Debating Darwin: the 'intelligent design' movement; a new generation of anti evolutionists has arisen based on the perceived inadequacies of Darwin's theory

Christian Century, July 15, 1998 by Edward B. Davis

"The time has come," the lawyer said,

"To talk of many things,

Of Gods, and gaps, and miracles,

Of lots of missing links,

And why we can't be Darwinists,

And whether matter thinks."

--with apologies to Lewis Carroll

In 1874, 15 years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the great Princeton theologian Charles Hodge replied with his own book, What Is Darwinism? Darwin had proposed that natural selection, a blind, purposeless process operating through random variations, had produced the myriad forms of life that inhabit our planet. Hodge contended that this denial of design in nature "is virtually the denial of God." Hodge noted that although Darwin might personally believe in a creator who had in the distant past "called matter and a living germ into existence," Darwinism implied that God had "then abandoned the universe to itself to be controlled by chance and necessity, without any purpose on his part as to the result, or any intervention or guidance." Such a God was "virtually consigned, so far as we are concerned, to nonexistence.' Thus Darwinism was "virtually atheistical."

The authors of the three books reviewed here understand Darwinism as Hodge did, and like Hodge they believe that a God who is not involved in creation and with human beings in obvious, highly visible, scientifically detectable ways is no God at all. They seek to marshal evidence for the truth of Christian theism, based partly on the perceived deficiencies of Darwinian evolution. Although certain elements of their position may warrant further consideration, it is neither very convincing nor particularly original.

In the century and a quarter since Hodge leveled his pen at the offending theory, many Christians have come to terms with evolution. They have done this in different ways, however. Some evolutionists who maintain belief in God, especially those who are theologically moderate or conservative such as Richard Buhe and Howard Van Till, regard science and theology as separate (though ultimately complementary) modes of knowledge. In this view, science deals with mechanism and material reality ("how"), while theology deals with meaning and spiritual reality ("wily"), which are in another domain or on another level. This approach is best summed up in the famous phrase that Galileo borrowed from Cardinal Baronio: "The Bible tells how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

Other thinkers, including liberal Protestants such as Ian Barbour and Arthur Peaeoeke, employ more integrative models. They decry the intellectual schizophrenia and theological insulation of the separation model, proclaiming instead the need for a genuine conversation between theology and modern science that shapes both enterprises. But much of this conversation is dominated by one side: many leading advocates of integration are process theologians or panentheists (believing that God includes the world as a part of God's being) who call for doctrinal reformulation in light of modern scientific knowledge but do not intend to ask scientists to reformulate their theories in light of theology.

Indeed, none of these Christian evolutionists proposes what might be called a Christian science, one in which Christian beliefs influence the actual content of scientific theories so that the rules of science might be different for Christians than for non-Christians. Instead they represent various Christian views of science in which the rules of science are assumed to be the same for all scientists in a particular discipline, without regard to their religious beliefs, and with differences arising only at the level of personal worldview.

In other words, adherents of all of these views accept methodological naturalism, which claims that scientific explanations of phenomena always ought to involve natural causes--which are usually understood as mechanistic causes operating without any intelligence or purpose apparent within the phenomena themselves. Whether or not any intelligence or purpose has been imposed upon natural processes from the outside is a separate question that science alone is not competent to answer, although scientific knowledge may have some influence on the kinds of answers one might offer. Science is seen as religiously neutral; evidence for or against theism has to be found elsewhere.

The books under review reject the notion that methodological naturalism is religiously neutral. They also reject the idea that evolution is compatible with theism. All three books offer a highly sophisticated form of antievolutionism known as intelligent design theory (ID).

The essence of ID and the motivation behind it are dearly explained by Phillip Johnson. Theistic evolution, he argues, is a "much-too-easy solution" that "rests on a misunderstanding of what contemporary scientists mean by the word evolution." Like Cornell biologist William Provine and Cambridge biologist Richard Dawkins, Johnson defines evolution as "an unguided and mindless process" that admits no possibility of being a divine work. It implies that "our existence is therefore a fluke rather than a planned outcome."