And the Mountain too is Spirit: The Flaw of Intelligent Design

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”  Genesis 1.2

The Intelligent Design movement is growing in strength.  It is difficult to ignore the force of the arguments made by Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, Donald Axe, and many others that the mindless, random worldview adopted by modern science cannot explain the undeniable order in the world.  From the computer-like code of the DNA molecule to the fine-tuning of the fundamental parameters that make a universe – and life itself – possible, it takes a great leap of faith to adopt the position that no intelligence of any kind is involved in how the world operates.

But that is the leap modern, materialistic science makes: today’s scientists attempt to explain the world without resorting to a supernatural power or an intelligence of any sort.  In the world of materialism, it is “particles all the way down;” all that exists – from the stars in the sky, to life and human consciousness – can ultimately be reduced to particles in motion.  There is no spirit, no Mind, and no God. There is nothing to give purpose, direction, or meaning to the universe or to life. To materialistic scientists, the universe is “pointless” and “absurd.”[1]

Without any sort of intelligence to guide the organization and movement of the physical world, scientific materialists resort to the multiverse, contrived theories,[2] unbridled speculation, and mathematical slights-of-hand.  Since scientific materialists hold virtually all university positions, win the Nobel prizes, and are widely accepted as the leading authority figures, they wind up writing the rules to the game. Many opponents may step up to challenge scientific materialism, but because the practice of science – and rationality itself – has become equated with materialism, the challengers inevitably fall by the wayside; the worldview of scientific materialism will not allow any intelligent force to enter its mindless domain.

In many ways, however, scientific materialists are still fighting Darwin’s battle, 150 years later: Darwin became popular because his theory of natural selection offered a credible alternative to the story of Genesis.  Instead of the universe being created in seven days, and all life forms appearing on Earth already pre-assembled, Darwin offered a picture of gradual descent from a common ancestor.  Life started as something simple, emerging from a primordial swamp, passing on favorable mutations to descendants.  Some mutated descendants better adapted to the changing environment and survived to leave more offspring, which in turn repeated the same cycle, churning out new life forms to compete in the battle of the fittest.

This Darwinian evolution, however, has no end in sight, no goal, and no destination.  Although the human form may appear as the end of evolution – the “crown of creation” – this thought has no standing in Darwin’s theory and is rejected as naïve by modern biologists.  Rather, we are nothing more than “survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”[3]

Few people accept the notion that the Book of Genesis gives a literal account of creation.  But it seems as if today’s material scientists, in vanquishing Darwin’s original opponent – the church – believe they have also vanquished all possible foes and the entire Intelligent Design movement.  But here they have gotten a bit ahead of themselves, as there are more opponents lining up to challenge the radical materialistic perspective.

Despite defeating the church, Darwinians and materialistic scientists have yet to come face-to-face with the absence of an organizing force in their own repertoire of particles and forces.  The particles of the materialist are dead and dumb.  They are not computer chips programmed by Ph.Ds.  And the forces of modern science – gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces – are forces of strength, not of art.   When materialists refer to the forces of nature as sculpting the raw material of the cosmos, they neglect to mention that these forces have no artistic ability.

So what rules the cosmos in the world of the materialist?  The laws of nature.  It is the laws of nature – gravity, Newton’s laws of motion, Mendel’s chemistry laws, the ideal gas laws, to name a few – that ensure the chaotic, lonely particles of the cosmos follow patterned and predictable movements.

The laws of nature organize the random dance of science’s mindless particles.

But then the question is asked: where did the laws of nature come from?

Are they embedded into space? Programmed into the particles moving throughout the cosmos?

Here materialists grow silent, for they have no answer to this threshold question.  While the practice of science is to study and record the regularities of nature, these scientists have no answer to the question of where the laws came from.  These laws are “given,”[4] a matter of faith, something science must assume to make sense of the world.

In short, the laws of nature are the God of materialists. But this is an unseen God, hidden among the wide-open spaces of the cosmos, etched into the fabric of space and time; buried in equations and the passive voice of scientific writings. An invisible God doing its work behind the scenes.

So here we have scientific materialists, looking out at a storybook world of unending wonder, and attempting to explain it without an intelligent guiding force.

Intelligent designers see this flaw and pounce upon it, exposing all of its inconsistencies and assumptions; uncovering the sheer arrogance of many materialists who eventually reach the position that what they say is true because they are scientists, and as scientists, they control the rules to the game, determine the winners and losers in the debate over how we should look at the world and ourselves; any theory of materialists, no matter how preposterous, such as the inflationary big bang, the many worlds interpretation, the multiverse, and dark matter, is given credence not because the theories make sense, but because they issue forth from the hallowed halls of scientific materialism.

But then the Intelligent Designers face their own dilemma, and one that materialists, in turn, pounce upon: how is this God-spirit of yours supposed to interact with the material world?  As Lisa Randall of Harvard University notes in Knocking on Heaven’s Door, the problem is that we need to explain how God “or any external spirit” intervenes in the mechanical world of science.  She writes that random mutations allow species to evolve, but did God, “physically interven[e] by producing that apparently random mutation?” “Did He apply a force or transfer energy?  Is God manipulating electrical processes in our brains?”  “How,” she writes, “could this ‘God magic’ possibly work?”

Reduced to its essentials, Randall’s point is the main argument of scientific  materialism and a dilemma for the Intelligent Design movement.  How does spirit interact with the material world?  How does spirit create the DNA molecule, the crystal atom, the human cell, the spiral galaxies; how does spirit move a mountain?

In one way: if the mountain too is spirit.

 

 

[1] Steven Weinberg, First Three Minutes, 154.

[2] The best example is the inflationary big bang, which even its founder, Alan Guth, admits was contrived to solve the flatness and horizon problems.  A. Guth, Inflationary Universe, 252. (The flatness problem is that the repulsive force of the universe almost exactly balances off the attractive force of the matter contained in the universe.  The horizon problem is that the entire expanse of the cosmos is at almost precisely the same temperature even though regions separated by more than 2 degrees have never had “mixed” or come in contact; the separated regions lie outside each other’s horizon.) https://www.astronomynotes.com/cosmolgy/s12.htm

[3]  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Preface, xxi.

[4]  , R. Jones, Physics for the Rest of Us, at 79.