“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Declaration of Independence
In 1776, the United States’ Declaration of Independence acknowledged the reality of nature but also injected into the Declaration another reality, a reason for nature’s very existence: “nature’s God”. This document was not only a declaration of independence from another state but was also a document that declared a certain amount of faith in a “Creator” who had granted to man certain “unalienable” rights. With the acknowledgement that this “Creator” God had granted to man these rights is an acknowledgement of a “Creator” God with superior, if supernatural, intelligence.
I do not pretend to fully understand the arguments for or against “intelligent design” as a theory of the creation of the world, but suffice it to say that I believe it to be so. To say otherwise would be, for me, to deny the existence of any god, particularly my God, and my faith would not allow this to be. I cannot deny that which has been seared into my soul. For me, then, and other like-minded believers, the matter is simple. We cannot have come from nothing by mere chance. Logic alone does not allow for such thoughts, and faith renders these thoughts impossible.
Even for the faithful, the matter of the creation of the world and of man is incomprehensible. The weightier matters of the substance of our physical being and that of nature cannot be explained sufficiently for the relatively simply mind of man. The immeasurable “intelligence” responsible for such awe cannot be grasped, let alone explained. For the faithful, then, the matter of how we and this world came to be, and by Whose Mighty Hand, is settled.
Does this discussion about what might be appropriate to teach our children in public schools have to be a choice between science and faith? Must it be so that if we embrace any scientific explanations for the origin of our being that we would by default be in denial of our faith and our God? For children who come from homes where faith and religion are taught, this conflict alone must surely be a source of enormous distress especially for those who are perhaps taught a more fundamentalist scriptural viewpoint. It is not fair to demand of a child to make a choice, for instance, between embracing “natural selection” as the theory it is and risk being accused of rejecting his or his parent’s God. From the “peanut gallery”, this is my observation. It seems to be a battle between those who reject the notion of a supreme “creator” God and those who insist that there can be no other way outside of God.
From faith, from Holy Scripture, and even from the Continental Congress in 1776 is the firm belief in “nature’s God”. There can be no other way. But am I forced to deny my faith if I declare that perhaps Darwin’s theory is not unreasonable even within the context of a divine realm? That perhaps Darwin was on to something minus one key element: divine design?
For me it is completely reasonable. Darwin was a man, no more or less so than I. As such, he was as capable as I of drawing conclusions based on observations made. Whether or not Darwin would acknowledge or embrace it, I will still declare that he was as “blessed” with his mind as I am with mine and that it is no “accident” or chance encounter with some natural phenomenon.
Even still, I look upon the theory of intelligent design and its being taught in public schools with more than a little trepidation. I get to choose the churches and the pastors and Sunday school teachers who have access to my children. I do not have such control in a public school setting. And because of the divine nature of intelligent design, I am not so sure that many public school teachers are equipped to deal with it as scientific theory. This is not to say that I am completely opposed to it being explored in public schools, but I think the school boards will have their hands full in trying to make sure it is handled fairly and without passion or prejudice. With matters of faith, this is most difficult.
2 comments:
Very good post.
A book you might be interested in on the subject is Phillip Johnson's "Reason in the Balance," which covers much of the same subject area that your post does.
The interesting thing is that both ID'ers and Creationists agree a lot more with modern evolutionary theory than the evolutionists want to admit. This keeps it in a science-vs-religion setting, rather than a "what is your evidence" setting.
But I think you've missed the most interesting part of the ID/Evolution debate -- the notion of agency. "Origins" is but one aspect of ID. ID is the study of agency in general, whether of individual humans or of God's agency. See Thinking about ID as a Theory of Causation.
Thank you for the insight. There is no doubt I've missed a great deal mainly because I get so tired of the argument. However, a caller on a local radio talk summarized the whole mess in his own perspective: how do we know that evolution is not in itself "intelligent design"?
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