The Intelligent Design Movement: Rocking Scientific Naturalism
by: Richard Land - Sep 1, 2005 - comment
For too many years, the prevailing orthodoxy in the scientific academy has faced no meaningful challenges at the epistemological level. This prevailing orthodoxy, which I will call a naturalist evolutionary theory of origins, believes in a chance-driven, naturalistic universe and believes time plus chance plus matter produces life as we know it in all its mind-boggling complexity in this universe.
Immanuel Kant provided a convenient way to avoid a direct confrontation of competing worldviews—naturalistic and Judeo-Christian supernaturalism. Kant’s invention is what has been known to philosophy as a “divided field of knowledge.” Kant was a theist deeply influenced by Christian pietism. As a philosopher he made a radical proposal for epistemology, which is the field of philosophy that examines how we know what we know. He proposed two kinds of knowledge—that which could be determined as fact—phenomenological knowledge—and that which could be known only by faith, that is, noumenological knowledge. This fact-faith distinction changed the way we in the West have approached the question of what we could know and what we could not know and how we could not know it.
As the pressure of the Enlightenment built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people surrendered the notion that God was necessary to explain Creation. Having surrendered this point, they soon surrendered the notion that God was necessary or relevant for formulating moral or human behavior.
At the same time, religious believers began to walk away from the culture, and in accepting and swallowing this same fact-faith divided-field-of-knowledge pill, they became increasingly private in their faith. They focused on individualistic piety, and believers forgot the holistic worldview thinking of previous generations in the Judeo- Christian tradition. In accepting and adopting this fact-faith distinction, they compartmentalized their faith and cut it off from the rest of their understanding of the world. The end result has been a decades-long abandonment of any meaningful cultural engagement between the world of faith and the world of so-called fact.
Such “two-story” thinking became almost unassailable and left the field wide open for naturalistic scientists to dominate Western thought. These scientists and philosophers gave a naturalistic explanation of the biophysical universe with no allowance for a Creator or a designer.
Although this was–and is–a false dichotomy, it has continued to dominate Western thinking even as naturalistic explanations for the origins and complexity of life have faced increasing challenges for physicists and mathematicians and their computer models which read out probability nil that time plus chance creates complexities we now know as life in this universe.
Indeed, those who worship at the altar of naturalism and so-called mainstream science continue to rely on a set of unscientific, unprovable, false philosophical presuppositions as the foundation for many of their conclusions. Thus, crucial aspects of what modern science teaches us are simply shabby philosophy dressed up in a white lab coat.
This whole way of thinking and perceiving reality is under sustained assault for the first time in a century.
The more we learn about the world in which we live, the more impressed we should be by what has been called the argument from congruity principle: the theory that gives you the best answer for the evidence you have is the one that is most congruous with the facts. The belief in the existence of an intelligent designer best explains the origin of creation.
Another supporting principle is the anthropic principle that states that our universe, all the seemingly and arbitrary and unrelated features of the physical world—the distance of the earth from the sun, the physical properties of the earth, the structure of an atom—have one thing in common: they are precisely what is needed so that the world can sustain life. The entire biophysical universe appears to have been thought out and intelligently designed.
The probability that time plus chance plus happenstance mutation has produced the incredibly biologically-balanced machine that you are and I am as human beings is extremely improbable.
The intelligent design movement is effectively challenging the presuppositions of naturalism at their core and is forcing scientists to take the theory of design seriously.
This is a debate that has been initiated by scientists, mainly younger physicists and mathematicians, whose research led them to conclude that the irreducible complexity of life can best be explained by the presence of an intelligent designer as opposed to nothing plus chance plus time equals something.
Their case is not based on the Bible or religion; it is based on scientific evidence. (See http://www.discovery.org for more information.) The overwhelming evidence constructed by these scientists is that the most likely explanation for this universe and all of its complexity and delicate balance is that there was intelligent design behind it. I am not saying that these scientists have proved that the intelligent designer was God. While I happen to believe that it was, that is a faith affirmation. But I can tell you this: Those who believe in the theory of naturalistic evolution have far greater faith than I. Because it takes a far greater faith than I have to believe what they believe rather than to believe what I believe.
Further Learning
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