Also featured in the Outlook forum this issue: Reflections on Intelligent Design by Mark Achtemeier
Intelligent design has become a common cultural code phrase. It appears in our newspapers. It inspires indignation, delight, dismay, confusion and curiosity. A deeper look is worth the effort to understand what is going on.
To understand how “Intelligent Design” is used in our society today, we need to look back at the history of evolution over the past 150 years, and fundamentalist responses to it beginning in about 1920. We also need to think clearly about the finer distinctions between modern science and religion.
Darwin‘s Origins
The history of evolution took wing with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species on November 22, 1859. In it, he outlined the implications of observations made while traveling on the British survey ship Beagle 1831-1836. Darwin’s ideas created religious upset in some quarters, and continue to do so to this day.
Unbeknownst to Darwin, Gregor Mendel, a Czech-born Austrian monk, was conducting experiments on the genetics of pea plants that fit well with Darwin’s observations. He published two lectures in 1865 and journal articles in 1866. His work was unnoticed, and forgotten for 30 years.
Mendel’s work includes some fundamentals we all appreciate: Everyone has two biological parents. Children look like their parents. Children are not identical to their parents. Most of us consider these three obvious facts truisms, and therefore we believe the fundamentals of evolution.
To these basics, Darwin added that, for the animals he observed, not all offspring survive, and that only the progeny that survive to have descendents will pass along their genetic material. Mendel added the notion of genes, the particles of heredity that parents pass to children in a way that a child receives half his genetic complement from each parent, without blending. He worked out the basic arithmetic of inheritance.
In 1902, Walter Sutton of Columbia University found that grasshopper sperm cells had only half as many chromosomes (DNA strands in the cell nucleus) as other cells. He asserted that genes are part of chromosomes, and that they are inherited, half from each parent, just as Mendel described. This notion was widely accepted by the 1950s.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published their description of DNA. They revealed the now-famous double helix, a molecule shaped like a spiral staircase in which each step was one of four letters in our basic genetic code. By 2001, the Human Genome Project had decoded a complete copy of the human genome: a spiral stair with 3.2 billion steps! Our DNA is in 23 pairs of chromosomes (seen by Sutton a century earlier) and we inherit half of them from each parent, as Mendel had deduced in 1865.
Modern evolution, from the viewpoint of the biological sciences, consists of far more than Darwin’s work. For example, the DNA coding structure is found in every known living thing on our planet. It is one line of evidence for a central tenet of evolution, “Common Descent,” which holds that all life on earth is genetically linked by common ancestors. We are members of a single family of life on earth.
Modern evolution also uses lines of evidence from plate tectonics and geology. Plate tectonics is the well-regarded science of how continental plates form and move on the liquid core of the earth’s mantle. It provides a coherent explanation for findings of identical fossils at what are today widely distant places. It does the same for some modern animals as well: marsupials in Australia, and the opossum in North America with no apparent connection other than through plate tectonics.
The ancient age of the earth, also documented by multiple lines of evidence, from geology, is another key to biological evolution. It shows what great spans of time have been available in the past for species to change significantly.
Today, evolutionary theory (no longer called “Darwinian evolution” by scientists) draws on multiple lines of scientific evidence that include DNA analysis, Darwin’s proposals and new ones, such as punctuated equilibrium, for how organisms change, fossils of ancient species, plate tectonics, geology, astronomy and cosmology, and statistical analysis of populations.
These multiple lines of evidence are so well woven together that there is little serious scientific doubt or debate (other than for some details) about the evolution of living things, including ourselves.
The cultural response to evolution
Beginning around 1920 there grew up in the United States a response to Darwinian evolution as well as to the analytical study of the Bible, then centered in Germany.
A “back to fundamentals” movement began that stressed biblical literalism. As early as 1909-1912 a U.S. group circulated a 12-volume work called “The Fundamentals.”
The 1930s saw the formation of independent fundamentalist churches in the U.S. By the end of the Vietnam War, fundamentalism was waging a political war, as well as a cultural one, and these efforts focused on banning evolution from science classes, or on having creationism taught side-by-side with science.
The movement, which has evolved considerably, persists to this day, and includes creationists, young earth creationists, creation scientists, and advocates of Intelligent Design. To generalize, creationists believe the world and all we see was created exactly as described in the Bible, but longish time spans are permitted. Young earth creationists believe the creation was short, and occurred about 6,000 years ago.
Creation scientists believe that science can document their beliefs about a literal Biblical creation–document that the world and all we see was created as we observe it today. In this view, fossils are not the remains of ancient creatures; they were created as we see them today. Creation scientists often use the trappings of modern science (scholarly-appearing papers; fancy footnotes; and citations out of context) to advance their religion in the classroom agenda.
The cultural battle
Most recently, creationists have adopted the phrase “intelligent design” with its handmaiden “irreducible complexity” as the Trojan horse to bring religion-as-science into K-12 classrooms.
In current creationist usage, Intelligent Design claims that there are elements of the observable world that can be documented as “irreducibly complex” by the tools of science, and which are therefore special creations by “Intelligent Design.”
Most scientists know that there is no science behind Intelligent Design, and therefore it has no place in a science classroom. Not, mind you, that it has no place in the education of our children, but that it has no place masquerading as science. If it were science, it would offer up testable assertions for other scientists to evaluate. It does not.
Several objections to teaching Intelligent Design are clear. Some object because the religious beliefs are not science, but faith assertions, and not subject to verifiability. Some object on the basis that the public schools should not teach one religion to the exclusion of another. Either way, the fight is joined.
Presbyterians hold the view that God created the Universe. God is intelligent. The Universe, therefore, is an intelligent design. Some of us, therefore, use Intelligent Design conversationally without regard to its strong politico-religious connotations.
Presbyterian beliefs
We believe God created the Universe. We are God’s creatures. We are endowed with an immortal soul. All these are matters of our faith.
We also seek to understand God’s physical creation, and that modern science helps us in understanding the creation. It provides testable ways to understand the observable world better. Many of us believe that the revelations of science bring us closer to God–by revealing more of His creation.
God’s creation is continuing. It began long before we were present to contemplate it. More will be revealed in the future.
We strive to use our God-given intellect and curiosity–the combination within us of our faith and our science–to understand the totality of our humanity.
Walter R. T. Witschey is director of the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond and a Presbyterian elder. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University. Dr. Witschey was president of the Virginia Academy of Science 2003-04.
©Copyright 2006 Walter R. T. Witschey.
Used by permission.
