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The Copernican Theory and the Theory of Evolution are the two most
radical ideas in western civilization since Monotheism (when Christianity
was adopted as the official religion of Rome in he 4th century ).
Ever since Darwin published the "Origin of Species", there has been an
ongoing struggle between conservative Christian groups and official Science.
In the main this has been a political conflict. If
it were
intellectual, both sides would give due regard to
what the other has to say, and in so doing hope to reach greater understanding.
In point of fact neither side understands, or even cares very much, about
what the other side has to say (in my own personal opinion). Rather,
the struggle is mostly about how adolescents should be indoctrinated.
However it is just plain silly to say that unresolved questions about how Evolution occurred are evidence that it didn't occur at all. Opponents of Evolution are fond of saying it is a "secular religion", and based on the behavior of some biologists, they are not entirely wrong. On the other hand, one of the strongest arguments that Evolution is a science, and not a religion, is precisely the fact that there are questions. If Evolution were truly a religion, there would be only received wisdom, dogma and absolute TRUTH. The insistence that God can be used as the default explanation for every ignorant gap in human knowledge is a philosophical debate of long standing, and even has a name ("God in the gaps"). Unfortunately the result is theologically unsatifying. As Science answers more and more questions, God is ignominously squeezed out of one gap after another. Potentially, an even more contentious point is that if we insist on using logic and rationality to deduce the existence of "Intelligent Design" - and thus the implied existence of an "Intelligent Designer then - if we are intellectually honest - we cannot avoid continuing the rational approach to its logical conclusion; that the nature of the design tells us about the nature of the Designer. This idea goes all the way back to Roger Bacon in the 13th century who believed that the philosophical reason for science "consists in this, that through the knowledge of his creature, the Creator be known". The problem is that an attempt to use rationality, logic and science to prove the existence of a Creator or Designer sometimes turns up answers which are unpalatable. Over 125 years ago Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) used mathematical statistics to test the hypothesis of God. Using the methods of science, Galton found that the hypothesis of God's existence must be rejected! The standard answer to this, accepted by mainstream scientists and theologians, has come to be that belief in a higher being is a matter of faith, and that God, unlike nature, is inaccessible to the rational and experimental methods of science. Rebelling against this philosophical accord, "Intelligent Design" now makes a fresh attempt to prove the hypothesis of a supernatural designer through science. Its advent must necessarily rake up all of the old conundrums. In addition, it poses new ones. When the anatomy and physiology of individual organisms is examined, the design is usually pedestrian and derivative ..... For example no human engineer is so impossibly stupid as to think that a suspension bridge, stood on its end, is a good idea; nonetheless that is exactly what the human spine is. Furthermore, now that we can examine the architecture of the genome, the implications for "Intelligent Design" are even worse. When we look at the genome, the design is no longer merely uninspired; now - if we even think of it as design at all - it is incompetent, slovenly and negligent. Many mistakes (pseudogenes) have been made and then left lying around. Rough drafts are cobbled together from bits and pieces of previously created elements (exons), but then the extra pieces (introns) are not even removed and the joints neatly finished. Instead a Rube Goldberg system of splicing is thrown in to make the whole rickety contraption work. The workplace itself is rife with negligence. The product has been attacked and parasitized (transposons and retroposons). Some of the parasites are not even killed, but when they have been, the dead bodies (LINES and SINES) are not cleaned up; they are left lying around to rot, and the damage they caused is not repaired. If logic and rationality lead us to the deduction of "Intelligent Design" then they also lead us to some unflattering deductions about the nature of the designer. When this is realized by the public at large, I suspect that the response will be outraged accusations of blasphemy and atheism. However, this would be intellectually dishonest! Science cannot be brought into the arena of religion to one-sidedly support the assertions of Faith, while political and polemical attacks are made on any contrary results. The advocates of "Intelligent Desing" should consider that this approach, if honestly pursued, could be devastating for traditional religious belief. There is little question (in my opinion) that the advocates of "Intelligent Design" have squarely identified some of the weaknesses of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary biologists should be expected to address these problems honestly. However, at this point in time "Intelligent Design" has little claim to scientific legitimacy, and it is well on its way to degenerating into the fraudulence and political posturing of "Creation [[pseudo] Science". |
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