Only a Theory

I finished reading "Only a Theory" by Kenneth Miller the other day and I must say that he succeeds in taking apart the Intelligent Design (ID) camp pretty thoroughly. The book makes a very compelling case that ID is not really science in the way we normally define science. I won't go into detail here but many of the examples of "irreducible complexity" touted by the ID camp have been refuted already and even more damning as far as I'm concerned is the fact that the ID people have utterly failed to produce any actual original research based on the idea of design. I have read several books by the most prominent ID proponents in recent months and while on the surface they make a certain amount of sense, far more than the Young Earth Creationist folk do at least, in the end they spent almost all of their energy pointing out how they just can't imagine how evolution could produce the features they are seeing. Basically I saw it as simply an argument based on lack of imagination ;-) Just because they can't imagine how it could have happened they fall back on "God must have done it!"

Well, I do think that "God did it." I just think that he used natural means to pull it off. I don't really see the need to bring in miraculous intervention on the edges of our knowledge the way the ID crowd likes to do. My take on the whole thing is that God, being the omniscient and omnipotent creator of the cosmos, set everything into motion with full awareness of the end state of things, there was no need for intervention after that. Oops, that sort of makes me a deist doesn't it? I need to hash out what I'm thinking here a bit more I guess, because I don't maintain that God never intervenes in the world, or that he can't, merely that as far as the progress of the natural world goes he allows things to move naturally for the most part. It is also my belief that God upholds the entire creation at each and every moment, nothing exists that God does not sustain, if He withdrew His sustaining power all of creation would simply cease to exist, He knows the position of every particle in all of existence at every moment and where it will be in a billion years and where it was 12 billion years ago. He has no need to reach into the world and tinker every few million years to bring about a new species of beetle or sea snail, or you and me for that matter.

Anyway, I'm now reading a book called "Saving Darwin, How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution" by Karl Giberson that I hope will help me to clarify what I'm trying to say here. I'll let you know how that works out ;-)