Evolution and Intelligent Design

Editor's note: This is one of those areas where the writer and I do not see completely eye to eye. I have no problem posting it of course; it's his forum, and he does most of the shameless self-promotion of it. But he did say it was ok to interpose my own comments on this post, which will appear in italics below.

For some reason, lately there has been a run on stories concerning Darwin's theory of Evolution, Creationism and a new term getting bandied about, Intelligent Design. First National Geographic. Then Time Magazine devoted an entire issue. And the perpetually smirking Jon Stewart hosted 'Evolution/Schmevolution' last week on his Daily Show on Comedy Central. I'm not exactly sure why this subject is rearing its ugly head at this particular time, it might have something to do with the start of the school. Which unfortunately means we can look forward to this every year with the turning of the leaves. However, its also the time of year when my lovely, beautiful, smart, intelligent, talented, funny demon-spawn daughter goes back to school, so I guess I can live with it.

Considering the mission statement of this blog, which is, to educate the Great American Public on just what the Constitution is, what it embodies, what it allows and prevents, thereby providing an absolute crystal clear example of why pretty much all politicians are liars and crooks, let's begin with the Constitution:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html

Now without a doubt, this falls under the well documented, thoroughly enshrined wall that separates the Church and the State. To reach that end, in full disclosure, I am a practicing Roman Catholic; we volunteer at Church, and my daughter attends Catholic School. So you'll have to grant me some leeway here with how I view this subject. I've seen government in action, and I've seen Catholic volunteers in action. Enough said.

So lets take a look at just what kind of brick and mortar is made of, shall we? It can be found in the first amendment of the US Constitution:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a
redress of grievances.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html#amendmenti

Or more precisely "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..." There it is. The entire kit and caboodle. That's it. That sentence fragment is what is at the heart of the entire debate between Church and State. Seems pretty simple to me. The state leaves the Church alone, and the Church leaves the state alone. And never the 'twain shall meet. I like it. I attended public school myself. I think I got a fairly decent education, but that was 30 years ago. I've seen my daughter helping our publicly schooled neighbor with homework she covered two years earlier. They are in the same grade. In the recent tragedy called Katrina, the Red Cross - a private organization - had truck loads of food, water and blankets, loaded up and ready to roll into New Orleans following the storm. While the Red Cross is not a religious organization, it is not a government organization, it is private sector. The state of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans prevented them from entering the city, because they were trying to evacuate the city, and were afraid the relief supplies would attract people to the city. On the one hand we see a nongovernmental organization ready to act, on the other hand we see government gumming up the works. My point here is, I can see the huge benefit from keeping the government the hell out of the public's way. On the other hand, we can look to the Crusades and see ample proof the Church does a pretty crappy job when it pokes into the states business.

For those interested in a much more thorough work on the subject, my editor (yep that's right, I may not have a lot of readers, but I have an editor!) found this fantastic piece of writing from Pope Benedict XVI, back when he was just a lowly Cardinal. Its pretty thick, but I found it an incredibly well written refutation of Liberation Theology. In short, Liberation Theology is a Catholic thing that says Jesus so hated injustice, as documented by his examples in the New Testament, that its proof he would approve of left wing death squads killing right wing death squads, and that the Church must force itself into the political arena. Pope John Paul II excommunicated five priests in Latin America for this crap. That's one reason I have so much respect for that future Saint. But if you want more, read Cardinal Ratzinger's take on it.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ratzinger2.html

Now that we've covered the what the constitution says on the separation, and why its a heck of a good idea, let's progress to the matter at hand.

What is Darwin's theory of evolution? Here's where my public education comes up short. The extent to which we covered it, it was that species evolve to higher life forms based upon natural selection. That's a nice, pretty way of saying the strong survive and the weak die. I've had several people over the years try to explain it all to me, and I've come up with what I believe were pretty good arguments to their proof. From those debates, and from what I've read and was taught, Darwin nails some points very well, some not so well, and other points he doesn't even try. For example, Darwin, as far as I know, doesn't even try to explain where life originally came from. Just some vague, broad ideas. More on that in a minute.

What's Creationism? Again, here being a Catholic, leaves me at a disadvantage. the Catholic Church teaches us that Darwin is correct, and he merely describes how the hand of God did it. I can live with that. As best as I can figure, real, hard core creationists believe the Bible, literally, word for word. The entire spiel. Everything. Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, serpent, apple, the whole shebang. The earth is only 6,000 years old. Angel of Death. Parting of the Red Sea. Now here's where I part company with some of my fellow Christians. Carbon dating has proved amazingly accurate. I've seen pictures of the dinosaur fossils. I understand the earth is billions of years old. That's science. The Bible is faith. Therein lies the difference. That being said, one of my hobbies is studying the Bible, and its historical context. Any archeologist or historian worth their salt would have to admit, as an historic document, the Bible is a lot more historically accurate than atheists would have you believe. For example, there was a city called Jericho, and its walls did indeed fall. There has been some evidence that it is possible, under extremely rare circumstances for the Red Sea to appear to part. There was indeed a man named Jesus who caused a big fuss at the Temple in Jerusalem during Passover, and the Romans did indeed nail him to a tree for it. Those are facts, and facts are what science is made of. Was he the Christ? That's faith. Did he exist? That's a fact. If you don't want to believe those facts, then you need to disavow a good portion of established history. Because the three or four "gold standard" ancient historians whose works we accept as gospel (pun intended), also establish the existence of a man named Jesus and some of antics (Note: Jesus was a common name at the time). Scientist listen up: you can't have it both ways.

