Letter To The Editor

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Pneuma 29 (2007) 179-181

Letter to the Editor

Paul Elbert

Church of God T eological Seminary, Cleveland, TN 37320-3330

(December 7, 2006)

Frank D. Macchia’s editorial, “Intelligent Design: Bad Science?,” Pneuma 28/1 (2006): 1-3, raises two points that call for clariﬁcation. He ﬁnds interesting the “widespread rejection of intelligent design among those who have spoken out on the issue from within the scientiﬁc academy,” based on the “assumption” that such design is “theology and not science.” After some commentary on that, he concludes that the comprehension and appreciation of intel- ligent design “will likely not make any inroads in the scientiﬁc academy. Maybe it will cause some within the academy to pause and consider that the mystery at the base of life points to a transcendent mystery. It will be our task to grant that mystery a name and a narrative. It will be the Spirit’s task to make these compelling. Intelligent design is not at all ‘bad science,’ only science from within a faith perspective.”

As to the current spate of publicly expressed rejection of the inference of design from within the scientiﬁc community as communicated to the public media, it surely must be noted that this rejection is often consistent with prominent law suits to keep “creationism” or “young-Earthism” out of public school classrooms as well as with the need to respond to the agenda of intelligent design as advocated by the Discovery Institute, an enterprise with ties to the physically cessationistic “cult of creationism” (so, Hebrew scholar, William S. LaSor). In fairness to the scientiﬁc community, after over a half-century of exposure to the anti- scientiﬁc and educationally harmful claims of young-Earthism, scientists and professional scientiﬁc societies with a patriotic concern for the welfare of their country have decided to speak out most forcefully. Many view the intelligent design of the Discovery Institute as “stealth creationism,” as a view of design having no past in Earth history. Intelligent design of that sort will have no academic credibility whatever unless and until it entirely and publicly divorces itself from, as well as repudiates, the sectarian claims of young-Earthism, cf. too my review of Langdon Gilkey, Blue Twilight: Nature, Creationism, and American Religion (Pneuma 25/1 [2003]: 134-38). More theologians might recognize this current situation as a component of the scientiﬁc community’s rejection of design that they perceive as pinned to a destructive sectarian agenda.

Indeed, it must also be recognized in this regard that it was from within the scientiﬁc community that evidence for design was ﬁrst observed and appreciated as a reasonable and attractive philosophical speculation. The anthropic principle, suggestive of physical parameters being designed for the beneﬁt of humankind as carefully enunciated by Barrow and Tipler

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in their famous book on the subject, followed the discovery in 1965 of a cosmic beginning. This discovery allowed humankind for the ﬁrst time to conﬁrm the truth of the prophetic claim by the Genesis narrator that there actually was a beginning, now detected to have happened 13.7 billion years ago. After 1965, the world scientiﬁc community resonated with the implications of a Beginner, as Einstein had earlier suggested might be the case. Perhaps at this juncture humankind entered into a new era, the Era of the Glimpse of God (“The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Review Article,” TrinJ 23/1 [2002]: 81-101 [96 ]). In 1978, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this discovery of a beginning, the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, a faint, cold, and heretofore elusive heat- radiation left over from the intensely hot beginning of the universe. When Penzias and Wilson accepted their Nobel Prize, Penzias commented on the theological implications, namely, that a beginning suggested a Beginner. Just this year, in the new era, another Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery in 1992 of tiny ripples in that same radiation, a discovery that made the front page of the London Times for ﬁve consecutive days and solved the long-standing design problem of how galaxies formed. When George Smoot made that discovery he told the public media that it was like looking at the face of God.

In the biologically-related sectors of the scientiﬁc community, the intricate and spectacular biomechanical and biochemical structure of cells clearly suggests design and hence a Designer, if the existence of God is accepted. Although not a falsiﬁable observation, this probable design is widely noticed, and if not for the tense social upheaval and terrible tes- timony being provided by some Evangelical Christians (happily by a few Pentecostals) who seek to discard all of natural science, replace it with “true science” and rewrite Earth history, this appearance of molecular design would be more widely acknowledged. Also, biologically- related is the discovery of narrow restrictions on the proposed evolutionary mechanism within complex organisms, that is, the theory that beneﬁcial mutations over and against the thousand times more numerous deleterious mutations can result in an evolutionary change to a more complex organism. This phenomenon appears highly unlikely in individuals numbering in the quadrillions with body size larger than a centimeter and has never been observed, cf. too my critique of the unnecessarily excessive claims of paleontologist Andrew Knoll, “Genesis 1 and the Spirit: A Narrative-Rhetorical Ancient Near Eastern Reading in Light of Modern Science,” JPT 15/1 (2006): 23-72 (61-63). The abrupt origin of animals some 600 million years ago in the Ediacaran period and similar abrupt ensuing origins of structurally diﬀerent animals suggests non-naturalistic events, that is, miraculous creative events. Given that a physical law of increasing complexity has not been found anywhere in the universe, although much hoped for and needed to support evolutionary theory, it is now becoming apparent from a scientiﬁc perspective that both the origin and the history of life on Earth is probably more consis tent with divine creative action within invisibility than with evolutionary assumptions. An interesting ﬁrst tiny step to suggest a testable and falsiﬁable creation model for all inter connected physical reality has just recently been advanced, cf. Hugh Ross, Creation and Science (NavPress, 2006).

Macchia, perhaps following historical claims of assured evolutionism by some contemporary public voices in the biological sector of the scientiﬁc community, who do not, however, speak with such assurance for the entire scientiﬁc community on the evolutionary hypothesis, states in his editorial that “evolutionary theory has vast explanatory power.” This is a popular

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perception, but one not currently shared by all experimental biologists, chemists, and physi- cists. However, given that experimental biological research is not guided by evolutionary theory, the vast amount of valuable published results being independent of the theory, it is excessive to claim that this theory, and no other, explains experimental ﬁndings. More modestly, it is a convenient descriptive tool traditionally employed by this sector of the scientiﬁc community. Whether individual researchers personally believe in this theory is another matter altogether. Some obviously do; others do not. I must repeat, however, that experimental research itself is not guided thereby, as, for example, the several experimental discoveries demonstrating that modern humankind is not genetically related to the last of the hominids. Neanderthals are not our biological ancestors, an experimental result entirely inconsistent with neo-Darwinian assumptions and premature claims. Similarly, the theory that life arose naturalistically from some non-living molecule and organisms of increasing complexity gradually emerged by an unknown mechanism is simply a hypothesis now facing an uphill battle with experimental ﬁndings.

Lastly, I agree with Macchia, that Christians who attempt to be in tune with the Spirit of God should participate in granting life on Earth a narrative that the Spirit can conﬁrm. This conﬁrmation comes via testable experimental ﬁndings, not premature or unnecessarily ideological speculation. Moreover, and I am sure that most Pentecostals would agree, care must be taken not to attribute to a physically improbable and heretofore undiscovered evolutionary phenomenon what the Spirit himself has actively and personally created.

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