Unapologetic Catholic: My Cat knows calculus: Intelligent Design Part I

My cat likes to play with ping pong balls. I toss a ball, which bounces along on the floor as the cat gives chase. The cat knows exactly where the ball will be on any particular bounce and it’s great entertainment to watch the cat leap right to the spot the ball will be so the cat and ball arrive simultaneously.

Now, Newton’s laws of motion describe the ball bounces, how many and how far the ball travels. The ancient Greeks assumed such a ball might bounce forever, but Calculus, which can solve a number of useful problems gets us to the correct answer. Calculus also predicts the position of the ball at any time during the bounce sequence. Since my cat gets to the position of the ball before the ball arrives there, the cat has some concept of the laws of motion and of calculus itself. I spent two years in college learning calculus. My knowledge of calculus is rusty, but I know calculus on a philosophical and fundamental basis far beyond my cat’s knowledge. Does my cat know calculus? In some dim fuzzy way, my cat has a glimmer of some natural regularity that it applies to bouncing balls. It does, in some sense, know calculus.

Probably in the same limited way I can “know” God. In some dim fuzzy sense I can know God. I know what's written in the Bible, I know what the Church teaches, but I suspect this is a very, very small fraction of what any human being can know about God. Why did God decide to give us free will? Is that related to suffering and evil? Why is there evil? Why does God appear so capricious in our daily human lives? Does God keep my car running? Why do evil people do so well during this lifetime? Exactly how provident is God, really? Where was He when my sons old watched their mother die? I don’t think we will ever have satisfactory answers to these questions and all proposed answeers I have heard sound like weak rationalizations. The most satisfactory answer I have heard to these questions is, "I don't know." That's why I truly believe that God is at least as far beyond my understanding as calculus is to my cat. I can grasp enough of His love for me and enough of His guidance to for me to know how to live my life, but beyond that, I doubt we can know much more.

That’s why I’m critical of Intelligent Design arguments. A couple of blogs have recently linked to the creation/evolution dispute in Cobb County. Clearly, religious sympathies are not on the side of the ACLU. But this time the ACLU is right. We should not allow general opposition to the ACLU to cloud our thinking the two times a day that particular stopped clock is accidentally right. Inevitably, Intelligent Design comes up in the discussions as some substitute or euphemism for creationism. I do think Intelligent Design is bogus science, no different than UFO abductions, ESP or cold fusion.

It’s also bad theology. Intelligetn Design begins with the assumption that we can know the mind of God. The argument from design for God’s existence is old, but the evidence to support it has had to change over the years. Once, angels were required to push the planets in their orbits. Now, with an understanding of the same rules governing my cat's bouncing ball, plants orbit without any divine assistance. As fast as arguments from design are made, they are overcome by scientific progress. Now Intelligent Desing proponents must squeeze God into the molecular level, because science has explained all other aspects of evolution. Intelligent Design concedes, as it must to maintain any superficial plausibility, that evolution proceeds almost completely without the need for divine intervention. Nobody seriously disputes that. ID proponents acknowledge that the theories of common descent and evolution of species are essentially correct, because that’s what distinguishes ID from “creationism.” ID makes the argument that, at the molecular level only, and only in a few instances, God had to supernaturally intervene to keep things on track and create a few enzymes from scratch so that the overall evolutionary process could continue.

They just crammed God into a might small gap. According to ID, God didn’t need to supernaturally intervene to create galaxies, solar systems planets and the evolution of life on earth. No, instead He needed to intervene to supernaturally create a means of mobility for a particularly virulent germ. He also had to intervene to make sure that primates’ blood would clot, but whales, fish and sea urchins all evolved their blood clotting mechanism without His help. At once, God is omnipotent, and at the same time incapable of allowing evolution to solve germ mobility issues and primate blood clotting. Intelligent Design proponents would have God intentionally interfere with the natural course of evolution only to create particularly virulent forms of bacteria to inflict untoward pain and suffering upon His creatures, and to cause primates blood to clot and to detectably intervene at no other time. God’s scientifically detectable miracle turns out to be a disease germ. That doesn’t sound like an awesome God at all, it sounds like God the tinkerer, and it detracts from His greatness for no purpose. Intelligent Design proponents are just unwilling to imagine that God created and maintains this entire universe as we know it in ways we can neither imagine nor detect. Just as the cat doesn’t really need to know or understand the details of calculus to get that ball, we don’t need to knew and are incapable of knowing the awesome extent of God’s creative majesty.

ID assumes that we can understand the mind of God. If ID is correct, it demonstrates conclusively that God would refuse to intervene on a grand scale, ignoring the widespread suffering of animals and people, only to create a few enzymes necessary to develop a tail on a lethal form of bacteria. ID coyly claims not to be able to identify the “designer.” Perhaps ID is right in that regard. Perhaps that’s not actually God at all, only a a Marcion-like demurrage would individually create desease causing germs while passignup the opportunity to create a previously unknown orchid. Or worse, what if it wasn’t really any form of supernatural being after all? Finally, the most thoroughly scientifically valid Intelligent Design concept establishes that there must be multiple cosmic designers! There cannot be just One. Intelligent Desing unavoidably leads to weird understandigns of God.

Neither science, nor ID, can differentiate between that demurrage, Raelians or “gods.” To do so, you must know the characteristics of the designers, which we can’t do, if God is the Designer. Attempts to make a scietific theory out of God's creation are just like cats doing calculus. Alternatively, we must accept our limitations and concede for purposes of science that all Intelligent Desing can tell us is that, yes, Raelians could well have done it. If we attempt to use science to understand the mind of God, we will have committed the same sin as the builders of the Tower of Babel. In this sense, Intelligent Design is the Twenty First Century Tower of Babel.

Comments

Eagerly awaiting part 2.

Posted by: Talmida | November 18, 2004 at 07:49 AM

A while back I read a lengthy article from an ID proponent from Berkeley. His description of the argument bore absolutely no resemblance to yours. I think you should perhaps bone up on ID.

Posted by: Mike Petrik | November 29, 2004 at 03:27 PM

What makes you think he's right and I'm not? Your reference is too vague to address where there might be differences. ID proponents from Berkeley...I assume you mean either Jed Macosko, or Phillip E. Johnson, since they are the only ones I know of with a Berkely connection?

I don't know what you could be referring to by boning up, since I've read every published book written by Intelligent Design proponents I can get my hands on. That would include Behe, Dembski, Johnson, Meyers, Wells and Gonzalez, along with numerous visits to their respective web pages and those of the Discovery Institute. If you have something in particular for me to look at that I haven't already read, I'd be interested.

It would be very exciting to demonstate the existence of God by scientific evidence--which piqued my interest in ID the first place. It appears that ID has failed in this, and failed as worthy science as well. That's too bad. As I said, ID is not only not science--it's terrible theology. I'm not surprised that any ID proponent would disagree with that, are you?

Posted by: Unapologetic Catholic | December 01, 2004 at 01:56 PM