question:
Why is there something rather than nothing? Either the universe had a beginning or its always been here. The question must be addressed.
West’s lecture is 28 minutes in length and well worth your investment of time. By the way, West’s discipline is political science, not biology or physics or any of the other natural sciences. His comments about his experiences on the faculty of an evangelical university will surprise many (and should dismay more):
God creates, evolution explains.
To use our God-given intelligence to acknowledge and marvel at the way the world actually works is to glorify God. It certainly does not make one a heathen or a materialist.
“Either the universe had a beginning or its always been here.” So take your pick. Neither option has anything to do with evolution.
What do you make of Richard Dawkins quote: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
The question is, do we see “design” etc. and therefore we believe? Or do we first believe, and therefore we see “design”? It’s a small but crucial distinction. Dawkins is speaking as one who has no faith and therefore finds no particular significance in what he observes.
Many people of course are inspired by the beauty of the natural world, and perhaps that’s enough to lead some to faith. But for most people, no amount of observed complexity or intricacy of “design,” in and of itself, is going to elicit faith where there is none. Or so it seems to me.
Plucking a quote from Pope Benedict XVI’s inaugural papal homily, West makes the Pope Emeritus sound like an evolution denier. But from the two preceding sentences, which West omits, it’s clear that Benedict was speaking in spiritual, not natural, terms: “And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.”
More to the point, Benedict/Ratzinger’s views are quite clear from a document that was put out just the year before:
“[T]rue contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ [such that]… the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation.“
[Paraphrasing St. Thomas Aquinas:] Divine providence means not just that something should happen, but also whether it should happen by necessity or by contingency.
“Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so.“
— International Theological Commission (Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Pres.), 2004
This all seems rather obvious if you reflect on the high degree of contingency involved, say, in the process of conception. (Unless one imagines God not only as a designer but a micromanager.)
Psalm 139:15-16 answers your concluding, parenthetical observation: “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
Benedict (quoted by West) says that each of us is willed, loved and necessary. Both Benedict and the Psalmist have in mind individual persons who have been conceived. But of course, each and every time a person is conceived, there are millions of *other* potential persons who are destined to lose the lottery and become non-entities. Anyone can win, but generally speaking there can only be one winner. Talk about a highly contingent natural process! (I note that the Psalmist didn’t have the benefit of this scientific knowledge.)
My guess is that God is content to let the lottery run itself, because His concern is with the person who actually results. Come to think of it, it’s a lot like evolution.