Bad science, bad theology
PUT ASIDE the question of whether "intelligent design," the latest alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, is good science. The more interesting question is whether it is good theology.
ID argues, supposedly on purely scientific grounds, that the complexity of life, especially at the cellular level, points to an Intelligent Designer. It's adherents won't call that designer God, but the conventional wisdom is that Christians can only be pleased if ID gains traction. But that's not necessarily so, though ID certainly has its Christian cheerleaders, and they aren't all fundamentalists.
Last month, for example, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna, published an Op-Ed article in the New York Times assailing "neo-Darwinism" and sounding a lot like a supporter of ID.
"The Catholic Church," he wrote, "while leaving to science many details about the history of life on Earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world."
Schoenborn conceded that Pope John Paul II said in 1996 that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis" (a statement science writer Michael Shermer once paraphrased as "evolution happened -- deal with it"). But the cardinal also argued that this "rather vague and unimportant" papal pronouncement must be read in light of John Paul's comment 11 years earlier that "the evolution of living beings
But is acceptance of ID (and rejection of Darwinism) really required by the basic belief contained in the Apostles' Creed?: "I believe in God
Long before Darwin, Christian thinkers struggled with the paradox that portraying God as "maker of heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible" (in the words of another creed, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan) could give the Deity less than his due.
The problem, Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey explained in his 1965 book "Maker of Heaven and Earth," is that a "maker" could be a mere craftsman, shaping raw material, rather than a truly omnipotent God. The solution, was to emphasize that God created ex nihilo, "from nothing."
"In the Christian doctrine of creation," Gilkey wrote, "God is the source of all and creates out of nothing. Thus the Christian idea, far from merely representing a primitive anthropomorphic projection of human art upon the cosmos, systematically repudiates all direct analogy from human art." God instead is the "transcendent source of all existence."
