Why Intelligent Design might not be all that intelligent

Sven has a good article about Intelligent Design. Unusually, he takes a look at one of the commonest reasons people support ID – the idea that it allows space for a Christian idea of God. Sven points out that this is wrong. What ID does is bring back the old Enlightenment Deism, in which a “God” started the universe off and then left us alone to get on with it. ID offers no hints that the triune Christian Creator God is involved. Indeed, the actions attributed to the “Designer” by ID advocates are actually at odds with the God revealed in Christ.

Advocates of ID…stake the entire validity of Christianity and the Bible on a positivist reading reading of Genesis 1-3 that seeks to turn the text into a literal scientific and historical account of how the world began. “If ID falls, then so does Christianity” they say, and indeed it does – and the only thing rising from its ashes is Atheism. ID tries to punch above its weight in the realm of science, and its rebuttal leads to wholesale and outright rejection of Christianity altogether.
Yet all of this is so needless. Christianity is not a theory about how biological life began. God did not give us Genesis with the sole purpose of using it as a polemic to refute worldviews that would arise 3,500 years after the text was written, and those who make Genesis – or rather, their particular theological slant on Genesis – the foundation of Christian faith are undermining Christianity, not strengthening it. The foundation of Christianity is not ID, creationism or even (yes) the Bible – Jesus is the foundation and needs to be the point from which all our critique of science and our doctrine of creation proceeds.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 7:45pm on 15 November 2005
Category: Faith, Science, Struggling