{"id":5034,"date":"2009-06-05T06:49:35","date_gmt":"2009-06-05T06:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2009\/06\/friday-is-for-friends-logan-pa-1.html"},"modified":"2009-06-05T06:49:35","modified_gmt":"2009-06-05T06:49:35","slug":"friday-is-for-friends-logan-pa-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/06\/friday-is-for-friends-logan-pa-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Friday is for Friends: Logan Paul Gage"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a two-part series by Logan Paul Gage, of the Discovery Institute, about Intelligent Design. We posted part one last week — this is part two, and today’s post covers two themes: God and beauty.<\/p>\n

<\/i>Intelligent design and the deity<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\"DiscInst.jpg\"<\/span>In the predominant
\nnarrative, Charles Darwin was a humble scientist who proposed a
\nstrictly scientific theory.  Upon publication of The Origin of Species
\nin 1859, religious folks like Bishop Wilberforce voiced theological
\nobjections to it; and thus began the most salient episode in the ‘war
\nbetween science and religion.’  Many Christians adopt a similar
\nnarrative, but suggest this was all a misunderstanding; Darwin’s theory
\nsimply has nothing to do with religious or philosophical questions.<\/p>\n

If
\nI may be so bold, I’d like to suggest that both narratives are wrong. 
\n(For a good, short critique of the “conflict thesis” of science and
\nreligion, see God’s Undertaker by Oxford’s John Lennox.)  If one reads
\nThe Origin, the fact that Darwin is presupposing certain views of God
\nand creation fashionable in Victorian England is striking.  This theory
\ninvolved more than strictly scientific questions from the beginning.<\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

<!–
\ndocument.write('\"TwitThis\"<\/a>‘);
\n\/\/–><\/p>\n


\nOne
\nsuch theological conception common in this debate (touched upon by RJS
\nin a recent post) involves whether God is a “tinkerer.”  Kenneth
\nMiller, Catholic Darwinist of Brown University, sums up this view
\nwell.  He thinks that neo-Darwinism’s view of God is better than ID’s:<\/p>\n

“The
\nGod of the intelligent design movement is way too small….  In their
\nview, he designed everything in the world and yet he repeatedly
\nintervenes and violates the laws of his own creation.  Their God is
\nlike a kid who is not a very good mechanic and has to keep lifting the
\nhood and tinkering with the engine.”<\/p>\n

As C.S. Lewis was fond of
\npointing out, divine action does not require the breaking of laws of
\nnature.  So let’s set that aside and make two other observations.<\/p>\n

First,
\nif ID is only the proposition that an intelligent cause explains some
\nfeatures of nature better than mere material causes, then the ID
\nadvocate is not necessarily committed to intervention in the process of
\ncreation.  God could (intelligently) set up nature to unfold a certain
\nway.  He need not intervene in “gaps.”  All ID requires is that
\nintelligent design was involved and that the effects of this design are
\nempirically discernable.<\/p>\n

Michael Behe, for example, thinks there
\nwere probably not any interventions by God in creation.  Other ID
\ntheorists think otherwise.    <\/p>\n

Second, and more to our point, as
\npost-modern philosophers of science often point out, even the questions
\nwe ask are from a certain frame of reference.  Miller seems to ask,
\n‘Why would God create a world which he has to tinker with?’  But
\nwouldn’t it be equally valid to ask, ‘Why would God design a process in
\nwhich he isn’t going to be involved?’<\/p>\n

Is “tinkering” really the
\nonly way to look at it?  Tinkering is a rather loaded term.  Did Monet
\n“tinker” or did he add detail, richness, and complexity?  Would Monet
\nhave been a better artist if instead of tinkering with paintings he
\ncreated a machine which relied upon a random number generator to
\nmanufacture them without his involvement?  It might have saved him some
\nwork, but it wouldn’t have let him be an artist.  (And one supposes God
\nisn’t too concerned with saving work.)  <\/p>\n

St. Thomas often relied
\nupon the principle that effects cannot be greater than their causes. 
\nIn this regard, wouldn’t it be odd if the creator of artists should not
\nalso be an artist?

