Why Intelligent Design might not be all that intelligent
Sat here on the British side of the Atlantic Ocean, I'm something of a spectator when it comes to theological issues in the USA. One of the more bewildering topics of discussion that is popular at the moment is the furore over intelligent design being taught in schools. I have no opinion on educational policy, but the more I learn about it, the more I think that the teaching of ID either alongside evolutionary science or even instead of it is a deeply flawed idea with more problems than Christians realise.ID will produce a generation of Deists, not Christians
ID teaches that there was, at some point in the past, an intelligent being who in some way brought the universe and all living things into existence quite apart from any random natural activity as per most Darwinian models of natural selection. Get the scientists to agree there is an intelligence behind the universe, so the reasoning goes, and we've practically converted them all to Christianity. Well perhaps not everyone would put it that way, but there is little point in pretending that ID is not a thinly disguised attempt to squeeze Christian creationism into the science laboratory and into the classroom. Herein lies the problem, and one that no ID proponent I've heard of seems to have picked up on yet. Simply put, even if scientists were to concede there is an intelligent designer behind the universe there is absolutely no scientific reason to assume that this intelligent being is the God of the Bible, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because there is simply nothing to identify him/her/it/them as such.
How are we to show that the Intelligent Designer is the God of the Bible? How do we know it isn't Allah, or perhaps Zeus? Or some of the Hindu gods? If ID wishes to be taken seriously as a scientific theory, it must submit itself to the rigours of scientific methodology, but the fact is that no matter how much ID supporters try to conquer the laboratory by wheeling in the ill-disguised Trojan horse of creationism, ID actually fails to identify the Intelligent Designer it wishes to, and indeed cannot do so by scientific means. The Christian doctrine of the triune creator God cannot be verified scientifically, it is a theological idea, not a scientific thesis. A Creator God is not a problem for theology, but ID is weakened in this area this precisely because it seeks to take on science as science, but it is simply unable to do so.
If ID were to succeed in its attempts to be taken seriously as a scientifc theory, it would in all likelihood simply transport us back to early Enlightenment deism, not to the kind of Christianity its supporters would wish. ID has chosen to fight on the scientific battleground, and in this arena it is quite simply unable to identify and reveal the God which its proponents wish to. It can only point to a vague and faceless Designer who at some point in history began the process that gave rise to life and the universe as we know it now. Far from pointing people to Jesus Christ, it is no different to the Deist philosophers who saw god as the 'absentee landlord' who had set the universe in motion but who for all intents and purposes was no longer involved in the day to day running of the universe. ID's greatest drive is in fact its area of greatest impotence.
In its current form, ID is doing as much harm as good to Christianity
ID is not helped by the fact that it is perceived to be part of a wider socio-political agenda being pushed by certain groups in the USA, and unfortunately ID has become rather encumbered by its association with the aims of the Right in US politics. As a result, those who reject the policies of the Right often reject ID and also Christianity as being a part of the same package. This is a rather irritating and entirely unnecessary mess caused by the fact that ID (and some other more overt forms of Creationism) is often made the keystone which upholds the entire structure of Christianity. Not only is this nonsense, but it simply turns Christianity into a house of cards which collapses at the mere mention of the term 'fossil record'.
As George Monbiot notes in this recent essay in The Guardian, advocates of ID (in this case G T Sharp of the Creation Truth Foundation) stake the entire validity of Christianity and the Bible on a positivist reading reading of Genesis 1-3 that seeks to turn the text into a literal scientific and historical account of how the world began. "If ID falls, then so does Christianity" they say, nd indeed it does - and the only thing rising from its ashes is Atheism. ID tries to punch above its weight in the realm of science, and its rebuttal leads to wholesale and outright rejection of Christianity altogether.
Yet all of this is so needless. Christianity is not a theory about how biological life began. God did not give us Genesis with the sole purpose of using it as a polemic to refute worldviews that would arise 3,500 years after the text was written, and those who make Genesis - or rather, their particular theological slant on Genesis - the foundation of Christian faith are undermining Christianity, not strengthening it. The foundation of Christianity is not ID, creationism or even (yes) the Bible - Jesus is the foundation and needs to be the point from which all our critique of science and our doctrine of creation proceeds.
I have some more thoughts on the matter, but I'll save them for another time.
