evolution & metaphysics
I appreciate Tim Kowal’s long, thoughtful response to my post on Ben Stein and intelligent design, but after reading and re-reading it I’m afraid it misses the mark. Lines like “Strictly speaking, natural selection is not a scientific theory” only help to harden that impression. They don’t call it the Theory of Evolution for nothing.
Science, as I see it, is the process by which we as humans attempt to better understand the natural world. Whether we want to phrase this as “God’s creation” or merely as “the natural world” is unimportant. When it comes to actually taking apart the radio and figuring out how it works, we don’t need to ask whether it was made by hand or by a machine, in America or overseas. All we need to do is take it apart and then put it back together. Similarly, with science – whether it is biology or geology or physics – all we need to do is ask the question “how?”
How does it all tick?
That, to me, is science. The exploration of how the natural world ticks. To me, as a person of faith, I think of this as a way to better understand God also, to understand how creation ticks. I find the anthropomorphizing of God in “theories” like Intelligent Design to be insulting both to God and to my intelligence.
Let me explain. Let’s take, for example, the rock cycle. This is the natural cycle whereby rock is pressed down into the earth and then reemerges as magma. That rock – now igneous rock – is pressed slowly down into the earth, turns into sedimentary and then metamorphic rock, and finally is melted down once again into magma. It is a process which takes millions upon millions of years. Understanding this process helps us understand the earth beneath our feet (and a great deal more) and it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of this process whether or not it was created or designed by God. If a group of Intelligent Rock Cycle Designers came around arguing that instead of this being a natural process it was instead one guided by some other Intelligence, I simply fail to see how their alternative theory would be at all useful to our understanding of the rock cycle.
But does it diminish from it? [Read more →]
January 11, 2010 170 Comments
