Why Intelligent Design is a Danger to Religious Faith

By Clay Farris Naff

Talk Given at Darwin Day Celebration, 2005

With George Bush in the White House and Michael Behe in the New York Times, evolution's place in biology must soon give way to intelligent design. Such, anyway, is the fervent hope of creationists as the 196th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth nears.

"Freud, Marx, and Darwin. …Two frauds down and one to go. It shan’t be long now," taunts a critic of evolution on the Panda's Thumb blog.

The intelligent design agenda is hardly a secret. Its adherents fear that science is undermining religion. True, they rarely mention design and God together, but their concern is never far off.

Law professor Philip Johnson, the author of Darwin on Trial, says of science, "It has become the starting point … that God is imaginary rather than real."

Johnson and his followers hope that intelligent design will restore God as commander-in-chief of the natural world. But before wedging intelligent design into the science curriculum, they should pause to consider how damaging this might be – not to science, but to religious faith.

The intelligent design movement has been entirely a critique of evolutionary biology rather than a positive program of science. No wonder. Here is the uncomfortable truth: if we apply the rules of scientific inquiry to the origins of life, the Universe and everything, we can infer a Creator. But it looks nothing like the deity most Americans worship.

God is said to be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all good. Does nature resemble the handiwork of a such a being? Not really. The world that science reveals is wonderful, but it is also wasteful, chaotic, and cruel.

Teach intelligent design as science, and students might start to ask, "What kind of a creator shoves smallpox viruses into his world?" or "Why is the human birth canal so narrow compared with the baby's head that before modern medicine one in a hundred women died in childbirth?" or "What was the designer's intention in making breast cancer genes?"

Churches, mosques and synagogues may have answers to such questions, but science teachers, debarred from teaching theology, can only shrug. Some may turn back to evolution, which provides thorough (if not comforting) explanations.

Of course, biology is not the only science in which intelligent design suffers by comparison with naturalism. Take geology. How does intelligent design hope to explain earthquakes? Are plate tectonics a sign of unfinished business? Or just sloppy craftsmanship?

Astronomy presents special challenges. Why would an intelligent designer make a beautiful planet like earth, seed it with life, and then constantly bombard it with chunks of rock and ice, occasionally wiping out most of life?

Teach "intelligent design science" and we might see the Greek gods stage a comeback. After all, on learning that lightning kills more golfers than criminals, wouldn't you be inclined to picture the culprit as Zeus rather than Jehovah?

No loving, omnipotent deity can be saddled with direct responsibility for the natural world as science reveals it. Not unless we resort to the old line, "God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform." But by then, we've abandoned science and gone back to religion. Which is fine, provided it's not in the public classroom.

The great irony is that science need not be a threat to faith. For the past three years our forum on science and religion in Lincoln, Nebraska, has brought together scientists, philosophers, ministers, Buddhists, Muslims, a Catholic priest, and a great variety of ordinary folk.

Among the ideas we have developed are these: The realm of God may be entirely metaphysical. (Surely, heaven is not a physical place.) The natural world may be an emergent, or secondary, phenomenon, untouched by God except through the actions of his followers. Surely, that would be consonant with the Christian idea of the Fall.

This kind of perspective need not diminish the ultimate hopes of the religious. Nor need it make scriptural narratives any less real. On the contrary, relating scripture to a metaphysical realm restores the credibility that science has done so much to undermine. And best of all, it leaves science education free to stick to science.