I, myself, have no problem reconciling my belief in God with the workings of evolution and other “natural” processes. It seems to me that folks who insist on applying an Intelligent Design label to what they simply don’t yet understand (“It’s too complex, therefore it must be an artifact, therefore God exists, therefore gay marriage is evil!”) are too busy looking for an intellectual short-cut. They are seeking an external validation of their faith, either to prove its correctness to others or to shore it up for themselves. In so doing, ironically they reduce the importance of that faith.<\/p>\n
Jim Holt has a nice little essay on Intelligent Design<\/a> and some of the oddities that nature presents us that make ID something less than clear-cut.<\/p>\n In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.<\/p>\n Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?<\/p>\n The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases — cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis — the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.<\/p>\n And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.<\/p>\n Or, of course, we have cases like this<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now for any of these, one could argue that it’s simply a matter of not understanding the true Purpose behind creation, that the Mystery is that there really is a Reason for these bits of Creative oddity. But ID folks can’t have it both ways — they cannot point to complexity of creation as proof that, since we don’t know how such things could have occurred “naturally,” they must <\/em>be artificial, but then argue that it’s fine to simply accept that we don’t (or can’t) know the reasons for the things we still don’t understand.<\/p>\n Regardless, putting forward Intellectual Design as a proper “competitor” for “Darwinian evolution” is like putting forward Faith Healing as a proper “competitor” for “Modern Medicine and Germ Theory.” It’s nonsense. Where those things have their place is in theological schools and religion classes, where questions of underlying Purpose and Reason and Meaning can be debated, and where non-reproducible results can be attributed to Mysteries rather than serving as disproof of a hypothesis<\/a>.<\/p>\n