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2 SPENGLER Why 'Intelligent Design' subverts
faith By Spengler
If the
evidence for Intelligent Design lies in the
perfection of nature down to improbably refined
levels of detail, what stake does created man have
in created nature? Did the same God who designed
the mitochondria of living cells and set universal
constants in the cosmos also create unstable
tectonic plates, the plague bacillus and the
tsetse fly? Why are some parts of nature
benevolent and others hostile toward man? That is
the Lisbon earthquake problem. More than two
centuries ago, Voltaire's skepticism and Kant's
critical philosophy beat the stuffing out of
Leibniz' theism, and in a fair fight. Why should
we expect a rematch today to come out differently?
That is why Intelligent
Design subverts faith, despite its
defenders' best intentions.
The second
argument is this: If a design does indeed exist in
the mind of God, why should we presume that we are
able to understand it? Why should the finite mind
of created humans have the capacity to understand
the grand design of physical creation, any more
than we can understand the workings of Providence
in history?
In fact, the assertion that
the human mind can grasp the whole design of
creation is neither Christian nor Jewish, but
Platonic, and its most famous exponent in modern
science was Albert Einstein, who believed not in
the God of the Bible, but (as he wrote) in
"Spinoza's God", that is, a God who is
indistinguishable from nature. (The great British
mathematician Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawkings'
long-standing collaborator, is perhaps the most
prominent Platonist working today.) Nature's
harmony contains an inherent beauty that makes it
perceptible to man, in Einstein's view.
Einstein was not only irreligious, but
wrong. He could not countenance the uncertain
world of the quantum revolution that emerged in
the mid-1920s, and spent the last three decades of
his career in a fruitless quest to restore
determinism to physics. What Einstein eschewed,
though, was a liberating event for religious
thought, wrote Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the
leading mind of 20th-century Orthodox Judaism: As
long as mathematical determinism ruled physics, he
observed, religious philosophy was excluded. The
truth of Soloveitchik's observation is
self-evident on reflection: If nature can explain
itself through deterministic models, then religion
can have nothing to say about the world outside of
itself.
The most devastating refutation of
determinism came from Austrian mathematician Kurt
Goedel, whose famous incompleteness theorems of
1931 proved that no mathematical system could
prove all of its own assumptions. It also proved
that we can formulate mathematical statements that
are known to be true, indeed are true by
definition, but that cannot be formally proved.
That ruined the great mathematical project
of the early 20th century, the quest to find a
comprehensive logical foundation of mathematics. A
deeply religious man, Goedel noted that this
presented a problem for the philosophers, who
sought a deterministic system to explain
mathematics without recourse to human intuition
(or divine inspiration). But it was of small
concern to the mathematicians, who always would
have an infinite number of new problems to solve.
Goedel was optimistic that all mathematical
problems eventually could be solved, but with
intuition rather than with a general algorithm.
Goedel's quip points toward a solution of
both the theological and the meta-scientific
problems in Intelligent Design. David Bentley
Hart's vision of a fallen world beset by forces
hostile to God, with God as a hapless bystander,
belongs to the horror movies or the novels of
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But there is another way of
thinking about man's relationship to nature,
emphasized in rabbinic Judaism and espoused
eloquently by Rabbi Soloveitchik: God made an
imperfect world and gave the task of improving it
to his junior partner in creation, humankind.
As Rabbi Soloveitchik observed, the final
perfection of nature is a messianic vision: In the
prayers for the New Moon, for example, Jews look
to the day when God will restore the moon to
parity with the sun. But there is a great deal to
do in the meantime. Man is not the passive victim
of earthquake, flood, famine or disease. We can
build defenses against natural disasters, cure
disease, and eliminate hunger. Whatever harm
befalls us today, we can change our destiny in the
future. God does not reveal his infinite mind to
us, except through an infinite procession of
discoveries, to which we are led by intuition, or,
if you will, inspiration.
We are not the
passive victims of nature. We strive to establish
human dignity by mastering nature. We are neither
gods who can grasp the infinite mind of the God of
Creation, nor mere animals for whom evolution is
destiny. We do not need to worry whether there is
an Intelligent Design, nor whether we might grasp
such a design if it indeed exists: As creative
beings, we are part of the design. We do not know
the full scope of the design, because we do not
know what we have yet to accomplish. God does not
need us to justify his position as creator; our
task is nobler, and incomparably more challenging,
namely, actually to advance his work of creation.
With this in mind, theodicy - Leibniz'
term for the justification of God given the
existence of evil - is beside the point. As
Professor Jon Levenson of Harvard University wrote
in his 1994 book Creation and the Persistence
of Evil:
Biblical faith has no need of
theodicy (YHWH explicitly condemns the theodical
arguments of Job's friends in 42:7). Jeremiah's
famous accusation (Jeremiah 12-13) against YHWH
is neither a philosophical judgment of God nor a
cry of horrified despair but rather an indignant
demand that God rise up and destroy the wicked:
You will be in the right, O LORD, if I
make claim against You, Yet I shall present
charges against you: Why does the way of the
wicked prosper? ... Drive them out like sheep
to the slaughter, Prepare them for the day of
slaying!
The answer - and please note
that there is an answer here - is nothing like
those rationalizations proposed by the
philosophers: "Drive them out like sleep to the
slaughter." The answer to the question of
suffering of the innocent is a renewal of
activity on the part of the God of Justice. In
light of the answer, it becomes clear that the
question is not an intellectual exercise but
rather a taunt intended to goad the Just God
into action.
Levenson's observation
applies to natural calamities as much as it does
to human evil. We do not shrink in terror, like
Professor Hart, before the monsters of the fallen
world: We ask for divine inspiration to advance
the unending work of creation.
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