Intelligent Creation

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on December 4, 2005
Text - Isaiah 40:8

The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

That's a beautiful verse. It's included in many graveside funeral liturgies, because it says there's something beyond nature, beyond this process of living and dying that we're all a part of. The creation is more than just “dumb matter.” The creation is alive, and conscious. It's inspired. It's not just atoms randomly colliding with each other. It's too complicated, too exquisitely ordered, and too enchanted to have just happened. Some intention or will must be in the process. All of us, have probably had that feeling.

This is one of the issues at stake in the controversy over whether “intelligent design” (which is really another name for what the church calls the “doctrine of creation”) should be taught in public schools side by side with the theory of evolution.

This idea of “intelligent design” is basically what I've just said. It's hard to imagine life and consciousness just happening on their own, by some accident. That seems very unlikely. Something must have made all of this.

I thought I'd say a couple things about this controversy, even though no one's bringing it up in our Middletown school system, at least that I know of.

The main argument against bringing “intelligent design” into the science classroom is that it's not science. Science is the study of the material world. It's about cause and effect that can be seen, and measured, and tested. Science looks for theories about how things work, then finds flaws in those theories and improves them or comes up with better theories to explain the physical evidence.

The theory of evolution doesn't explain everything we'd like to have explained, by a long shot. In fact, we still have a rather superficial knowledge how evolution works. It's a very rough theory, but there's overwhelming evidence that evolution has taken place and is taking place. We're pretty sure it has to do with mutations - changes in the genes of living creatures, changes that either help or hurt their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce and pass those mutated genes on to the next generation.

This is the essence of Charles Darwin's theory in the 19th century. Darwin noticed that in a population of very similar birds, some birds had longer beaks and some had shorter beaks. Except for the length of the beak, they looked like the same kind of bird. So he wondered, why is that? And he proposed a theory. Maybe a longer beak made it easier for birds to get food in certain places, like a bug under the bark of a tree. In a location where the main food source was bugs in trees, the birds with long beaks (because of a mutated gene) would have a better chance of survival, and would pass the longer-beak trait on to the next generation, increasing the percentage of birds with long beaks in that location.

This is a theory, but it's a very simple, elegant theory. It explains a lot of complexity. But the important thing is, it's based on observation of the material world. We can see mutated genes in a laboratory.

The problem with bringing “intelligent design” into the science classroom is that we can't locate an intelligent designer in the way you can locate a mutation. We can't find God with a microscope or a telescope. The notion of an intelligent designer is an obvious idea. Most human beings who have lived on earth have embraced that idea, in one form or another. But it can't be tested. It can't be verified. So it's not the subject of science.

Many people who object to bringing “intelligent design” into the science classroom do so because they see it as a way to sneak God into school. Most of me sides with the people who want to keep science and religion separate. In the science classroom, let's talk about the physical evidence, and in the religion class or the philosophy class we can talk about “intelligent design” and about who or what God is.

Of course, we don't have many religion classes in public schools. Schools are supposed to keep their hands off religion. This is why many religious people feel so frustrated, and I sympathize with this frustration. Here's a huge area of human experience, our sense of wonder, our spiritual experience, and it's been ruled off limits.

What does that communicate about the place of spiritual experience in our lives? One thing it communicates is that we're better off if we don't talk it. Or it communicates that spiritual experience isn't important enough to talk about in school. I can understand why advocacy of and practice of religion is avoided in public schools, but we've taken this prohibition so far that religion can't even be taught in a non-proselytizing way. I see this as a great impoverishment of public education.

As I said, I do tend to side with those who want to keep “intelligent design” out of the biology class.

But I have to confess that, if I were teaching biology, I wouldn't want to keep it out completely. I'd want to say to the students, when you look at this world and all its creatures, doesn't it make you wonder? How did it happen? Why is there any life? It would have been so much easier, and simpler, and more likely, to have a universe with no life, and no consciousness of any sort. A simpler universe would be a bunch of rocks floating through space.

We learn in science the law of entropy. Matter and energy tend to flow from high complexity and high energy to simplicity and low energy. A stone tends to roll downhill. A tree (a complex living thing) dies, falls to the ground, decays, and turns back to minerals and gases.

But that's not all that happens in the world. In life, in evolution in fact, energy gets pumped in to create more complexity. How does a rock, or a bunch of methane gas, turn into William Shakespeare without something pushing the process up hill, so to speak?

Nature is not just dumb matter. We are not dumb matter. We think. We're conscious. We're part of the enchantment of nature. And when we try to disenchant nature, that is, when we try to reduce nature to chemical reactions, that's when irreverence for life and emptiness in life begin.

We can't prove that there was an intelligent designer. We can see that the creation itself is intelligent. Seeing this enchantment, wondering about nature, is a big part of what drives science. If creation weren't mysterious, why would anyone study it?

“Intelligent design” probably doesn't belong in the science classroom, at least not as a major topic of discussion, but it belongs in some classroom or we miss the whole point of life, including science. It certainly belongs in the church.

This is what the Bible is saying in our verse. Think of these words being spoken at a graveside funeral service, perhaps at the burial of someone you love, or even at your own burial. What effect would they have?

The grass withers, the flower fades. But the word of our Lord will stand forever.

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