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Authors: Michael Shermer
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advocates will find (if they find anything) is an alien being capable of engineering DNA, cells, complex organisms, planets, stars, galaxies, and perhaps even universes. If today we can engineer genes, clone mammals, and manipulate stem cells with science and technologies developed in only the last half century, think of what an ETI could do with one hundred thousand years of equivalent powers of progress in science and technology. For an ETI who is a million years more advanced than we are, engineering the creation of planets and stars will probably be practicable. And if universes are created out of collapsing black holes—which some cosmologists think is probable—it is not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced ETI could even create a universe.
What would we call an intelligent being that could engineer a universe, stars, planets, and life? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it an ETI; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it an Intelligent Designer; if we left science out of theology altogether, we would call it God.
So Intelligent Design is simple science. It is also bad theology: Intelligent Design reduces the deity to a mere engineer, a garage tinkerer, a technician piecing together worlds and life forms out of available materials, but not necessarily the creator of the original materials. This is not at all the spirit invoked in creeds such as thoseformulated at the first Nicene Council, held in AD 325, the opening of which states: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”
In his classic work,
Maker of Heaven and Earth
, the Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey, who also penned a cogent history of the 1981 Arkansas creationism trial, 8 rejects the approach taken by the natural theologians all the way back to William Paley’s heyday. “In the Christian doctrine of creation,” he writes, “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.” Far from being a mere intelligent watchmaker, God is the “transcendent source of all existence” who creates
ex nihilo
—from nothing. For Gilkey, whose theology I greatly respect, knowledge of God comes “not from a careful scientific or metaphysical analysis of the general experience of nature and of finite existence, but rather from the illumination that comes from special encounters with God in revelatory experiences.” 9
Recall that in our study on why people believe in God, the second most popular reason people gave for their belief was the experience of God in everyday life. This reason, and not the convoluted logic and twisted science of Intelligent Design Creationism, makes for deep and honest theology, the type of theology practiced by the great German theologian Paul Tillich, who once said, “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.” 10
If we think of God as a thing, a being that exists in space and time, it constrains God to our world, a world of other things and other beings that are also restrained by the laws of nature and the contingencies of chance. But if God is the maker of all things and all beings visible and invisible in heaven and earth, God must beabove such restraints; that is, above the laws of nature and contingencies of chance. “The question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered,” Tillich explains. “If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer—whether negative or affirmative—implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not
a
being.”
What would we call an intelligent being that could engineer a universe, stars, planets, and life? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it an ETI; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it an Intelligent Designer; if we left science out of theology altogether, we would call it God.
So Intelligent Design is simple science. It is also bad theology: Intelligent Design reduces the deity to a mere engineer, a garage tinkerer, a technician piecing together worlds and life forms out of available materials, but not necessarily the creator of the original materials. This is not at all the spirit invoked in creeds such as thoseformulated at the first Nicene Council, held in AD 325, the opening of which states: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”
In his classic work,
Maker of Heaven and Earth
, the Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey, who also penned a cogent history of the 1981 Arkansas creationism trial, 8 rejects the approach taken by the natural theologians all the way back to William Paley’s heyday. “In the Christian doctrine of creation,” he writes, “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.” Far from being a mere intelligent watchmaker, God is the “transcendent source of all existence” who creates
ex nihilo
—from nothing. For Gilkey, whose theology I greatly respect, knowledge of God comes “not from a careful scientific or metaphysical analysis of the general experience of nature and of finite existence, but rather from the illumination that comes from special encounters with God in revelatory experiences.” 9
Recall that in our study on why people believe in God, the second most popular reason people gave for their belief was the experience of God in everyday life. This reason, and not the convoluted logic and twisted science of Intelligent Design Creationism, makes for deep and honest theology, the type of theology practiced by the great German theologian Paul Tillich, who once said, “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.” 10
If we think of God as a thing, a being that exists in space and time, it constrains God to our world, a world of other things and other beings that are also restrained by the laws of nature and the contingencies of chance. But if God is the maker of all things and all beings visible and invisible in heaven and earth, God must beabove such restraints; that is, above the laws of nature and contingencies of chance. “The question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered,” Tillich explains. “If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer—whether negative or affirmative—implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not
a
being.”
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