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2 SPENGLER Why 'Intelligent Design' subverts
faith By Spengler
I
hate it when the bad guys are right. But it
happens sometimes, and when it does, we should own
up to it.
The bad guy who drove a wedge
between faith and science was the 18th-century
skeptic Voltaire, who did more than any other to
undermine religion in the Enlightenment world. The
eponymous hero of his 1759 novel Candide
wanders through sundry disasters of
mid-18th-century Europe, under the tutelage of "Dr
Pangloss", a lampoon of the
philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, who reassures him after each mishap that
this is "the best of all possible worlds".
Candide finds himself in Lisbon during the
1755 earthquake that leveled the city, killing up
to 100,000 people. Untold thousands
more perished along the
Mediterranean coast. No matter, Dr Pangloss
explains after their narrow escape: If we hadn't
gone through the earthquake, we wouldn't be
sitting here now eating strawberries.
The
novel was an elaboration of Voltaire's "Poem on
the Lisbon Disaster", which lamented:
These women, these infants heaped
one upon the other, these limbs scattered
beneath shattered marbles. What crime and what
sin have been committed by these infants crushed
and bleeding on their mothers' breasts?
[translation David Bentley
Hart]
Voltaire taunted the theologians
with this question: How could a benevolent and
omnipotent God slaughter so many innocents at
random? If this is the best of all possible worlds
(as Leibniz maintained), because a good God would
not create a worse one, why do such awful things
happen? That is one trouble with the so-called
clockmaker's argument, one of the five classic
proofs for the existence of God cited by St Thomas
Aquinas. The workings of nature are so complex and
perfect, the argument states, that they bespeak a
design, and a design must have a designer. The
trouble is that the same clock seems to set off a
bomb at random intervals.
There is a false
premise in Voltaire's argument, namely that
humankind is always and inevitably subject to the
ravages of cruel and capricious nature. We now
build cities able to withstand earthquakes; the
earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011
killed 16,000 people in much more densely
populated regions, a terrible toll, to be sure,
but a fraction of the Lisbon dead. No human being
need die from hunger, or cold, or bacterial
disease; if some die, it is the fault of human
action, not an Act of God. But we are getting
ahead of the argument.
To argue that bad
things are part of a beneficent divine plan that
we cannot yet grasp, as do many Christian
theologians, David Bentley Hart contended in a
celebrated essay,
... requires us to believe in and
love a God whose good ends will be realized not
only in spite of - but entirely by way of -
every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every
catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world
has ever known; it requires us to believe in the
eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an
agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young
mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands
of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of
millions murdered in death camps and gulags and
forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find
peace in a universe rendered morally
intelligible at the cost of a God rendered
morally loathsome.
To avoid what he
dismisses as "vacuous cant" about the workings of
Providence, Hart instead cites the
... Christian belief in an ancient
alienation from God that has wounded creation in
its uttermost depths, and reduced cosmic time to
a shadowy remnant of the world God intends, and
enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial
powers hostile to God.
God's alibi in
Professor Hart's account is the fallen state of
nature itself, its "ancient alienation from God",
and the prevalence of "spiritual and terrestrial
powers hostile to God". Perhaps the Devil was
behind the Lisbon earthquake and the 2004 tsunami?
That view is embedded in a popular genre of horror
films; the fact that it is popular, though, does
not make it any less problematic. One requires an
intellect as recondite as Professor Hart's to
reconcile the notion of a good and omniscient God
with a nature abounding with "powers hostile to
God" who randomly inflict unspeakable suffering on
multitudes of innocent people. Hart's argument
risks falling into the fire of apocalyptic
paranoia, in order to quit the frying pan of
vacuous cant.
Another source of cant,
namely Immanuel Kant (1824-1807), began his
philosophic career by pondering the Lisbon
earthquake, and concluded it by destroying
Leibniz' influence in philosophy. That demarcates
the point at which science was separated from
religion. As the co-inventor (with Isaac Newton)
of the calculus, Leibniz began the modern
scientific revolution with explicitly theological
motives. His contribution to mathematics expressed
a view of nature that could not be comprehended
without God. I summarized Leibniz' theology
recently in this space (Now
for something about nothing ..., Jul 24, '12).
Kant usurped Leibniz' influence to become the
dominant figure in Enlightenment philosophy, by
proposing a system that had no need of God. But we
are getting ahead of ourselves again.
It
is hard to believe in a benevolent God without
seeking the good in the universe, and that, I
think, explains why popular religion ignores
Professor Hart's dour vision of a fallen world,
and cleaves instead to a variant of the
providential argument, namely Intelligent Design.
Proponents of Intelligent Design include
Christians like George Gilder as well as observant
Jews like Michael Medved and David Klinghoffer -
friends and political allies, I note as a matter
of full disclosure. I sympathize with them, but I
think they are on the wrong track.
The
usual refutation of Intelligent Design states that
it requires assumptions that cannot be
experimentally verified by scientists. The
opposing camp, the Darwinian evolutionists, cannot
verify their arguments, either. Darwinian
evolution is an after-the-fact explanation of
phenomena rather than a predictive science.
Neither the particular way in which evolution
occurs, nor the pace at which it occurs, are
matters on which Darwinian theory sheds much
light.
Despite numerous attempts,
including one by the anti-religious polemicist
Richard Dawkins, Darwinians have failed to create
a model that can predict evolution. University of
Texas mathematician Granville Sewell, an
Intelligent Design proponent, surveyed the damning
evidence in a 2000 essay for The Mathematical
Intelligencer. The quarrel between the Darwinians
and the Creationists comes down to a confrontation
between a quasi-religious belief that nature is a
closed system that self-evolves in the absence of
a creator, and the explicitly religious belief
that a creator directs the process. The South
Park caricature of Dawkins got it exactly
right.
If the Intelligent Design argument
cannot be proved, as the Darwinians claim, neither
can it be refuted. Science as such has no stake in
the argument: Something that neither can be proved
nor falsified does not belong to the realm of
science in the first place.
Quite apart from the
scientific debate, I have two objections to
Intelligent Design. Both are theological rather
than scientific.
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