October 16, 2005

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

Intelligent Design: Is It Either?

I want to begin this morning by sharing two seemingly unrelated stories. The first is a story from my days in high school biology and the second is from my days as a seminarian. The two stories took place almost 40 years apart.

As I think I've shared before, high school wasn't exactly the best five years of my life. But I did enjoy biology. Now, what I enjoyed the most about this class was not so much dissecting frogs and flatworms; and it certainly wasn't memorizing taxonomy tables, but rather it was the occasional open ended conversations on such topics as the origins of life, where did humans come from? What was our place in the universe? And conversations on evolution; you mean my great, great, great to the Nth power grandchild may not have either little fingers or little toes? Wow.

In short, we would often spend some time, particularly on Fridays discussing how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something and then how that little bit of something turned into us.

Now there were two ideas that came out of these conversations have stayed with me all these years. The first was the suggestion that life on earth began when a family of extraterrestrials had a picnic on our dear planet and left behind some crumbs which in some mysterious way interacted with the chemicals and gasses present at the time and presto life began.

I was intrigued that humankind might just be the by product of space junk. Sort of like the mold that forms on stale bread. I was reminded of this story just last week as I had my arm in the disposal trying to find out what alien life form had temporary clogged up the drain.

Another idea that appealed to me at that time was what I guess I would call the fish-bowl theory of life. This totally non-scientific notion suggested that just as there were particles of ever smaller size whirling around atoms, perhaps humans were just the equivalent of dust mites existing in a larger universe than we could image.

Perhaps we were the equivalent of the fish in a fish tank and some greater being kept us for their amusement. After all, I believe it was a true scientist who taught us that everything is relative.

Now the second story is far more contemporary. One time during my days in seminary I was asked to participate in an adult Sunday school program sponsored by a nearby church. The class had invited a number of representatives from different denominations and religions to give a brief overview of their beliefs and then to engage in a time of discussion. I was to be the token Unitarian Universalist.

At first things went very well. I thought my presentation had gone quite well until the questions began. You don't believe in God? Well, certainly some of us do but not all. You are pro-choice? Again, many of us are but by no means are we all. And so on.

As our time was coming to an end I made the statement that I thought one of the most salient characteristics of Unitarian Universalists was our ability to live with a fair amount of ambiguity in our lives.

No sooner had the words come out of my mouth, than a member of the class, who as I recall was dressed to the nines, slammed her hand down on the table and said, "Well, I certainly couldn't do that!" and walked out of the room.

Before I proceed with all of this, I need to offer this disclaimer. I am not now nor have I ever been a scientist. Some might even argue whether or not I have a rational mind or not. But suffice it to say that I think I'd be much happier as a member of the Professional Association of English Majors than the National Science Foundation. But I digress.

Intelligent design, is it either? According to an article appearing in a recent edition of the New Yorker Magazine, "Intelligent design is not what people often assume it is. For one thing it is not Biblical literalism. Unlike earlier generations of creationists' proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the universe was created in six days, that the earth is ten thousand years old, or that the fossil record was deposited during Noah's flood. (Indeed, they shun the label 'creationism' altogether).

Nor does intelligent design flatly reject evolution: adherents freely admit that some evolutionary change occurred during the history of life on the earth.

The movement's main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence."

Living organisms are too complex, argue the supporters of Intelligent Design, "to be explained by any natural, or more precisely by any mindless--process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart."

Now, of course, this is all very different from what most of us learned about evolution and the theories of natural selection. As we will recall, evolution was meant to show that very complex features of plants and animals arose through the complex processes of adaptation and genetic mutation.

Carried out over millions of years this "process of incremental improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms that are exquisitely adapted to their environment." By the end of the nineteenth century nearly all biologists agreed that life had evolved and by the mid twentieth century most scientists agreed that natural selection was the cause of these changes.

In recent time there has been an increase in tactics designed to cast doubt on the veracity of the theory of evolution. Some of these attempts have included placing disclaimer stickers in the front of high school biology textbooks; mandating or recommending the inclusion of Intelligent Design in high school biology courses; development of statewide lesson plans that encourage students to examine "weaknesses" in the theory of evolution and plans to revisit parts of state science standards that focus on evolution.

