I watched Ben Stein's movie, "Expelled", the other day. It was interesting in many ways, but one question that came up for me was this: Isn't every believing LDS, by default, a proponent of intelligent design? I mean, whether you believe the straight story from Genesis or whether you believe evolution was involved, every LDS who believes in a God who is active in our lives believes that our Heavenly Father oversaw creation, right? That's basically the definition of Intelligent Design. The only way that I can see to believe in "evolution by chance" and still profess a belief in God is to believe in a "clockwork god" who set everything in motion and then just ignored us. Perhaps there's something I'm missing here, but it seems to me that no LDS should have a problem with the basic concept of intelligent design, which is that a creator is responsible for our creation.
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
The proponents of intelligent design see its basic concept a little differently. They believe that there are absolute gaps in the natural history of the universe and life on earth that can only be explained by supernatural acts, acts outside of the laws of the universe, thus proving through the failures of science and the universe that God exists.
If all they wanted to say was, Evolution rocks and God exists!, then there wouldn't be much controversey, since many, many evolutionary scientists are ardent believers in God.
Actually, I haven't heard a single one say "outside the laws of the universe". God operates totally within those laws. But only He understands those laws perfectly, so what may to us seem supernatural is actually quite natural. Might not someone from 200 years ago, upon seeing a hologram (current technology), decide that it's supernatural? And yet we know with today's understanding of the laws of physics that such a thing is perfectly within the laws of physics. And actually it seems that even prominent darwinists admit to not having the full picture. There doesn't seem to be agreement, for instance, on how the 250 proteins necessary for the simplest self replicating molecule came to combine together in the right order. One common explanation is lightning, although that's falling out of favor. They quoted one prominent scientist in the film who thought that the proper elements might have piggybacked on growing crystals. So there are gaps that everyone admits. And, as you say, those advocates of Intelligent Design propose that an intelligent creator fills those gaps. I have no doubt that you are right that many who believe in evolution also believe in God, depending on how you define "evolutionist". But the film also quoted several prominent darwinists, including a guy named Dawkins who wrote a book called "The God Delusion", that said that darwinism tends to lead people away from a belief in God. Mind you, they weren't saying anyone that believes in evolution is led away from God. They are saying that those whose primary area of study is darwinism are typically atheists. Mind you, I'm not a proponent of Intelligent Design as it was put forth in the film. As they put explained it in the film, they accept that life started with a single cell and went from there. Their difference is that they say it was guided. I'm what many would call a "young earth creationist", which is that I believe that each creature was created as it was during the creation of the world. So I'm for "intelligent design" as far as that means that a creator directed creation. But I'm not for it when it includes evolution. Micro evolution I believe in. Macro evolution I do not.
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
I think the "flaw" with intelligent design, is its novelty. Evolution has been on the stage for decades by itself, then this newcomer arrives says, "Hey, how about this for an explanation". Scientists are still human; no one likes to be proven wrong.
Critics label it creationism in disguise, which in itself is a revealing accusation. The majority of the scientific community wants to find a more "logical" explanation than intelligent design. If God is involved, then faith must enter in and faith is something they cannot quantify nor qualify with their training. When they hear "intelligent design" they actually hear "you're fired". They also don't want the Church taking over scientific academia, as was the case in the middle ages. I can appreciate that worry.
God cannot be found in a scientific laboratory, but you can sure see His fingerprints on everything. I'm studying human physiology as part of my course work right now. The complexity of just the cardiovascular system is astounding, breathtaking.
Give intelligent design a few decades and with more scientists jumping on board, it will become a viable, yet unprovable, alternative to the evolution dogma. It just needs time to gain stature and undergo scrutiny.
Well, obviously I can't address the motivations of everyone who believes in evolution, but there is definitely a group of people who use evolution to justify their atheism. I don't think that that group would ever be accepting of intelligent design, because then they'd still have to be grateful to a creator (whether aliens who seeded the planet with life, or a loving Heavenly Father, intelligent design tries not to specify who the intelligent designer must have been.) As it is, if we all happened by random chance, then there is no ultimate arbiter of morality, and so it truly is survival of the fittest: whatever you can get away with is right and good because you're more powerful than the other guy.
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
Science freely admits that it currently doesn't understand everything, which is why there is ongoing scientific research. Intelligent Design proponents argue that because science currently doesn't understand everything, it is therefore permamently flawed. Example is the book, Darwin's Black Box, which has the idea of "irreducibly complex". Irreducibly complex is an incredibly prideful viewpoint. Understanding of certain "biologic physics" will never be obtained because these "biologic physics" don't follow any laws of the universe. They require magical acts of God to sustain them.
I think the scientists viewpoints are much closer to Mormon teachings than intelligent design. Humans are capable of understanding the laws and reality of the universe, eventually. The more we learn in this life the bigger advantage we'll have in the next one, because we'll eventually have to learn how it all works. May as well get a head start on earth rather than later.
Edit to include: Because evolution follows the laws of the universe, it is not random chance, rather indeterminate chance. Huge, huge difference, which makes evolution much more likely, maybe even probable given the right environment.
I haven't read Darwin's Black Box, therefore I don't know what concept of irreducible complexity they put forth there. But my understanding of it has always been different than what you explained. It's not that "we just can't understand something so incredibly complex". My understanding of the theory of evolution is that it proposes that, over time, life adapted, and as it adapted it kept the useful mutations. Over time these mutations built on each other and developed into new traits or species. The concept of irreducible complexity, as it has been explained to me, is that natural selection could not have developed certain traits step by step, because there are no initial steps that would have provided survival advantages. The classic example is the eye. The eye is entirely non-functional for sight without 90% of the stuff already present. That is, a creature would have had to go from having no eye to having almost an entire functioning eye in one step, and that just beggars disbelief. Refutations of that I have seen don't make sense to me. For instance, one argument is that there's a fish that has something like an eye that it uses for scaring other fish, and therefore there are survival advantages to having just part of an eye. That argument doesn't work, though, because a) the other fish already have to have an eye to see the partial eye and be scared, and b) any feature that provides a benefit other than sight is going to go develop, according to natural selection, into a feature that does that better. Therefore, a growth that scares other fish (and let's be generous and assume it doesn't need sight to scare them) would develop into something that scares other fish more and more. The other argument I've heard is that, for instance, they've twiddled with the genes of a fly and its children had many more eyes than normal. The argument is that if eyes could appear spontaneously like that on a fly, then they could have appeared spontaneously like that during evolution. The problem is that with the fly all the genetic information was already there. So anyway, that's my understanding of irreducible complexity, that there are certain things which simply could not have been developed step by step. It's not a slam on our intelligence; as you point out, we are meant to understand all things with time. And that's the whole point of it: what couldn't have happened by chance can happen with the benefit of intelligence. For LDS, I think, the issue of whether evolution could have happened by chance is moot. We know that we aren't a chance creation.
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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen! - Samuel Adams
