Thursday, May 08, 2008
God, science not exclusive
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
When I read something that gets my dander up, I tend to carry on lengthy mental arguments with the writer. Occasionally I get around to writing a rebuttal, but more often my brilliant ideas stay in my head. A good thing, too. When I go back and read the offending article again after I've cooled off, I sometimes find it didn't say exactly what I thought it did.
When I write one of those dander-raising columns, I sometimes wonder whether readers read exactly what I thought I wrote. Still, it's not my habit to follow up a controversial column with another on the same topic. I get to have my say. Readers get to have theirs. That's as it should be. Yet with much trepidation, this week I'm breaking my rule.
As happens with so many controversial issues, in the evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate, each side often suspects the other of being devious or having sinister motives. Evolutionists accuse Intelligent Design advocates of trying to smuggle God back into a game where he's already been called out. ID theorists accuse evolutionists of manipulating the rules in such a way as to keep them out of the game altogether.
Evolutionists likely don't have sinister motives, and Intelligent Design theorists aren't trying to smuggle God onto the playing field -- at least not in the way evolutionists think. But, whether through manipulation or not, it does seem the definition of the game and the rules have been altered in favor of the evolutionists.
In my early American lit classes, I sometimes ask students to explain how John Edwards and Cotton Mather, two noted Puritan theologians, could be both men of God and men of science. Mather, in fact, was a member of the British Royal Society. The students are so convinced that God and science are separate, however, most have a tough time coming up with a coherent explanation.
The answer is that an "orderly and rational investigation of the natural world" ("Intelligent Design lacks testable theories," May 2 commentary) doesn't have to preclude a creator. Edwards and Mather believed in a rational God. They also believed he'd created an orderly, rational, natural world that could be investigated and understood with the rational minds he'd given them.
If science really were defined today simply as an orderly and rational investigation of the natural world, Edwards, Mather, ID theorists and evolutionists alike could all play together on the same field. A more accurate definition for today, though, is that science is an effort to explain all natural phenomena by natural causes only.
That definition pretty much rules Edwards, et al., out of bounds. But given the things we don't have answers for -- how the universe began, how life got started, where DNA originated, to name a few -- there's no way we can be sure all natural phenomena can be explained by natural causes.
That doesn't mean we give up on natural causes, as ID theorists are sometimes accused of doing. Edwards and Mather clearly believed God is the ultimate cause of everything, yet they also believed smallpox had an immediate natural cause and that a natural remedy had been found to prevent it. Both men, as a result, supported smallpox vaccinations.
Natural causes, however, don't seem adequate to explain everything. If some things can't be explained by natural causes, the only other option is some sort of intelligent designer. In "The Language Instinct," acclaimed Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker admits as much. According to Pinker, natural selection is the "only alternative to divine creation ... that can explain the evolution of a complex organ like the eye." Pinker, of course, opts for natural selection. Intelligent Design theorists opt for an intelligent designer.
The problem isn't that natural selection is scientific and Intelligent Design isn't. Both ought to be considered scientific since both are rational attempts to explain the natural world. The problem is that the natural selection folks think the ID people should pack up their theory, get off the science field and hie themselves off to the religion department.
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
