Intelligent design: don't count on it. (Of Several Minds).

I once had to suffer through the attempt of an atheist friend to explain to me, and to others too polite to flee him, exactly why religious people are religious. It was all standard stuff: unresolved childhood security issues, an inability to face up to the real consequences of modern science (particularly the lack of a need for a God to explain our origins), and so forth. It was also, like most forms of scientism, so reductive as to be unfaithful to real experience.

The experience of someone in prayer or meditation, for example, will be seen in psychological or chemical terms--it all comes down to endorphins or alpha waves. The assumption is that there is no need for an objective correlative; that is to say, the experience is explainable whether God exists or not.

I have nothing against studying the experience of prayer or meditation. The problem is that the scientific method is insufficient when it comes to explaining those aspects of experience that matter most to us--not only religious belief, but most of the experiences we cherish. Someone may tell me that my love for my wife and children can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology, and then go on to speak of love in terms that are so foreign to my experience that I know them to be, at least, woefully inadequate, if not simply false. This is not a question of my defensiveness, of wanting to hold on to a comforting illusion. It is as if someone were to come up to me as I looked at a painting by Klee or deKooning and say, "The reason you like this painting is that when our remote ancestors saw flowers they knew they were near water, and so associated color with survival." This has been offered, seriously, as an explanation for the human aesthetic impulse, and it falls so short of the mark of what people really experience in the presence of art as to be laughable.

The scientific method is necessarily reductionistic. It has to confine itself to what can be weighed and measured in rather precise ways; it requires experiments that can be replicated; and it is concerned with what generalizations can be made from close observation of such limited slices of reality. The method is essential and powerfully helpful, but quite limited.

You fall in love, for example, with a particular woman, not with women in general--whatever valid generalizations may be made about women. What can be said about all or most women is not as interesting to you as this specific person, who is as rich and mysterious as a new planet, and will never be completely fathomed (as years of marriage have taught many of us).

This brings me to the problem I have with "intelligent design," presented as something to be taught as if it were a science, or as if it could be presented as a serious alternative to evolutionary thought. I can see the objection to a certain sort of Darwinism; I would object loudly if I were to come across a high school text claiming that evolution means--even proves--that God is not the creator, as some Darwinists believe. Still, any teaching of evolution was opposed by creationists, on the ground that it didn't square with a literal reading of the Bible. This has properly been rejected by most school systems. Some advocates of creationism have taken comfort in the advance of the intelligent-design arguments, which seem to give scientific credibility to an argument for the universe's origins that allows for--well, demands--the idea that it was deliberately made; in other words, a scientific argument for the place of God in explaining the universe. I don't agree with those who believe that intelligent design is a simple substitute for creationism. Far from being based in a biblical vision, the case for intelligent design seems to lead at best to a kind of deism. Whatever the intention, however admirable the motives of those who advance the cause, it isn't science. The appropriate reductionism of science demands that you don't drag God in to explain things. This is not because God is not real, but because the reality of God is beyond science's ability to know--just as what makes a particular loving relationship full of mystery and depth is beyond science.

The reason for the reaction that intelligent design represents, however, is clear enough. People like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker use Darwinism to make claims that are every bit as unscientific as creationism. They infer the nonexistence of God from the facts of evolution, which is as unscientific as inferring the existence of God from order in the universe. At most, you can say, of either claim, that the clues seem to point in one direction or another, and that the conclusion you make will be based on something science is not competent to address--the irreducible specificity of the fullness of existence.

Arguments for God's existence have frequently taken the form of arguments from order and design, and they may seem persuasive to someone who is already a believer. But a stronger argument (and it would not, any more than the others are, be anything like a proof) might begin with the delight we take in order, in beauty. This has to do with our likeness to God, with our being made in God's image. Our recognition and celebration of that goodness join us to God. I remember the words of two friends, both agnostic. One said that what he regretted most was that when he was filled with joy, he had no one to thank. The other was fascinated by a forest he was walking through--he is a biologist--and he was thinking about the interconnectedness of the bank and stream, and the life forms supported there; and then something struck him almost like a revelation: it didn't have to be beautiful. The fact that it was brought him closer to an understanding of belief.

Genesis says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Creationism and intelligent design theory pay close attention to how this may have come about. It might be more fruitful, and something closer to our most fruitful ways of knowing what matters to us most, to concentrate on the words toward the end of that first chapter: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."