There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and elsewhere about
Intelligent Design over the last few weeks, and I’m afraid that much of
what I’ve seen is appears both sloppy and uninformed, to wit, many
pundits have equated Intelligent Design with Creation Science. They are
undoubtedly linked, in that both posit a Creator,
but they are most definitely not identical.

Broadly speaking, Creation Science is the attempt to enlist scientific
evidence to support the proposition that the Earth was created as
described in the book of Genesis–that is, that it was created in six
days some six-thousand years or so ago. No doubt I’m ignoring some
subtleties, but I believe that’s the general picture.

I’ve known fine and honorable people who find this to be a reasonable
position; as for me, I’ve never found it intellectually acceptable.
The conviction of science, based on innumerable observations, is that the
universe is not thousands but billions of years old. I’m fine with that.
The geological record indicates that the Earth itself is millions of
years old. OK by me. Dinosaurs once roamed the earth. Okey-dokey.
Current life-forms appear to have derived from simpler, more primitive
life-forms.

I’ve no problem with any of that. When it comes to drawing sound
conclusions from physical evidence, the scientific method is the best
tool yet found. If the consensus of the brotherhood of geologists is that
the fossil record shows that dinosaurs must have lived millions of years
ago, I see no reason to demur.

Where I disagree with the hardline evolutionists is not on their
observations and analysis, but on their philosophy, which is strictly
materialist. Richard Dawkins’ faith–I use the word advisedly–that
random chance and time are sufficient to explain the world we see about
us today is based on his belief that only the natural world, that which
can be seen and felt and measured and experimented upon, is real–that
there is no supernatural realm, that the supernatural is, in fact,
inconceivable, that the Almighty cannot exist because He cannot be measured.

Perhaps he’s right, but whether he is or not isn’t a scientific
hypothesis. You can’t run experiments on God to see whether he exists or
not; the idea is ludicrous on the face of it, rather like a character in
a novel shouting his loudest in hopes of taking the author by surprise.

So though I cannot accept the Creation Science view, no more can I accept
the strict materialist line either. I accept the fossil record simply
because I don’t believe that the Creator of the Universe is a liar. He
speaks through His creation as he speaks through the Bible, and the two
(as St. Thomas Aquinas taught) can never truly be in conflict.

So far as I can tell from my reading, the Intelligent Design crowd fall
into my camp. On the one hand, they believe that the Almighty God
created the universe and all that is in it; on the other hand, they
accept the geologic record. The chief difference between the ID’ers and
the strict evolutionists is not scientific but philosophical. Where the
strict evolutionists take it on faith that evolution is the product of
time and chance and natural processes, the ID’ers believe that the
Almighty had a hand in things. The crux of the Intelligent Design
argument, as I’ve seen it expressed, is that certain biological features
are “irreducibly complex”–that is, they consist of a constellation of
innovations which as a set are indeed very useful to the organism and
enhance its ability to survive, but independently are neither here nor
there. The example that I saw was the flagellum of a paramecium, which
has many complicated parts, all of which are needed to make the flagellum
work. Any one of the parts could have arisen as a mutation; but there
would be no reason for it to have been preserved in the population long
enough for the other parts to be assembled into a complete package.

I am not concerned here with defending this view, and especially not as
I’ve stated it; I’m not a student of Intelligent Design, and might have
presented it badly. My point is that the ID’ers are not intending to
pooh-pooh or otherwise reject the fruits of scientific observation.
Rather, they are pointing out places where they believe the best
scientific explanations break down–and suggesting that those are the
places where God might have taken a direct hand. In a sense, they are
treating the geologic record as a whodunnit, and dusting it for God’s
fingerprints.

Myself, I think it’s a losing game. Current science might not explain
the cases they point out; not having studied it, I don’t know one way or
the other. If it does not, then the evolutionists have a job ahead of
them–to explain, in a way that’s more than hand-waving and invocations
of random chance, just how these irreducibly complex features could have
arisen. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, given time and chance, they
come up with an answer that works–which would leave the ID’ers grasping
at straws.

As I say, the basic proposition is not one that’s scientifically
verifiable one way or the other. But insofar as there is evidence for or
against the supernatural, that evidence is surely in the plus column, for
most men and women, in most times and places, based on the evidence of
their senses and the world around them, have rejected the notion that the
natural world is all there is. If you are strict materialist, you might
well believe that you are right and the vast bulk of humanity through time
has been wrong, that you are smarter than they are; and perhaps you’re
right. It must surely be comforting to think so, anyway. For my part,
I’m confident that there is a God, that He did create the universe and
all that is in it, and that His fingerprints are all over the place.
Trying to find them is a worthy goal; but it’s not mine. I’d rather take
it for granted and move on.

But to return to my main point, the equation of Intelligent Design theory
with Creation Science is simply false, and it doesn’t behoove honest men
and women to keep repeating it.