Evolution and "Intelligent Design"

If the devil is in the details, then God must be in… what? The usual answer is: in the big picture. Upon first appearance, at least, a lot of life’s details suggest anything but a divine presence. A tsunami and a degenerative disease here, a drunken driver and a child molester there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real disorder, and maybe even a disorder-er. What helps is the idea of an unseen Someone transforming the whole of things, destructive chaos included, into something better. Genesis 1:1-2:4? We get the picture.

Or do we? The other day, a federal judge intervened in yet another school district’s affairs over the teaching of biology in the schools, this time to order removal of a sticker from the inside front covers of biology textbooks. The sticker reads: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and criticially considered.”

Apparently what bothered the judge in this particular case was the subterfuge involved in the school board’s tactics. There is nothing really all that off-base about the sticker itself; suitably modified, its words could fit any science textbook. But the intent behind them is something else: a not so subtle endorsement of a particular religious view about the origin of human life, in violation of the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause. Random mutation and natural selection are only theories, the label suggests, while implying that God’s spirit brooding over the waters of chaos is fact. Well, maybe --- in both cases --- but if we are to decide responsibly, we will need to appeal just as much to science as to theology for help.

And on this matter, science continues to speak clearly, and credibly, if not with one mind at least with very few differing ones. Evolutionary biology, the scientists keep reminding us, derives its strength from its ability to probe the details of human life’s emergence from simpler life-forms. By contrast, the theologians should be reminding us, creationism is an attempt to put all the details in a broader perspective that speaks to the much larger human question of “what for?” The Priestly and Yahwist writers of the Old Testament would have understood this distinction well. They were big picture guys, after all; they left most of the details to the really Big Guy. And yet, here some of us are, clinging for dear life to the view that the Bible is the only textbook people will ever need on the mechanisms as well the purpose of human beings’ appearance on earth.
At least, until very recently. Lately, we are beginning to hear something else from creationists, to the effect that all of the biological evidence taken together suggests that (1) there is “intelligent design” at the very heart of living things, and (2) that this suggestion should be spelled out in our biology textbooks as an alternative to the evolutionary theory that now appears in them. Clever. Old-style creationism, the strategists realize, is just too hard a sell; so they are slipping it in under a new label. A Pennsylvania school district is leading the way, through administrators making the rounds of biology classes, ostensibly to increase student awareness of the Intelligent Designer of the universe. It will be interesting to see whether the concept will shed any light on details like geese practicing monogamy. Somehow, “male and female God made them” just doesn’t seem to be relevant here.

Here are two recommendations for parents and leaders of the aforementioned school districts. First, lead the applause for the view that there are abundant suggestions of design throughout the universe, and make sure that as many of these suggestions as possible are fleshed out in philosophy and religion textbooks. Second, get back to the basics in biology.Why? Because big pictures deal with questions that accumulations of details do not and cannot: questions of purpose and direction, rather than questions of mechanisms. And if we will leave science to work on the details, we’ll keep the devil just where we want him. It’s when we let him mess around with our big pictures that things begin to go to hell.
Most creationists use the Bible in the way that Calvinism once did, as the one and only book we will ever need in order to learn everything about everything. Christian evolutionists who are also credentialed scientists seem content with the more limited view of biblical authority that can be found in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions: the Bible contains the truths that are necessary for salvation, but not all truth whatsoever. For them God, and God’s world, are bigger even than God’s own book.