Recovering Evangelicals

#130 – Intelligent Design – an introduction

Aug 11, 2023

01:03:24

A short introduction to start a mini-series on this Christian apologetic idea, and some of the reasons why we have such difficulty with it.

Intelligent Design” has attracted much criticism — certainly from the secular, scientific community, but even from Christians of all stripes … including ourselves. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk to some of the most prominent advocates of this controversial idea …. as well as to scientists who are the world experts in the areas on which those advocates build their pro-ID arguments. But before we do that, we thought we’d re-release an episode that we recorded three years ago, which introduces this controversial idea and sums up many of the reasons why we find it so hard to fully embrace it.

Our main stopping points in the discussion included:

why “Intelligent Design” is hard for Christians to resist: “we’re made/designed by God, and God would be intelligent”
why we can’t embrace Intelligent Design: too many examples of design which are not just clumsy (the retina of our eye) or unclear to us (goose bumps; ability to wiggle our ears; fingernails), but even many which are just fundamentally wicked:
- the joining of our food-pipe and wind-pipe results in a horrible death for people who breath at the wrong time while swimming, or took too big a bite out of their sandwich, or who have Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), or gastric acid reflux leading to respiratory dysfunction;
- childbirth: without modern medicine, too many mothers and babies die a horrible and slow death through exhaustion from not being able to expel the baby, or slowly bleeding to death, or having the life slowly squeezed out.
it’s awkward (to say the least!) to speak of a God who intervenes in our lives to give us beautiful design when there are these examples of horrible design, just like it’s hard to attribute good outcomes to an intervening God when horribly bad things happen to other people around us (like saying “God steered this tornado right around our house and saved us from destruction,” when that same tornado destroyed the neighbor’s house and killed his kids)
those “horrible examples” are better explained by evolution working from the bottom-up and landing on solutions to a problem that work most of the time, than a carefully-considered design from the top-down
we need more clarity and nuance around words like random, undirected, designed, and orchestrated
genetic evolution does not only operate through small, incremental changes in the genetic code (which is as far as Intelligent Design advocates want to take this conversation); there are many other mechanisms that lead to sudden and big changes (many of which we talked about in detail with Dr. James Shapiro in Episode #70):
- gene duplication, with subsequent modification and selection
- pre-programmed gene shuffling and re-organization
- information inherited from the mother through machines inside the egg (the mitochondria) and molecules (glycoproteins) on the “skin” of the egg
- recombination of pairs of chromosomes
- “epigenetics” (this is an umbrella term which simply means everything that doesn’t involve genes”)
even the writers of scripture, the ancient Hebrews, recognized childbirth as an argument against design, which is why they re-framed it as a punishment against breaking a Divine law.
God can create using naturalistic mechanism (the Big Bang; chemical evolution; genetic evolution; natural selection)
the “horrible examples” described above are not examples of previously good designs which were broken by the Fall in the Garden, as many Young Earth Creationists will propose; they are instead fundamental designs right from the start.