The origin of beauty<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

This is the third in a series of three posts, Intelligent Design and the Artist’s Soul.<\/p>\n

Benjamin
\nWiker and Jonathan Witt’s masterful book A Meaningful World:  How the
\nArts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature gives the following
\nillustration of how modern scientific reductionists treat nature and
\nthe arts:<\/p>\n

Imagine hearing the following
\naccount of one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies:  ‘We have been
\nable to prove that this particular symphony is actually reducible to a
\nseries of notes that happen to be played both at the same time in
\nchords and one after another, creating a string of disturbances in the
\nair caused by different frequencies.  We realize, of course, that these
\ndisturbances cause further disturbances in the audience, due in part to
\nthe presence of Earth’s particular atmosphere and in part to the effect
\nsuch disturbances have on the apparatus of the ear as transmitted by
\nneurons to the brain–so disturbing, in fact, that some break into
\nvoluntary tears, remarking that they seemed to be hearing the very
\nharmonies of heaven.  Happily, we now know that there is nothing more
\nto Mozart’s work in particular and to music in general than mere notes,
\nthemselves reducible to waves disturbing air.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When
\nChristian intellectuals hear such things, their general response is to
\nthink that they can have their Darwinian cake and merely scrape off the
\nreductionist icing.  But Darwinism, if I may continue the strained
\nmetaphor, is, it turns out, a layered cake with icing all throughout.<\/p>\n

Continue Wiker and Witt:<\/p>\n

“Such
\nreductionism displays the kind of bluntness of soul we found in Sigmund
\nFreud, which could reduce the glory of Hamlet to the irrational
\ngurglings of sexual desire.  It is the precise bluntness of soul that
\nled Charles Darwin to reduce the origin of music to mating calls and,
\nhence, to the sexual desire that drives sexual selection.”<\/p>\n

The
\nauthors refer here, of course, to Darwin’s reductionist account of
\nmusic in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.  Many
\nChristians think science determines the ‘how’ and religion determines
\nthe ‘why.’  But we see here that in the strange case of Darwinism, this
\nsimply won’t do.  Natural selection swallows up other causal chains. 
\nThe ‘why’ of natural phenomena reduces to ‘because it enhanced
\nreproductive success.’  And beauty–to the artist’s great horror–is no
\nexception.<\/p>\n

As University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne
\nwrites, “any injection of teleology into evolutionary biology violates
\nprecisely the great advance of Darwin’s theory: to explain the
\nappearance of design by a purely materialistic process–no deity
\nrequired.”<\/p>\n

In chapter six of The Origin, Darwin further destroys
\nthe beauty of beauty, demoting it to an illusion which, once again,
\nenhances reproductive fitness.  Darwin there writes that if his theory
\nis truth, nothing in nature was created for the beauty of man.  Nor is
\nbeauty of any real substance, but completely arbitrary.<\/p>\n

The
\nDarwinian, at least in his philosophical commitments, is tone deaf.  As
\nA.N. Wilson (the great biographer of C.S. Lewis) recently wrote of
\nphilosophical materialists in explanation of his re-conversion to
\nChristianity, “they seem to me like people who have no ear for music,
\nor who have never been in love.  It is not that (as they believe) they
\nhave rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion–prophets do that in
\nevery generation.  Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on
\nsomething that is not difficult to grasp.  Perhaps it is too obvious to
\nunderstand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should
\nhave come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.”<\/p>\n

Nature’s
\ndesign is just like this.  Too obvious to grasp.  (As Lewis said, fish
\ndon’t feel wet.)  But this is why we need the artist.  For the artist
\nsenses the transcendent and eternal in the mundane and temporal.  She
\nmakes plain what should be plain; stirs in us what is simmering
\nunconsciously.  Conveys the immaterial through the material.<\/p>\n

So
\nwhy have so many of the best artists of our generation, even rather
\nsecular ones–the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.s, the Tom Wolfes, etc.–been
\nunable to shake their skepticism of Darwinian fairytales?  Because
\nDarwin’s view strikes at the heart of the artist’s soul, reducing all
\npurposes, all agency actually, to survival.  The Darwinian world is no
\nlonger a shadowland, for it is without Sun.  To the artist, however,
\nsuch reductionism will ever echo falsely in the quiet hour, when
\nanother world whispers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a two-part series by Logan Paul Gage, of the Discovery Institute, about Intelligent Design. We posted part one last week — this is part two, and today’s post covers two themes: God and beauty. Intelligent design and the deity In the predominant narrative, Charles Darwin was a humble scientist who proposed a strictly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-faith"],"yoast_head":"\nFriday is for Friends: Logan Paul Gage - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/06\/friday-is-for-friends-logan-pa-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Friday is for Friends: Logan Paul Gage - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is a two-part series by Logan Paul Gage, of the Discovery Institute, about Intelligent Design. 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