Here's another quote from the article that I think better "picks up on what's really going on here."
"the Vatican has said it finds no conflict between Christian faith and evolution. Neither does Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Institute at the National Institutes of Health and an outspoken evangelical. He wrote recently of his view that God, "who created the universe, chose the remarkable mechanism of evolution to create plants and animals of all sorts." It may require some metaphysical juggling, but if more people could take that view, there would be fewer conflicts like the one in Dover."
You see, on one side you have the anti-religionists who can only accept a theory that professes to explain life with zero room for any kind of supreme being, supernatural force or anything else someone might consider a "god". On the other extreme, you have the religionists who would grasp at any angle to reassert Genesis and deny evolution, and now want to use ID to do so.
The issue I have with both is that they present a false dichotomy - the Pope and the scientist Collins in the above excerpt make the same point.
ID, in its most basic form, simply attributes the origins of life - the building blocks, if you will - to some force beyond our current scientific comprehension. Call it God, "the Creator of all things", "nature's God", or more generically a "supernatural force", which means only that it is a force beyond what we comprehend as nature (I'll use "god" to refer to any of these options just for convenience).
To consider ID at this level, it is not necessary to attribute the details of all things created out of those building blocks to direct acts of that god any more than it is necessary to believe that God controls the details of our day-to-day lives or that everything that happens has some specific divine purpose. Purely random events - i.e. events not brought about by God for some specific purpose like "testing our faith" - on a very small or very large scale are not inconsistent with the existence of some kind of god. Likewise, free will, which allows for the possibility that we are responsible for our own actions, is not inconsistent with the existence of some kind of god. So, extending this line of thought, the idea that random events, natural selection and free will combined to turn the building blocks of life into the creatures and natural world we know today is not inconsistent with the existence of some kind of god.
Evolution, OTOH, does not really answer the question of the origins of life, at least when you're talking about Darwinian concepts of it.
There is a notion called "chemical evolution" that asserts that "life arose naturally from nonlife" (http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_chem.html ), but AFAIK, there's nothing there one could really call a "theory". Call it a supposition, perhaps. In any case, it doesn't explain HOW life arose from nonlife. It just supposes that it might have happened, somehow, over a very very long period of time.
So, back to more tangible and potentially provable notions of evolution - the notions that random biological events and natural selection could be responsible for modern man and all other life evolving out of more primitive life forms. Those notions are also in no way inconsistent with the existence of some kind of god.
I'd add further that this also does not preclude the possibilities of 1) heaven, 2) some grand purpose to it all, or even 3) a god that is caring, watchful, judging or even occasionally tweaking his creations.
Finally, to the notion you expressed that accepting ID means you "just got to believe" and, implicitly, that accepting and teaching evolution is anathema to religious beliefs:
I'd say that if your belief in evolution extends to the absolute origins of life, then yes, the two are completely incompatible. But then that, in itself, is a belief system and not a scientifically provable theory, and it has no more place in school than creationism.
But if evolution, to you, means random mutations and natural selection, then your theory does not address the origins of life and, therefore, does not preclude belief in God. Just as the Pope said.
If your opposition to ID is based on the former argument, then you are as guilty as any creationist of denying new ideas on grounds of faith and seeking to quash thoughtful inquiry. If, OTOH, you haven't made the leap of faith to say that God does NOT exist, then denying ID (in its basic, un-co-opted by creationists form) makes no sense. It is at least as valid as chemical evolution as an explanation of the origins of life.
PS: I'd be a bit surprised if any US primary or secondary schools teach chemical evolution, but if they do, then there is certainly room for ID in THAT same class. Otherwise, since it is not really a mutually exclusive alternative to evolution, there is no reason to present it as a rebuttal of evolution. That's just more of the same false dichotomoy. The absolute origins of life really need not be addressed in schools at that level - except, perhaps, in a comparative religion or philosophy class. |
