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

Since the ID proponents reject the middle-ground position of a theist who practices methodological naturalism, their challenge will probably produce more heat than light. This likelihood is increased by the highly apologetic thrust of certain essays in The Creation Hypothesis, edited by Biola University philosopher J. P. Moreland. Consider, for example, the title of the essay by Canadian astrophysicist Hugh Ross, head of Reasons to Believe, a Pasadena-based ministry specializing in apologetics: "Astronomical Evidences for a Personal, Transcendent God." Or consider Moreland's own essay, "Theistic Science and Methodological Naturalism," which presents the two as competing alternatives. The latter distinction is drawn even more starkly by Johnson, who refers elsewhere to methodological naturalism as "methodological atheism" and to those Christian scientists who defend it as "mushy accommodationists."

As Moreland defines it, theistic science claims that God "has through direct, primary agent causation and indirect, secondary causation created and designed the world for a purpose and has directly intervened in the course of its development at various times," including "history prior to the arrival of human beings." Primary causes are "God's unusual way of operating; they involve his direct, discontinuous, miraculous actions," whereas "secondary causes are God's normal way of operating." Either way, Moreland stresses, "God is constantly active in the world, but his activity takes on different forms."

In spite of this dear affirmation that God is never absent or inactive in the creation (and similar statements by others), the ID program is widely viewed as being committed to a "God-of-the-gaps" theology. In such a theology (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted with objections) God is invoked only when natural explanations fail.

It is not accurate to say that Behe and Johnson's God is merely a God of the gaps, if by that we mean a God who has nothing else to do but occasionally fine-tune the clock-like workings of the universe. Nevertheless, their argument does rely on a God-of-the-gaps strategy. That is, they argue from the existence of gaps in our knowledge of nature to the existence of gaps in the actual processes of nature, and on the basis of these gaps they infer that there is an agent outside of nature. What makes this a sophisticated God-of-the-gaps theory, and distinguishes their project from garden variety creationism, is that they justify their appeal to divine causation by pointing not simply to the absence of plausible naturalistic explanations but to the presence of an irreducible complexity which suggests to them that no naturalistic explanation for the phenomenon in question can be found.

Pointing out the inadequacies of any received theory, including Darwinian theory, is important work. But to my mind, the most important part of the ID program is not what it denies but what it affirms, namely, that some real causes might not be purely mechanistic, and that this line of inquiry might prove productive. Some interesting and fruitful science has been done by scientists who hold such a view. Newton, for example, offered no mechanical explanation for gravitation (prompting Leibniz to call it a "perpetual miracle"). Kepler based his hypothesis about the orbital radii of the planets on the assumption that God, in laying out the solar system, used the five Platonic solids as "archetypal causes."