(Picture from http://www.faradayschools.com/re-topics/re-year-10-11/god-of-the-gaps/)
At the recent Vulnerable Mission
conference at Norwich Central Baptist Church (See here for details) I presented a paper which
compared and contrasted Western dualism with rural African monism. This paper will
in due course be made available. In the
meantime, as an example of Western dualism, I present below the first part of a
case study. This case study is based on a post by North American IDist Vincent J Torley
which appeared on the “Intelligent Design” (sic) blog Uncommon Descent.
In his post Torley defends his
version of Intelligent Design against criticism by Orthodox theologian
David Hart. In a previous post by Torley we discover
that Hart has thrown out two blanket criticisms of Intelligent Design. These
are:
a) ID depends on “gaps” in the
natural order
b) ID also posits a part time
God who tinkers on and off with creation.
I can’t answer for Hart, who in
any case appears to exclusively (and
wrongly) identify the kind of views that Torley typically represents as
Intelligent Design - in fact so does Torley himself. This is Torley’s first big
mistake: As I once pointed out Christian physicist
John Polkinghorne would, if pushed, also claim to be an intelligent design
creationist and yet like myself he is loath to align his views with the
category of ID that many North American evangelicals promote. However, Hart
nevertheless raises criticisms that are similar to my own and this consequently
draws Torley out, exposing his dualist philosophy, a philosophy which embeds
the false folk dichotomy that can be expressed as: Either
God did it or Natural forces did it!
Below I’ve taken several quotes
from Torley’s long post and point out where I feel his categories are going awry.
Let’s begin with a definition. In its broadest sense, the theory of
intelligent design (ID) holds that certain empirically observable features of
the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause,
and that this intelligent cause can be shown to be the best explanation by
applying the scientific method in order to rule out rival explanations, such as chance and/or necessity. (I assume that
Dr. Hart is thoroughly familiar with Professor Dembski’s explanatory filter, so
I won’t elaborate further.)
My Comment: Straightaway Torley is
contrasting ID over and against “Law and Disorder” (Law and Disorder –
what Torley inappropriately refers to as “chance
and necessity”) by declaring them as rival
explanations. (See my highlight in the quote from Torley). Dembki’s
explanatory filter is partly if not fully to blame here because it polarizes
apart Intelligence and Law & Disorder into two rival categories of
explanation. Instead L&D should be included
in the set of observable features
(sic) that are used to decide whether a
meta-intelligence is to be invoked to make sense of those features. Dembki’s
filter does work with human and alien
intelligence but even here it is arguable that at the most fundamental level it
breaks down: If one is an atheist and believes L&D are the primary reality
then one is likely to believe that intelligence is only a secondary cause which in turn is itself a product of L&D. So,
in short, Torley is already paving the way for a “God did it vs natural forces did it” shoot-out. His polarised
categories invite the contrary belief that L&D are primary and not
secondary. Torley should be framing the
question not as a choice between God and natural processes but rather as a question
of whether the cosmos has features, features
which are inclusive of L&D, which connote to us an all-embracing primary creative
intelligence.
One obvious objection is that such a Deity might be nothing more
than a mere Demiurge, who imposes forms on the cosmos but does not conserve it
in existence. But if one could show that the features of the cosmos which
indicate a Designer are not merely incidental but essential or defining
properties of the cosmos, then it would follow that the cosmos could not exist
without those features – in which case, the Designer Who is responsible for
those features is also responsible for keeping the cosmos in being……
……So it should certainly be possible for us to determine which
properties are its defining properties, and scientifically investigate whether
these properties show signs of having been designed. An affirmative answer
would mean that the Designer doesn’t merely tinker with the cosmos, but rather,
gives it its very identity, and makes it what it is. (Let me add in passing
that like many Scholastic philosophers, I consider the notion of a “pure
passive potency” underlying all forms to be utterly unintelligible: like
Suarez, I hold that even prime matter has a form of some sort.) Hence I see no
reason in principle why cosmological Intelligent Design could not take us to a
Deity Who maintains the world in being, as opposed to a mere Demiurge who does
nothing more than impose his designs on a pre-existing cosmos. Of course, the
argument for such a Deity would need to be fleshed out in a mathematically and
scientifically rigorous fashion, which is something that has yet to be done.
