(Hat tip: Dennis Prager, Clayton Craymer, Hugh Hewitt)
It didn't take long.
On June 11, The Times runs an article about Dr. Francis Collins. Dr. Collins led the team that cracked the human genome, and sees the hand of God in the genome.
It was promptly picked up by Dennis Prager on his radio show, as well as Clayton Cramer in his blog:
Latest Knuckle Dragging Yahoo To Claim Science Shows God's Handiwork
The director of the National Human Genome Research Institute:
Prager, Cramer, and Hewitt do little more than take note of the fact that here's a top-rank scientist who believes God exists, and the genome shows His handiwork.
For many people, the most important paragraph in the Times article seems to be:
Collins joins a line of scientists whose research deepened their belief in God. Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of gravity reshaped our understanding of the universe, said: "This most beautiful system could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."
I have some questions for those who are busy linking this article on their blogs and dancing their happy dances on Darwin's grave.
Question 1: Do you believe there are knowable, discoverable natural laws that govern the universe?
Back in the days of Isaac Newton, science was called "Natural Philosophy". Natural philosophy was the study of how nature works, and the natural philosopher considered himself on a quest to discover the rules God had created so the world would run in an orderly manner.
Kepler, for example, spent his lifetime looking for the central principle on which the orbits of the planets were organized. At first, he proposed that the celestial spheres were spaced at distances that corresponded to the dimensions of the regular polygons. After years of trial and effort, the model refused to work for him. He finally abandoned it, and came up with three laws of planetary motion -- laws which did work.
Newton came up with his laws of motion, and his law of universal gravitation; other scientists developed the three laws of thermodynamics.
Although "scientific law" has a specific definition nowadays, its roots trace back to the notion that science was discovering the rules laid down when the universe was created. They believed in a universe governed by laws, so that God seldom, if ever, needed to intervene. For example, rather than imagining that God would personally direct the course of every star and planet in the universe, they held that God established laws of motion at the outset, and the stars and planets -- and everything else -- moved in accord with those laws.
Newton's laws have been spectacularly successful. We can use them to launch a space probe to the outer planets, with enough fuel on board to change their speed by a total of a few hundred feet-per-second. This requires very precise targeting, and is a feat at least as impressive as any of the Green Arrow's trick shots.
However, Newton's laws aren't the whole story. They've been superseded by Einstein's equations. That doesn't mean we throw them out -- they're still very useful in the areas where they apply. They just don't tell the whole story.
Scientists have also studied living things, and made a number of discoveries. These include the chemical makeup of life, eventually down to the sequence of molecules in its DNA. They've discovered patterns of similarity and differences among living things, and they've come up with theories (it's no longer fashionable to call them "laws") to explain them. Some of these theories are what is collectively known as "evolution".
What does Dr. Collins say about evolution?
COLLINS: Well, evolution is a theory. It's a very compelling one. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it's the similar gene, and it's 90 percent the same. It's certainly compatible with the theory of evolution, although it will always be a theory that we cannot actually prove. I'm a theistic evolutionist. I take the view that God, in His wisdom, used evolution as His creative scheme. I don't see why that's such a bad idea. That's pretty amazingly creative on His part. And what is wrong with that as a way of putting together in a synthetic way the view of God who is interested in creating a group of individuals that He can have fellowship with -- us? Why is evolution not an appropriate way to get to that goal? I don't see a problem with that. (link)
It would seem Dr. Collins has no problem with the notion that evolution is one of the rules laid down at the creation of the universe.
Question 2: Do you believe there are processes which can never be accounted for by any law of science, discovered or undiscovered?
The advocates of Intelligent Design / Intelligent Origin Theory (ID/IOT) believe that some phenomena are too complex, too intricate, too improbable, or too special to have arisen through the operation of natural law. They like to point to astonishing features in the natural world, and declare it impossible that they could have evolved. One example is the blood clotting cascade, which involves a dizzying array of enzymes in an intricate sequence of processes. They point to this as an "irreducibly complex" system, where all the pieces need to be in place for the thing to work.
The ID/IOT advocates point to the blood clotting cascade, among other features of the biological world, and aren't content to say, "we have no idea how these features came to be". They're not even content to say, "evolutionary theory is inadequate to explain it without the discovery of new laws." To be sure, that's as far as they ever want to take it in open debate, but when you read what these folks write to each other, you will see that the explanation they're pushing is not any sort of scientific law, but rather a miracle. Their "scientific" alternative is to bypass science altogether. In essence, it calls for miracles.
Now as it happens, Dr. Collins does believe in miracles.
However, I don't think miracles happen frequently. It seems to me reading the Bible there were times when miracles were occurring at greater frequency, such as in the time of Moses or Elijah or the time of Christ. I have not personally witnessed a spiritual miracle. And I reject the comments that people make sometimes like the fact that a flower is blooming is a miracle. I don't think so. That's a matter that science can actually explain. How did you go from that seed to that blooming flower? I can answer that. Now, why did the seed exist in the first place? That, perhaps, is a miracle. We don't really know how the universe got here. (link)
Fair enough, this is actually known as the "god of the gaps" conjecture. It makes the statement that whenever there's anything in the universe we can't explain, it happened because of divine intervention. But there's a grave danger in hanging your faith on miraculous intervention.
Suppose, for example, your faith stands or falls on the belief that the blood clotting cascade could not possibly have arisen without being designed from scratch. If researchers piece together a scenario by which it could have happened, and fill in enough of the intermediate steps with actual, living examples that show the intermediates work, then your faith starts looking awfully wobbly.
Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, says intelligent design holds "that there are some things in nature that are just so incredibly complex that they could not be the result of natural cause."
But Collins suggests this approach essentially "puts God in the gaps, and it says if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well."
"If we've put him in a box -- if we said, 'Okay, God has to be in this particular part of nature and science explains that,' then we have potentially done great harm to people's faith," says Collins. (link)
You see, if you decide your faith stands or falls based on whether science can explain this or that natural phenomenon, you're in for a crisis when a scientific explanation pops up. And the track record for those betting against science has been pretty dismal.
One of the topics Dennis Prager keeps returning to is the actual meaning of the commandment, "you shall not carry [not "take"] the Lord's name in vain." He has explained this forbids doing stupid or evil things in the name of God, causing him to look stupid or evil. This commandment would forbid, for example, blowing up busloads of children in the name of God, or telling people God commands them to rape children. It can also be held to forbid telling people they have to believe untruths in order to be right with God.
I saw an interview with some folks from the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishna people), and they confirmed that according to their religion, the sun is closer to the earth than the moon is. I guess, in order to be right with Krishna, you have to believe that, even though it's very easy to show the opposite is true. Maybe Krishna didn't think of imposing that commandment. Or maybe he doesn't care if his believers come across as blind and stupid.
In the final analysis, I think a lot of the opposition to evolution has to do with arrogance. There's lots of arrogance on both sides – many of science's spokesmen ooze the stuff. They have all the answers, even to questions outside the realm of science. Or if they don't, they're absolutely certain you don't either.
Believers, on the other hand, have their form of arrogance. They know how God works. They're intimately familiar with God in all his works, and they know anyone who tries to say God may have worked in a different way must be lying. Above all, they know that, however God may have made anything, from the universe to the blood clotting cascade to snowflakes, he didn't make them the way those dang scientistic types say he did.
I'll suggest these folks read 1 Corinthians 25-27:
25For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. 26Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
Atoms and molecules are far from wise – they do what they do entirely as the result of blind, unguided natural forces. Yet under the influence of these forces, over the age of the universe, they accomplish marvels enough to shame the greatest minds on this planet.
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