This issue has more than enough partisans already, and I won't join the fray here. But an update to the case on the radio yesterday got me thinking about a lot of rhetoric I've heard on the question over the years. It's a given that creation/evolution dispute, in whatever shape they assume, are not only about the origins of life, but about the hegemony of one or another segment of society. For a long time, though, I've had the impression that they are more fundamentally about the nature and source of power in creation--and society. Continue Reading.
The ID folks (like 18th century deists) compare complex structures in nature to complex human artifacts. For instance, a Thomas More Center press release on the Gull Lake case contends that
Since the late 1950s advances in biochemistry and microbiology, information that Darwin was not privy to in the 1850's, have revealed that the machine like complexity of living cells - the fundamental unit of life- possess the ability to store, edit, transmit and use information so as to regulate biological systems. This suggests that the theory of intelligent design offers the best explanation for the origin of life and living cells.
Creation is thus a matter of top-down engineering. There's a Guy In Charge with a blueprint who orders something constructed to his specifications. There may be junior engineers involved (natural processes, early life forms, human beings...) but they merely obey directives from the great Project Manager in the sky.
This is a very familar model of how things work in daily experience. From early on, we're taught to obey authorities, and that things happen mainly as a result of individual action and initiative. Those ideas have a place in life, but can they tell us anything meaningful about our origins?
Yes, necessarily, claims ID advocate and Baylor faculty member William Dembski. His "No Free Lunch" theorem holds that for observers to get design out of nature (which he believes is inevitable), they must read design in--specifically, the kind of top-down design described above. Against this, Michael Ruse, an ID critic, argues that thanks to natural selection, "we can get apparent design out." Or, design, and creativity, may result from unconscious, non-purposeful processes; from the interaction of numerous factors not obeying any master directive. From the bottom up.
This also resonates with daily experience. Different interactions among people--collaboration, conflict, friendship--can bring results unforseen by their participants. It is a basic truth of ecology, too: by relationships, phenomena emerge, endure, and perish. Yet for many, this model doesn't seem applicable to the emergence of life. For religious persons especially, it seems to discount the idea of a Creator.
Or does it? Why make an idol of the individual creative intelligence? The philosopher of religion William Grassie cites problems with the ways the metaphor of design is commonly employed in the origins debate.
Why should we limit God's generativity to a term taken from human architecture and engineering? There are much more interesting metaphors for God--artist, lover, friend, parent, teacher, motivator--all of which are also ultimately inadequate in describing that which transcends all and is also everywhere present.
Maybe we limit it thus because these other metaphors suggest that authority, value, and power is dispersed beyond the hands of an ultimate sovereign Lord or King. To ground the top down model in nature itself gives a metaphysical underpinning to imperatives to obey your dad, your president, your commanding officer, your dissertation director, your priest, your regional sales manager, etc. The bottom-up model supports something a little more egalitarian, democratic, and messy.
And so tradition and liberation battle on, in the science classrooms.
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