When I was but a wee baby boy, my mother used to take me to church. (Officially, I'm Episcopalian.) She was of the "take him and let him make up his own mind" school. And one day we tried a new church, one where there was a hideously ugly plaster statue of Christ on the cross, and as people proceeded down the aisle toward their pews, they were expected to make some kind of obeisance to the effigy behind the altar. Well, to me it looked as if everyone was curtsying to this horrid looming statue, and I didn't want to do it. But suddenly there was this massive wave of disapproval from everyone nearby, this burden of expectation and outrage that seemed to come out of nowhere. In that instant, I knew this church thing was not for me.
Confirmation came a few years later. A friend of my mother's, hearing that we had not been to church in a while, said that we ought to go with him the next Sunday. We essentially said Why Not, and got dressed up and bundled ourselves into his car. On the way to the church, the police pulled us over. The driver, it turned out, had a bunch of unpaid tickets or something, there was a bench warrant for his arrest, and the police took him away. They asked whether we wanted to be dropped off at the church or at home, and we most definitely went home. "God has spoken," we said. "And He says that we don't have to go to church anymore." Which was perfectly fine with us.
Which leaves me, as the singles ads put it, "spiritual but not religious." Certainly not an atheist, and not really an agnostic either. I believe in something, but on the whole I'm perfectly happy not knowing what that something is. For me, Shaw's definition of a Life Force works just as well as anything else. My belief does not need to be specific to be real. At the same time, I am completely resistant to the blandishments of any and all churches when they try to tell me that they alone know what is true and right. Thanks very much, I think I can decide that for myself--and live just as virtuous, just as spiritual, a life in the process.
My attitude toward science is kinda sorta similar, now that I think of it. I don't understand most of it, and numbers have always made my head spin. I once read something to the effect of "We don't know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow morning--it's only a very high probability." Which means that in the end, nothing is completely provable, you can only "prove" anything to a high degree of probability. Good scientists understand this, and are always prepared for a new theory to come along that might unseat the old theories, and this to me seems a healthy way to look at things.
We cannot prove that man descended from apes through a process of natural selection. As everyone knows, there is a missing link in that chain. To those who are particularly vehement in their support of intelligent design (or creationism, or whatever other stalking horse is put forth by those who really seek to assert that the Bible is literally true in all its aspects), this demonstrates that evolution (already a misnomer, as I noted yesterday) is unproven and is therefore no more "scientific" than intelligent design.
But the thing is, it is. We already know that evolution happens--just look at bacterial infections. It's been all over the news for several years now that various bacteria are developing resistance to our overused antibiotics. That's evolution in action right there--and further, it's natural selection in action. Want proof of evolution? Walk into a hospital's emergency room during flu season.
It may only be a high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm confident enough in that probability--I have enough faith in that probability, as established scientifically in ways I do not fully understand--to go to sleep at night without worrying about whether the sun will be there in the morning. As most of us do, without a second thought.
So. Why is it that I find myself more or less in agreement with the broad thinking behind intelligent design? Because I do believe in that Life Force, or whatever it is you prefer to call it; and because, though I do not understand mathematics, I know that in its broad strokes, what math accomplishes comes close to godliness. The pattern of tines on a pine cone can be described by a mathematical sequence called the Fibonacci series; an equation perfectly describes every spiral you've ever seen, from the swirl of two paints mixing together to the steam rising from your coffee cup; light moves at a constant, measurable speed, as does sound. In short, even things that seem to be random turn out to have some sort of pattern to them, some sort of--for lack of a better word--design. The patterns fit together, the design works. And if there is a design, it's reasonable to infer some sort of designer--even though I refuse to anthropomorphize the designer into a god. For all I know, mathematics may itself be the god we seek.
But intelligent design is not provable, not even to a low degree of certainty. It rests, finally and fundamentally, on belief, in your willingness (nay, your eagerness) to infer a designer from the design. And in a school setting, I would be very happy to discuss intelligent design in a philosophy class, a comparative religion class, I would even be happy to study it in a biology class--at the individual teacher's discretion. But what I don't want is for some busybody to come along and tell an entire school district that in science class this non-scientific idea must be studied on an equivalent basis to evolution.
That is when, as Einstein said, we see "...an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science...." Yet Einstein is also correct when he asserts that religion and science are dependent on each other--the Fibonacci series does not diminish my spiritual appreciation of a pine cone, rather it enhances it by pointing out how magnificent that seemingly-simple design is.
Those who have for so long inveighed against evolution often seem to be doing so because they're personally offended at the notion of descent from apes. This is, to put the nicest possible face on it, a kind of anthropological snobbery. Me, I'm fascinated by the ways we fit into the greater design, and the fact of evolution, the way simpler structures tend to transform into more complex structures, fills me with hope that we're all on an emergent path, toward not just greater complexity, but greater greatness.
But in the meantime, I'll thank you to keep your grubby little mitts off my science curricula.
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