My Comment: The ID community that Torley represents has only got itself to
blame for this concept of the demiurge rearing its ugly head. If you are going to
use an explanatory filter which explicitly sets up L&D and
God intelligence as two rival explanations then it
is a very natural inference that God is a being who works within the natural order as would a demiurge, rather than transcends it If, as Torley puts it, an intelligent cause is a rival
explanation to natural forces then this is not at all conducive to the view
that this intelligence is active in maintaining (presumably creating) those forces! Torley’s insistence on setting up God as a rival explanation to "natural explanations" leads to a deep intuitive paradox in his theology. As Hart's reaction shows, interpreting the North American ID God as akin to a demiurge is a very easy step to take.
But Dr. Carroll might reply that if naturalism explains the world
more parsimoniously than what he calls “the God hypothesis,” then we may
provisionally conclude, as a working hypothesis, that naturalism is true.
Carroll also contends – and here, I think, he is on shaky ground – that simpler
explanations are inherently more likely to be true, other things being equal.
On this logic, then, even if we cannot know that naturalism is true, we might
reasonably judge it to be likely, or probable.
My comment: Here we see Torley
interpreting atheist physicist Sean Carroll to be a user of the same categories
as himself, that is the naturalism vs.
God hypothesis dichotomy. I can’t speak for Carroll of course, but it is
conceivable that one may accept in its entirety the kind of “naturalistic”
account of the cosmos offered by Carroll and yet at the same time be an intelligent design creationist. How is
this? This is because theism, in its most general form, effectively adds on another layer of metaphysical structure
in order to purportedly explain these nomological facts (to use the very
words of Sean Carroll as quoted by Torley).
That is, theism doesn't necessarily compete with naturalistic histories and
processes but rather takes the natural order and embeds it in a higher level
theological narrative. Of course, it goes without saying that for Sean Carroll
this is, “an unnecessary complication” (quoting
Carroll) and so he leaves it rather than takes it. I am not here to discuss
Carroll’s views but instead wish to point out the difference between theism as
an all-embracing meta-narrative that
takes explanation to a whole new level and Torley’s take on theism whereby he
habitually perceives “naturalism” as a rival
of explanation to his homunculus intelligent design paradigm. Where Torley has gone wrong is that instead of
proposing God intelligence as a competing narrative to natural forces he
should be proposing it as a meta
narrative which embeds the
scientific account of “natural forces”.
Further on in his post Torley
quotes Thomas Aquinas:
[D]ivine power can sometimes produce an effect, without prejudice to
its providence, apart from the order
implanted in natural things by God. In fact, He does this at times to
manifest His power. For it can be manifested in no better way, that the whole
of nature is subject to the divine will, than by the fact that sometimes He
does something outside the order of nature. Indeed, this makes it evident that
the order of things has proceeded from Him, not by natural necessity, but by
free will.
My Comment: Here Aquinas is of course
talking about the miraculous as a discontinuity in the flow of “normalcy”. Now,
I’m not going to argue against miracles, but interestingly Torley sees this
quote through his polarizing lens:
Here, Aquinas says that God’s power and voluntary agency “can be
manifested in no better way … than by the fact that He sometimes does something
outside the order of nature.” I conclude that he would have had no qualms
whatsoever about appealing to effects that require a supernatural Cause, in
order to convince skeptics of God’s existence. The question which then arises
is: are there any scientifically observable occurrences within the natural
world, which point to its having a supernatural Cause?
My Comment: So Torley is looking for the discontinuities of the miraculous as
pointers to the supernatural; fair enough, as we can’t rule out occasional
miracles, but what if Torley fails to find them? Would that mean everything is
“natural” and therefore there is no supernatural God? These thoughts flow very
naturally from Torley’s dualistic thinking which has the effect of setting the supernatural in conflict with the natural.
