The Intelligent Designer – Believe if you must, but do not confuse Faith with Science.
Daar is geen sin in die lewe nie.
Die sin wat daar is,
is die sin wat jy aan jou lewe gee
I wrote the above piece inside the cover of a book (Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari) I gave to my eldest daughter some time ago. It is the logical conclusion anyone will arrive at who understands evolution by natural selection. However, I have subsequently reflected a lot on this statement, and as real as it is, I have come to realise that there is a non-rational and emotional dimension to it that requires empathy.
To be consistent, one must accept that for some people, the meaning and purpose of their lives is their religion. Even though for most churchgoers, their religiosity has far more in common with a social club than a way of life focused on and dedicated to their Lord in the first place and equally to others. I have crossed paths with a handful of believers for whom their faith truly is the meaning and purpose of their lives. And I have learned to respect that. I hope I have become more considerate about not offending those people when expressing my opinion on religious matters, however challenging it is when experiencing general apathy, ignorance and naivety, more often than not at the forefront.
What I want to say with this is that faith is OK. That belief in an invisible, humanly incomprehensible, supernatural being is OK when it ensures you a better quality of life. Keep believing, stay happy and keep hoping for better things to come. I think everyone has the right to hope and the search for happiness. However, do not confuse faith with science.
This brings me to the concept of Intelligent Design (ID), a relatively modern pseudoscientific attempt to reconcile religion with science.
Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication “On the Origin of Species” fundamentally changed our understanding of life on earth. Darwin was not alone in his finding of the progressive development of living organisms on earth. During the same time but independently of Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same conclusions. Free-thinking and intelligent people at the time built on the Enlightenment that had begun in Europe 150 years earlier and increasingly freed themselves from the indoctrinating and addictive influence of religion.
After Darwin substantiated his hypothesis of gradual change through natural selection in species, most laughed and scoffed. However, the laughter and jeers became less and less as one scientific discipline after another confirmed evolution by natural selection as reality, and the theory of evolution became an existential threat to the three monotheistic religions. The image of god had to adapt to new realities as images of god have incessantly adapted to changing circumstances and environments over many thousands of years. In this case, for example, the Bible has it that God first created Adam from the ground and Eve from Adam’s rib, remarkably “in His own image” and even added a talking snake. Evolution, of course, directly opposes the creation stories of Genesis 1-3.
The church’s dogma had come under increasing pressure, and the church had to respond. When the Roman Catholic Church, in a statement by Pope Pius XII in 1950, declared that there was no inherent conflict between evolution and the church’s ecclesiastical doctrine concerning man and his vocation on earth, the writing was proverbially against the wall concerning the authority of the infallible Word of God. Fortunately for the church, the declaration of Pope Pius XII also had the caveat “…provided that certain precautions are maintained, such as the belief in the divine creation of souls”. Of course, Darwin and science know no such thing as a “soul”. A soul is a matter of faith, not an entity that can be scientifically proven or experienced through the senses. There was, therefore, still an uncomfortable tension between the theory of evolution and the church’s doctrine.
However, knowledge and innovation also grew among thinking and intelligent clergymen, and the church came up with an innovative concept: Put God in charge of the evolutionary process, and the problem is solved! This was exactly what happened, and the idea of ID was born. However, it only grew strongly in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the USA, where enough money was available to fund any theme or ideology. Wealthy believers pump in large amounts of money to protect Christianity from the secularisation of Europe, which has now received a significant scientific boost from the evolution theory.
Intelligent Design is a concept that fits in well with the age-old “God-of-the-Gaps” phenomenon. The “God-of-the-Gaps” concept was first used by the Scottish scientist and evangelist Henry Drummond in his 1904 book The Ascent of Man. He believed that evolution was divinely guided and employed arguments, provocative and controversial to both sides, to reconcile evolution with a creator God. The “God-of-the-Gaps” strategy boils down to creationists (people who believe that God designed and created everything in the universe) proactively and eagerly seeking gaps in contemporary knowledge and understanding of natural phenomena. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. Areas where a lack of data or understanding exists are automatically considered to belong to God. Such episodes in the history of science became so common that the term “God-of-the-Gaps” was coined to label the process of invoking God to account for natural phenomena not yet explained by science.
