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Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from 1859 is both famous and recognized in wide circles, but especially in the United States, a large number of people believe that there must be an intelligence and a designer behind creation. Supporters of intelligent design (ID) believe that nature is so finely tuned that evolution may not have progressed by chance, but instead is the result of forward-looking engineering. They want the public school system to teach ID as an alternative to the theory of evolution. From time to time, this debate also emerges in European countries. Overwhelmingly, the scientific community regards intelligent design as unscientific and without merit.
A theory in crisis?
As a man of faith, he neither sought nor was he impressed by proofs. Rather, the primary element of faith is to be found within the human spirit. The exhortation “seek and you shall find” is directed inward, to the depths of the soul, rather than outward, to the logical “proofs” of the philosophers. To Rabbi Soloveitchik, it is the Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” that brings man into communion with the Almighty.
Comments: Creationism vs Evolution
Despite the criticisms, the theory of intelligent design continues to be a popular and influential theory, particularly among religious groups and conservative politicians. It raises important philosophical and theological questions about the nature of the universe and our place in it, and it challenges us to consider the possibility of an intelligent higher power behind the complexity and beauty of the natural world. Supernaturalism—not just any old supernaturalism, but orthodox Christian Theism—is the best vantage point for understanding the natural world. Classical Christian theology does not entail that either the natural world or the human enterprise was created without chanciness and contingency, without the potential for development along alternative possible routes, and therefore strictly determined. Evolution in the physical realm and free will in the moral realm mutually attest to the significant degree of openness in God’s creation. In nearby passages, Lewis states the scientific fact that the universe is running down and that all life will ultimately come to an end, as well as the obvious fact that pain is experienced by all sentient animals, including human beings.
Contemporary beliefs
First, note that the “argument from design” has no connection whatsoever with “Intelligent Design,” except for sharing the word “design” in their title. Also, note that the word “argument” does not denote disagreement; it is an old English word for “proof.” The “argument from design” is a proposed proof for the existence of God based on the complexity of the world. The argument claims that complex structures that carry out specialized tasks never form all by themselves; they always have a maker. Consider a watch, wrote British theologian William Paley in 1803.
People will be the professors of biology in the next generation, the opinion writers, the producers of television programs, and the editorial writers at newspapers. I have a commission to deal in education and not in litigation. We have a group that we call informally the "second wedge," which consists of literary people and writers and artists who discuss the issues of design, of intelligent causes in the history of life, and whether the naturalistic orthodoxy is as solidly based in evidence as it claims to be.
Remembering C. S. Lewis on Intelligent Design - Discovery Institute
Remembering C. S. Lewis on Intelligent Design.
Posted: Wed, 22 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
A large number of chemical reactions are involved in blood clotting, and – here is the crucial point – if even one of these reactions does not occur, the blood will not clot. Therefore, claims Behe, the mechanism for blood clotting could not have evolved gradually through a series of mutations, with each mutation providing an additional survival advantage to the animal. All the mutations have to be present to be of any use to the animal because every one of the reactions involved in blood clotting must occur or the blood will not clot. “Beyond the scholarly goal of showing the state of the debate, I hope this book facilitates gracious dialogue between Christians with different viewpoints.” (16). Hugh calls his day-age approach “constructive integration,” for it “anticipates a straightforward, harmonious integration of Scripture’s book with nature’s record, rather than a nonexistent overlap or minimal overlap" (76). He goes into detail how both records support this model, as well as some challenges. The proof is that juvenile modern flatfish looks like any other fish when they hatch from their eggs.
I see every reason to think that that's what happens with mutations in the cellular machinery. It certainly motivated me to think that this was an important subject, not just for biologists or even scientists but for people at large. So it was legitimate for a law professor to address it and for the public to make up their own minds about it rather than to take the word of the experts. It is a motivation, and I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. I was an agnostic from the time I was a junior high school student up until my very late 30s. I had the kind of upbringing that is most likely to produce agnostics, a conventional kind of church-going requirement that never became real to me.
Notes for “The Intelligent Design Argument”
Science is silent on this question and assumes the existence of laws of nature. The entire enterprise of science is concerned with discovering the laws of nature and with explaining all physical phenomena in terms of these laws. Ancient peoples observed phenomena that seemed completely inexplicable to them, and they postulated supernatural beings (analogous to today’s Intelligent Designer) to explain these phenomena. One of the most unfortunate features of the widespread criticism of ID is the persistent name-calling to which ID has been subjected.
Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.
Creationism has also been criticized by several religious organizations, as they maintain that the Christian faith does not conflict with the science of evolution. At its core, the theory of intelligent design argues that the complexity of the universe and its life forms cannot be explained solely by natural causes and that an intelligent higher power must have played a role in their origins. Proponents of the theory point to various examples of complexity in the natural world, such as the intricate structures of cells and the fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe, as evidence of intelligent design.
The theory of intelligent design has encountered many critics, not only among evolutionary scientists but also among theologians and religious authors. Evolutionists point out that organs and other components of living beings are not irreducibly complex—they do not come about suddenly, or in one fell swoop. The human eye did not appear suddenly in all its present complexity. Its formation required the integration of many genetic units, each improving the performance of preexisting, functionally less-perfect eyes. About 700 million years ago, the ancestors of today’s vertebrates already had organs sensitive to light. Mere perception of light—and, later, various levels of vision ability—were beneficial to these organisms living in environments pervaded by sunlight.
It is also uncertain whether or not the legal status of intelligent design in public schools will change, as there have been both successes and failures in the legal challenges brought against it. If space permitted, we could more fully expose the dichotomies between theology and science, divine action and physical process, primary and secondary cause, efficient and final causality, and so on. One dichotomy in ID that Lewis would certainly address in the present context involves pitting purpose and design against chance and evolution. Lewis rejects the view that reality exists completely by chance and without purpose as inconsistent with Theism, as we shall later see.
To understand the positive evidence I think we have to realize that Darwin was writing a long time ago. He didn't understand anything about complex specified information or the irreducible complexity of the cell. In Darwin's day it was thought that cells were simply globs of a kind of jelly-like substance, a protoplasm. So it didn't seem to be very difficult to imagine how you could get a blob of some substance like mud at the bottom of a prehistoric pond, lake, or ocean.
Wisdom counsels us, then, to distinguish between the arguments for a Transcendent Intelligence that are specific to ID and the broader lines of teleological reasoning. It is entirely possible to reject the ID movement’s attempt to prove this Intelligence from within science while endorsing expressly philosophical arguments for it. The philosophical approach is to consider critically what is required for the very existence of science, its rational nature, and the overall structure of the world it studies, as well as to reflect on the significant findings of science in an effort to find their larger meaning and relevance to theology. Consequently, besieged teachers and others are still likely to find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism, by whatever name. Creationists' arguments are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution. Nevertheless, even if their objections are flimsy, the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.
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