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What about Intelligent Design?
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Watch the following video clip:
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I need to be careful here in saying what I believe and what I do not believe:
- I have argued that creation shows much evidence of design and that behind this there is an intelligence, i.e. God. This is my view as a Christian.
- So why do I not believe in Intelligent Design (capital I, capital D)? I see this as a stance which tries to take certain complex structures in the natural world and argue that they could not come about by evolution. The argument is that the individual components within them would not have shown an evolutionary advantage and therefore the whole structure could not evolve without the help of a Designer. This seems to be a direct analogy to William Paley’s assertion that if you find a watch on heathland you assume that there must be a Watchmaker.
- There are two problems, as I see it, with this approach. First of all, it seems to relegate God to only being necessary to those parts of the created order that defy simple explanation. We concede the rest. Then, as scientists begin to find explanations (as they have with the eye), those areas under the care of a Designer become smaller. Both of these result in a God-of-the-gaps type theory.
- In my view it makes much more sense to see the elegance and tenacity of the whole evolutionary process as being the mechanism God has used to create the world we see around us today. We’ve already seen that this is far from being random. Anthony Flew, a former atheistic philosopher, argued that developments in genetics were the factor that most convinced him that the argument from design pointed strongly towards the reality of God.
Use the email address below to give feedback / ask questions to the author, whose views these pages reflect
Six Big Questions Rev John Hibberd sixbigquestions@throughfaithmissions.org |
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