The Creator God And Intelligent Design

Intelligent design (ID) “is the theory that the universe is too complex a place to be accounted for by an appeal to natural selection and the random processes of evolution—that some kind of overarching intellect must have been at work in the design of the natural order.” Most today, so far as I read, would not be entirely comfortable with the idea of “random,” but Yes, that seems to be how ID is understood today. I quote David Steinmetz from Taking the Long View: Christian Theology in Historical Perspective, his wonderful collection of essays on a variety of topics.

ID is supposedly faith neutral but Steinmetz observes that it is held mostly by conservative Christians who put scientific stock in Genesis 1-2.

Christians have always brushed aside the notion that the generating, a random concatenation of miscellaneous atoms accidentally thrown together by no one in particular and serving no larger purpose than their own survival. The first article of the Christian creed could not be clearer: the world exists by the will of God. No intelligent designer, no world.

He says “less conservative Christians” are not against the “possibility of evolution.” Catholics have affirmed evolution as a tool of God. Others simply don’t buy stock in the scientific value of Genesis 1-2. He appeals all the way back to Origen. Origen found some historical “absurdities” in Genesis 1-2 (how could God not find Adam and Eve?) and so said the text is a “semblance of history.” Truth through fiction, Steinmetz concludes from Origen. Truth is truth.

God as Creator, yes. Reading a nonliteral texts as literal is a mark, so said Origen, of immaturity.

Can we know the Designer from the design of the world? Is this public knowledge? Thomas Aquinas thought so; Calvin said the human mind was distorted by the Fall.

In order to understand Calvin’s argument, it may be useful to distinguish three terms: (a) the natural knowledge of God, (b) natural theology, and (c) a theology of nature. Calvin asked whether human beings have a natural knowledge of God (to which he answered yes); whether they can arrange what they know from nature into an intelligible pattern known as natural theology (to which he answered no); and whether redeemed—and only redeemed human beings can construct a legitimate theology of nature by reclaiming nature as a useful source of the true knowledge of God (to which he again answered yes).

Steinmetz thinks there’s something of Calvin in ID. Plus, all humans have a knowledge of God or a sense that there is a God. Why then are so many so unresponsive to the world as a witness to God? He turns to Augustine and original sin. Thus, Augustine thought humans misuse their knowledge to their own ends. Calvin didn’t buy that; there’s more at work: the faculty of knowing was corrupted.

What fallen human beings can see are scattered sparks of truth, momentary flashes of illumination, and blurred pages from the book of nature. When sinners nevertheless try to construct out of these fragments a sound natural theology that points to the true God, they succeed only in assembling a picture of what Calvin called an idol, a deity who is not really God, only a cheap substitute for the real thing.

Minds renewed by the Spirit are not the same.

[So] the advocates of intelligent design cannot escape theology so easily. Whether they like it or not, what they have offered is a form of natural theology. Leaving God unnamed does not make their argument any less theological, especially when they claim that the elements of complex design they have observed in nature are present because of the activity of their unnamed intelligent designer.

Calvin then thinks ID is smuggling in its assumptions:

Calvin rejected out of hand the possibility (which Thomas allowed) of a successful natural theology. On his principles, advocates of intelligent design had reversed the proper order of knowing. People do not believe in an intelligent designer because they observe in nature the marks of intelligent design. Indeed, the opposite is true. People find intelligent design in the natural order, because they believe on other grounds in the existence of an intelligent designer.

The world is, as Calvin correctly argued, the theater of God’s glory. The heavens do declare the glory of God and the firmament does show forth God’s handiwork. Christians have no excuse not to celebrate that fact. The more intelligently, the better.