One of the prominent supporters of Intelligent Design is Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute--a major Intelligent Design think-tank.

Behe's primary claim in support of Intelligent Design is really quite simple. He argues that many single cell organisms are just too complex to have resulted from either genetic mutations or natural selection. There must have been some kind of intelligence greater than our own that masterminded the creation of these complex cellular organisms.

Another leading proponent of Intelligent Design is William Dembski who holds a PhD in mathematics, another in philosophy and a master's degree in theology. His argument against evolution is focused on the incredible odds involved in adaptation.

He argues that a great novel isn't written by chance; but rather through the creativity and intelligence of the author. He would not subscribe to the old notion that if you took an infinite number of chimps all typing away at computers that they would eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare.

Dembski also argues that natural organism match up with human technologies--using the example of the camera and the human eye--to underscore the influence of an intelligent agent who much like a watchmaker, created an incredibly complex system and then put it in motion. What results, he argues, is what we science calls evolution.

In 1999, the Discovery Institute released, or had stolen, and posted to the internet, a document that describes the Institutes long-term goals and its plans for achieving them. Known as the "Wedge Document" because of its purported goal of driving a wedge between creationism and evolution, the introduction to the document reads in part:

"The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (and I'm still quoting here) seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.

In his concluding paragraph, the writer for the New Yorker concludes, "Biologists aren't alarmed by intelligent design's arrival because they have sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they are alarmed because intelligent design is junk science.

Meanwhile more than eighty per cent of Americans say that God either created human beings in their present form or guided their development...Intelligent design has come this far by faith."

And here, I believe is the key to understanding this debate. Intelligent design has come this far because it provides specific answers to those questions science is not yet ready to answer: Exactly what occurred to create life as we know it on planet Earth? What happened to initiate the "big bang"? Or as the physicist Paul Davies puts it, "If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules arise in the first place?"

"Whatever prompted life to begin," writes Bill Bryson, "it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know.

Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginnings from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life...and did something additional and extraordinary: it cleaved itself and produced an heir.

A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for all of us. Biologists are known to refer to this moment as the "big birth."

Was life the result of some intelligent being, far greater than our understanding, who set in motion all of the exacting chemical reactions needed for life? Or did it arise as the result of a few crumbs left on earth by my biology teacher's extraterrestrials?

Is the life we know a unified whole; or rather just some building block of some even greater organism. Ultimately will an astronomer somewhere looking into the farthest reaches of space and time see another eye looking back or will they see a small sticker with the words "made by God"?

Intelligent design provides rules and suggests an orderly universe. Intelligent design, in some sense, provides assurances to those who seek order and predictability in our chaotic and unpredictable world.

For some, to live with ambiguity is to live with chaos. To live with certainty about life and its origins is reassuring and comforting. Intelligent design takes the burden of uncertainty and ambiguity off the shoulders of the woman in the adult Sunday school class.

So, in the end whether we believe that the world was created in six 24-hour-days or over millions of years of trial and error doesn't really matter. Theologians will continue to be theologians and scientists will continue to be scientists and eighty percent of Americans will continue to believe that God created the world according to Genesis.

Intelligent design or evolution--science or religion? My fear is not that science and religion are failing to get together; my fear is that in the hands of some very vocal people, science and religion are getting together on a very dubious, shaky and unsound basis.

I have no problem with scientists using the scientific method to explore the universe and I have no problem with theologians attempting to explain the universe in their own terms. I do have a problem, however, when theologians attempt to use the scientific method to explain matters of faith.

At the end of a Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson tells the reader, "If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here--and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: we enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, make it better. It is a talent we have only begun to grasp."

Intelligent Design...Is it either? Are we at the beginning or at the end? Are we but players, or do we have the ability to change the outcome of the play? Are we able to cope with ambiguity, with uncertainty, and with mystery or do we need the final answer? I know what works for me. What works for you?

Amen