The curious thing about teaching in special education is that you are often called upon to teach outside of your discipline. A special educator is called upon to be an inspired generalist rather than a specialist. As a result of this, I have found myself teaching science classes (earth science and life science). I admit that my command of the sciences is cursory at best. I felt a need to do research. This brought me in contact with “intelligent design.”
Religion v. Science Redux
I am a believer in truth. I also believe that there are several means by which truth may be examined and, hopefully, described once discovered. The vocabulary is not the same, nor is the perspective. Truth, in any universal sense, is greater than perspective and vocabulary. Indeed, it can only be described in similes or metaphors, paradoxes, and hypothetical. The nature of a universal truth is its transcendence and therefore its ineffability.
Put simply – perhaps too simply – science concerns itself with what and how, religion with who and why. Science is predicated upon a rigorous method that reflects the philosophical tenets of the Enlightenment. It is a method predicated upon exclusion that seeks, by process of elimination, to reduce empirical observation to natural truth: a process of distillation. It is the sine qua non of natural observation. This method may bring the observer to the brink of the metaphysical but does not make claims in that direction. Indeed, its primary concerns are understanding; the natural and devising a grammar by which the natural may be described in an orderly manner. This is not to impose order, simply to utilize the human need of order to explain and understand that which may have no a priori organizational schema.
Religion is concerned with ultimate truth and therefore must speak in figurative terms. The canon of truth is quite different from the objectivity sought in scientific inquiry. Theology seeks to know who (or what) creates and orders the cosmos and asks why this thing was accomplished. What would motivate a creative agent to create? This is properly not the domain of science. This is theology. Theology is a slippery area of intellectual endeavor. It concerns itself with dogma and must concede that while a particular creed or confession may make an absolute truth-claim and that it is subject to the ratification of faith. Indeed, if “I” understand that ultimate truth has been communicated then how, in good conscience can “I” place lesser truth on the same level? It cannot be done. I understand the claims of fundamentalists. I do not support them.
This differentiation troubles me when I consider the question of intelligent design. Speaking as a trained theologian, I am troubled that by the presumption of a “god unknown” that creates per a design that is presupposed to be a priori. It is the perception of design that drives the deity. This is the realm of natural observation. Any design is a creation of the observer, not of the event. To impose a design on a god, known or otherwise, is to have made a creedal statement that supposes the observers’ understanding of nature to be equivalent to divine revelation. This is troubling to me insofar as it represents the apotheosis of finite vision and makes scientific observation the stuff of myth.
Whose Intelligent Designer Should I Wear This Season?
The presumption of order is just that: a presumption that may or may not stand when placed in the light of honest inquiry. Is the observation of a part truly indicative of the whole? That a pattern appears to exist in a sample may or may not imply a design. Consider random numbers: patterns may be extrapolated in a random distribution of integers. This speaks to the need of the observer to have order rather than the supposed intention of the distribution, to say nothing of the nature of a great and transcendent distributor.
I have to ask the question: who is the intelligent designer stands behind the patterns that defy random distribution or accident? Is this the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druid, Aztec, Sikh, Hindu, or [fill in any religious expression that you may desire] designer or designers whose mythology is validated by cosmic plan? Moreover, why is it presumed that science, specifically evolution, is antithetical to faith?
There is always some wag that wants to point to the Hebrew “Yom” to represent a day or an epoch. I will say nothing of the philological howler that this constitutes. I will point to the function of myth and the existence of not one, but two distinctly different creation myths in the Hebrew Bible. Read the first three chapters of Genesis. There are two narrations. The P account (Genesis 1) and the Y account (Genesis 2-3). They each bring a differing theological agenda: P seeks to present God as the priest that stands above creation, speaking creation into being by the agency of the divine word: God proclaims and that which is not becomes that which is. This is reflected in the prologue to St. John’s Gospel. The Y account speaks of a God that gets dirty; molding the mud into a body then inspires and animates the clay into being. This is a God that exists within creation. They stand in juxtaposition to each other to say that one myth is not primary. And this does not even regard mythology whose origin stands apart from the soil of Palestine.
Differing Compacts of Truth
Evolution is clearly observable in the form of Natural Selection. This may or may not imply the existence of an intelligent designer (to borrow that rather flawed term). As an educator in the public schools, I am troubled by the imposition of flawed religious language cloaked in a masquerade, disguised as science. If I value my religious convictions I should speak them clearly without fear, trusting that the truth will withstand whatever criticism and scrutiny to which it will be subject. Truth will stand.
Intelligent Design is bad theology. I am not expert enough to criticize it as science, though I suspect that my friends whose method requires a purely empirical critique will come to a similar conclusion. If we seek truth, let us do so boldly and honestly. If we seek to impose an agenda that is built upon the ignorant assumptions of those whose vision of truth is limited by the boundaries of their prejudice we do harm to the truth: let us, in the name of truth, oppose this and bring it to an end. Science and theology both seek truth; one in nature the other in the divine. Both are uniquely human endeavors and are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps a bit of intelligence in the understanding of faith is what is called for?
Ah, but I am only a fool…