Torley quotes Hart:
…[T]hose who argue for the existence of God principally from some
feature or other of apparent cosmic design… have not advanced beyond the
demiurgic picture of God. By giving the name ‘God’ to whatever as yet unknown
agent or property or quality might account for this or that particular
appearance of design, they have produced a picture of God that it is
conceivable the sciences could some day genuinely make obsolete, because it
really is a kind of rival explanation to the explanations the sciences seek…
My Comment: This argument by Hart follows if the role of God is one of being an
explanatory stopgap; that is, as an explanation to fill the gaps not currently covered
by Law and Disorder explanations. This God-of-the-gaps
God is indeed in danger of being explained away. The fact that the North American
ID community have staked so much on the idea that Law and Disorder are in
principle insufficient to generate life means that their role for God faces
this threat. But having said that Hart doesn’t tell us that if science should ever be
in the position of providing a complete L&D description of nature, then the
properties and qualities of the cosmos would include some very extraordinary
laws; those laws are extraordinary by virtue of the computational complexity needed to locate a suite of laws capable of generating life in what is in fact a short algorithmic time. The upshot is that this still flags an intelligent design alert, albeit at the meta level rather than the competing alternative explanation level proposed
by Torley.
At some stage, we reach an ultimate mathematical framework which
explains how the multiverse works. If even this framework exhibits features which
indicate design, then the design must be an essential feature of the cosmos,
rather than a merely incidental one.
My Comment: I’m inclined to agree with
Torley here: My main difference with Torley and his de-facto ID community is
that they are staking too much on a belief that an L&D physical regime is
in principle incapable of generating life, a belief which has the
knock-on-effect of setting God against his own physical regime.
But having said I agree with
Torley that attempts to press the L&D paradigm further by trying to explain
our own L&D physical regime in terms of a higher level L&D regime (such
as a multiverse) simply leads to a turtles all the way down regress.. There is
no way in which the universe can be explained with trivial truisms even if one
resorts to multiverse theory. Whichever way one tries to skin it, peculiar and
contingent conditions have to be assumed as a starting point in one’s theory. So, in as much as we are faced with the inescapable truism that our theories of the
cosmos will always start with non-trivial conditions this will invite a design
meta-narrative, and in this respect I would certainly agree with Torley. (Ref:
See here and here).
Torley quotes Hart as follows:
For Thomas Aquinas, for instance, God creates the order of nature by
infusing the things of the universe with the wonderful power of moving
themselves toward determinate ends; he uses the analogy of a shipwright able to
endow timbers with the power into develop in to a ship without external
intervention.
My Comment: To me this is at odds with
what Hart has already said; namely that one can’t appeal to this or that particular cosmic feature or
property as suggesting a need for a design meta
narrative. In fact here Hart seems to be appealing to the observed fruitfulness
of the physical regime to generate life as evidence of God’s work, which to me
looks like a design feature prompting a design meta narrative! This paradox may
have arisen because Hart, like other Westerners such as Torley, have two distinct
categories when they should have one; that is Hart, like Torley sees the power
of God in contradistinction to the innate power of nature.
However, Hart tries to square
the circle by suggesting that this innate natural power has been outsourced to
nature by God himself. This, I suppose, is better than Torley who, like the
rest of his ID community sees the power nature as a rival explanation to God.
But somehow Hart’s view still feels a little wrong. If nature is sufficiently
endowed to generate life it would be a product of the patterns imposed by the
cosmic L&D regime that run it. That L&D regime doesn’t look to me like
some innate animistic power because this regime is a statement of pattern rather than innate power and has more the
character of a transcendent object controlling nature. To me this is suggestive
of God’s ever present immanent power rather an innate “natural” power. Perhaps
I’m making too fine a distinction, here! But be that as it may, it remains
clear to me that Torley and his Christian subculture are promoting a problematic
paradigm, as we shall continue to see.
…to be continued