There are and always have been unanswered questions, such as: How old is the universe; is it static, or is it getting bigger or smaller? Or, how old are the earth and the sun? Or, what caused the Big Bang and what was before the Big Bang? Or, what does a black hole’s singularity (core) consist of? Or, when is a photon a particle, when is it a wave, and how do you predict the movement and position of an electron (quantum physics)? The further one ventures into the past, the more unanswered questions there are. What worries thoughtful theologians (and there are increasingly more of them today) is that gaps shrink and disappear as scientific evidence advances. As scientists fill the gaps, God has less and less to do and is threatened with eventually having nothing more to do. A famous example highlighting the God-of-the-Gaps concept involves two prominent scientists, Newton and Simon-Laplace, living a century apart.
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), in his 3-volume Principia Mathematica, laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and his natural laws and mathematical formulas could predict and determine the movement and positions of the planets with astonishing accuracy. However, there were two phenomena that Newton could not explain: a) the formation of celestial bodies in an elegant flat plane and rotation in the same direction, and b) he was concerned that an accumulation of the small gravitational interactions between, e.g. the earth and Mars, when the earth overtakes Mars in its orbit around the sun, would disrupt the smooth running of the solar system. As a religious man (like most scholars of his time), Newton believed that God’s periodic intervention was necessary to initiate and regulate the movement of the planets in the first case, and to ensure the smooth running and stability of the solar system in the second case. Newton believed that natural forces alone could not explain the elegancy and harmony of the solar system.
Pierre Simon-Laplace (1749-1827) was later able to expand on a hundred years of scientific and mathematical progress since Newton. He built on the work of Newton and others and wrote a wide-ranging text (the 5-volume Celestial Mechanics) that explained the workings of the celestial bodies in much more detail than Newton. In his magnum opus, Laplace provided a comprehensive explanation of the dynamics of the solar system based on gravitational forces alone, without the need for divine intervention. While Newton appealed to divine intervention for aspects he could not reconcile mathematically, Laplace’s work showed that the laws of mechanics and gravity accounted for even highly complex and seemingly irregular motions of the planets.
This incident caused a paradigm shift, and explanations based on natural laws gained dominance over explanations based on supernatural causes.
Hebrews 11:1 (Bible, New International Version) gives us a clear definition of what faith is: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see”. And this definition, to me, is synonymous with the theory of ID. Intelligent Design is based on faith, not science.
One should critically consider every statement or argument of the proponents of ID. They do not have and do not offer a single answer to any of today’s vexing questions. All they do, in effect, is question scientific theories that address the tantalising questions and point out that these theories have not yet been proven beyond all doubt. AND THEN takes the leap of faith and insists that an all-powerful and all-knowing god is not only part of the answer but even designed and/or produced/created the inexplicable situation. However, they never present any testable hypotheses or predictions for their claims, a fundamental requirement for a scientific investigation.
Proponents of ID often use the argument of “irreducible complexity”, which states that specific biological structures are too complex to evolve incrementally through natural selection. However, research has shown that what appears irreducibly complex can often evolve through natural processes. Examples once presented as irreducibly complex, such as the eye, the immune system, and the bacterial flagellum, have been shown to have plausible evolutionary pathways. I think part of the problem here is evolution’s unfathomable timeline, a mental obstacle for most of us.
Many proponents of ID appear to misunderstand and/or misrepresent evolutionary theory. For example, they focus on gaps in the fossil record (of which many exist) without acknowledging the wealth of supporting evidence. Using the Bible as an authoritative scientific source is absurd. It would appear that ID supporters have no genuine interest in seriously engaging with the science of evolution.
Summary:
The concept of GOD has manifested itself as one of the greatest and most enduring fictional stories ever created by Homo sapiens. As with fictional stories, the concept of god has changed over millennia to keep it real and workable. Both faith and science are constantly changing. Science increasingly fills gaps in knowledge and understanding, and faith adapts to changing circumstances. Each stands on its own and is incompatible. Believe if you have to, but then like an ignorant child, as the Bible recommends.
Bruwer Swanepoel
Author of Faith: Full Circle – The Religious Journey of a Baby-boomer Afrikaner
