In response to a comment I left on William Dembski’s Uncommon Descent blog, someone made an allusion to the Biblical language of having a millstone around one’s neck. The reference, of course, is to Mark 9:42/Luke 17:2/Matthew 18:6, where it says “whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Presumably in this individual’s thinking, by suggesting that Intelligent Design arguments are unpersuasive and unscientific, I am causing people to stumble.
I would like to suggest that I am doing the opposite. It was Rudolf Bultmann who famously identified the challenge of the cross as not only the central component of the Christian message, but as the one stumbling block that those who are confronted with the Christian message must encounter. His chief concern in much of his theological writing was that many systems of Christian thought place other stumbling blocks in the way of people who need to encounter the Christian message, so that they may never be confronted with its essential core challenge. Bultmann had in mind elements of a prescientific worldview in general, but certainly the suggestion that, in order to be a Christian, one must accept young-earth creationism or intelligent design, is not unrelated to this. To require this is to do precisely what Bultmann warned about, to make rejection of evolution a necessity. To do that is to require a sacrifice of intellect on the part of scientists and other individuals well-informed about the sciences, and in so doing, hinder them from encountering the true challenge of the Christian Gospel.
I would suggest that, if anyone should be worried about millstones, it is those who are adding an additional requirement alongside the challenge of the cross as an essential part of the Christian message. When intelligent people then presume that Christianity is not for them because of this, the individuals who link the Gospel to ideas such as Intelligent Design will have been guilty of causing people to stumble, not in the way that all must stumble when they encounter the challenge of the cross, but in a way that is not even necessary, whether considered from the standpoint of the Bible, theology, or science. My aim, for what it is worth, is to keep the challenge of the Christian message from being obscured by what most Christians would acknowledge are non-essentials. Sure, those who are adherents of Intelligent Design may wonder how anyone intelligent could be a theistic evolutionist (and I assure them, the feeling is generally mutual), but most of them would not deny for this reason that those individuals are in fact Christians. That being the case, it is clear that these are non-essentials. This is not to say that they are unimportant. But they are not compulsory, and therefore to link them to the Christian message as though they were is ultimately to undermine the Gospel.
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