The Questioning Christian

Intelligent Design: Strong and Weak Versions

We need to distinguish between the weak version and the strong version of “intelligent design.”  The weak version is something many evolutionists could readily accept.  The strong version is nonsense.

Hints of Early Stars May Have Been Found

From an Associated Press story:

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland believe they have captured traces of radiation from long-extinguished stars that were "born" during the universe's infancy.

The research represents the first tangible — but not conclusive — evidence of these earliest stars, which are thought to have produced the raw materials from which future stars, including our sun, were created.

The Big Bang, the explosion believed to have created the universe, is thought to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. About 100 million years later, hydrogen atoms began to merge and ignite, creating brightly burning stars. Just what these stars were like wasn't clear.  *  *  *

If the team's conclusions are correct, the study will advance understanding of how the universe originally lit up.

Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomy professor who was not involved in the research, said the early universe was probably dark for half a million years. Later, hydrogen coalesced into brightly burning stars that were hundreds to a million times more massive than the sun, and these are the stars whose fingerprints Kashlinsky's team hopes it has found.

"Creationism is not just bad science, it's bad Christianity, it's Bible worship"

An article in today’s NY Times tells of two groups of rafters navigating the Grand Canyon.  One group consists mostly of creationists, the other of geology enthusiasts. 

"Ultimately, creationism is not just bad science to me, it's bad Christianity, it's Bible worship," said [Alan] Gishlick, 32, a paleontology Ph.D [who describes himself as a devout Christian]. "There's just no reason to look at these patterns of layered sediment, or in the fossil record, or at the stars, and think that what you're seeing isn't what you're seeing.  God doesn't require you to be stupid, to deny what you see, to deny what you know."

Ms. Epperson, who sings in the choir at her Presbyterian church and brought her Bible along on the trip, said, "The more you learn about science, the more magnificent God is.

"I can look at a rainbow, and I know that white light can hit water droplets and it gets dispersed and the light spreads out and has lots of different colors," she said, "and I also say, 'Thank you, God, for the rainbow.' "

Jodi Wilgoren, Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon, New York Times, Oct. 6, 2005.

An Understandable Explanation of Natural Selection

In today’s Washington Post, writers Rick Weiss and David Brown offer a succinct, readable explanation of how natural selection works:

By some accident of nature whose workings neither man [Darwin and Wallace] could explain, an organism may exhibit a variation in shape, color or body function new to the species.

Although most of these new traits are damaging -- probably lethal -- a small fraction actually help. They may make it easier to hide from predators (like a moth's coloration), exploit a food source (an anteater's long tongue), or make seeds more durable (the coconut's buoyant husk).

If the trait does help an organism survive, that individual will be more likely to reproduce. Its offspring will then inherit the change.

They, in turn, will have an advantage over organisms that are identical except for that one beneficial change.  Over time, the descendants that inherited what might be termed the "happy accident" will outnumber the descendants of its less fit, but initially far more numerous, brethren.

*  *  *

What is hard to understand about this process is that it is essentially passive. The mechanism is called "natural selection" because the conditions at hand -- nature -- determine which accidents are beneficial and which are not. Organisms do not seek ends.

Giraffes do not decide to grow long necks to browse the high branches above the competition. But a four-legged mammal on the savannah once upon a time was endowed with a longer neck than its brothers and sisters.  It ate better.  We call its descendants giraffes.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Weiss and Brown also report on recent developments that “put the very theory of evolution to some  tough new tests.”

Read it all.

Katrina and the Story of the Continuing Creation

There’s a small silver lining in the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina:  At an awful cost, humanity is learning some lessons.  History strongly suggests that, by putting these and countless other lessons to use, however imperfectly, we make a contribution to a better world, just as our predecessors did and our successors will do.

"Show Me the Science" -- Daniel Dennett in NY Times

From Show Me the Science, by Daniel Dennett, in Sunday’s New York Times (paragraphing edited, emphasis added):

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design.

If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Yup.  Read it all.

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution -- NY Times

Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times editorial board points out that, in the debate over evolution versus creationism / intelligent design, we sometimes lose sight of how very, very, very long natural selection has had to do its work.  Excerpt (paragraphing edited):

. . . [T]he difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.

It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first originated on this planet.  That is not an unimaginable number in itself, if you're thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or grains of sand.

But 3.5 billion years of biological history is different.   All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one.  They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time. 

That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved.  It is time that has allowed the making of us.

The idea of such quantities of time is extremely new.  Humans began to understand the true scale of geological time in the early 19th century.  . . .

Read it all.

Intelligent Design, Meet "Intelligent Falling"

Somehow I missed The Onion's dead-on spoof of intelligent-design arguments last week, "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity wth New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory."  Excerpt (paragraphing edited):

. . .  Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding.  The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force.

Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

*  *  *

"Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science" -- NY Times

The Times must be publishing a series about science and religion.  Today's edition has a piece by Cornelia Dean, "Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science."  Excerpt (paragraphing added):

Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science as it has been defined for centuries.

That is, they look to the natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional - capable of being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation.

This belief in science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a supernatural force.

Read it all.

Intelligent Design? Evolution? Whatever: It Is What It Is

An article by Kenneth Chang in today's NY Times, "In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash," is one of the best general summaries I've yet seen about the controversy over intelligent design versus evolution.

My beef with intelligent design is that too many IDers seem to be trying to affirmatively disprove evolution.  It's as though their personal trust in God stands or falls depending on whether or not a particular scientific theory is valid.  That would be a pretty weak faith, if you ask me.  (I have a similar beef with radical evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins.)

It seems to me that a far-healthier attitude would be, "it is what it is."  Assuming God exists (and personally I'm persuaded), then he has done what he has done, and he did it the way he did it.  In this area,

• ours is not to declare that God must have done his work in such-and-such a way.  That attitude strikes me as prideful, and verging on blasphemy; 
• instead (to paraphrase the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor), our job is humbly to seek the truth, whatever the truth turns out to be, about what God in fact has done, and about how in fact he has done it. 

As the subtitle of this blog observes:  Putting God first requires facing the facts.  That goes for the dispute over intelligent design versus evolution, just as it does (IMHO) in every other area of life.