For more information on this subject, I suggest the following book. Its a wealth of information on how the New Testament and the Bible evolved. The actual Lost Gospels Of Timothy, in themselves don't shed a lot of light for me. But the background history described by the author was a fantastic read.

To me, the Bible and particularly the oldest books in the Old Testament, the Tora, are humanity's earliest attempts at trying to explain who we are and why we are here. I'm not going to hold some guy responsible, who, 4,000 years ago, looked around and saw everything flooded and concluded the entire world was covered with water. Come on, these were some of humanity's earliest stories, fables, tales, sacred writings. I can't fault them for not understanding about DNA, physics, calculus etc. Remember, for these earliest members of society, the world was flat, the sun rose in the east, set in the west, and they had no idea how it got back to the east the next morning. If you got sick it was because you or some one in your family sinned against some strange force they called God. Imagine the gossip if you got struck by lightning? "I told Grog he shouldn't be eating dirty goat meat, would he listen to me? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

What is Intelligent Design? Good question. In its simplest form, its nothing more than the idea that life is too complicated to have just happened. This is something I've thought for years. It was covered in a great book that I read back in college. Its called "Space" by James Michener. Its a fictitious story laid against the real back ground of America's space effort. He explained concepts about computers and science that I was studying - and I must tell you, he explained many of them much better than some of my professors did.

In one part (and I'm working from memories 20 years old) he tackles the subject of just how huge the odds were against life ever starting on this rock we're floating through space on. The odds are so huge, when you compare them to the odds of being life on all the trillions of planets out there, it is enough to make you stop and think. We're at just the right distance from the sun, any closer or any further and life would never have happened. For proof, look at second and the fourth rocks from the sun. The atmosphere, the climate, water, other life, such as plants and animals providing food? Let me just say, he convinced me, there's two positions on this one. We are either the absolute, most lucky receivers of the biggest long shot in the entire universe, or else we are the result of the intelligent design of some force beyond our ability to comprehend. I lean towards the later.

Let's imagine a world that is one big ocean, with a small, lone island. Now imagine we take the entire population of China, and place them randomly (ie, no conscious placement) in that world. Depending on the size of the world, and the size of the ocean, there's a certain chance that a person will be located either on or close enough by the island to survive. Of course, there's chance that no one will be placed close enough, in which case no one will be around to say "gee, look how amazingly fortunate I am, this cannot be chance - someone out there really, really, likes me!". The pedantic out there will now snidely say "ok, but SOMEONE placed them there" - but that's not the point of this scenario. It's to show, perhaps awkwardly, that amazingly improbable (from our limited experience) events can happen, without the occurance due from a conscious force.
It's a mistake to try to draw probability claims from a singular event - such as the existence of...existence.

Incidentally, in the Time magazine issue on Darwin, they asked one scientist what he thought of ID. He pointed out some anomalies in life, such as the human eye actually inverts the images it sees, by its shape, and the brain must learn to reinterpret them correctly. He said would an intelligent designer have made such crude mistakes? As a computer engineer, I have to say, that sounds exactly like the type of error an engineer would make. I've made them before, and I've had to fix them, in much the same way. They're called patches and fixpacks. Trying to convince me ID is false, he actually made the case for it.

This would certainly be an interesting argument for a finite creator. But trial and error seems beneath an infinite being, by definition. That the eye of a squid is much better than a humans, when that infinite being chose us as his special ones, is even stranger.

So lets contrast and compare. Darwin's work looks into "The origin of species" but does not touch on how life started, to the best of my knowledge. Instead it talks about how life changes. Creationism talks to how life began, but doesn't bother touching on how life changes. Intelligent Design dwells on neither, just a theological idea on how life managed to reach a form in which science can examine. Personally, I don't see a whole lot of conflict between them.

But the big 800 pound gorilla in the room is science. Make that two gorillas, faith. Science is fact. Faith is belief. If faith could be proved, it would be called science, not faith. If you need a leap of faith to believe science, then its not science, its faith. Until I'm proven otherwise, I will believe science as fact, and I will believe faith as faith. And that's not to give faith a short rift. I do have faith. I believe in a God. In a force that's out there that is beyond the comprehension of my simple human brain. And this is my decision, it just happens to coincide with the Catholic Church's teaching. Faith is that God created life. Science is just us humans reaching a point where we can stick our head under the hood, and begin to figure out how he did it.

So I have no problem with Darwin being taught in school. I have no problem with stickers on text books that point out its a theory, after all, that's all it is. I have no problem with introducing the idea that something may have guided evolution. Personally, I think we can all get along. But that's just me. I have no problem with my daughter being taught both Creationism and Evolution in her Catholic school. I think the entire concept of Intelligent Design can be covered in about 30 seconds in a science class. Then they can get back to slicing up frogs. Faith is Faith, science is science, and theories are theories. And every one in the news screaming they are right and every one else is wrong, should be relegated to Comedy Central, where they try to be funny. Sometimes they even are.

Placing a 'theory' sticker on a science textbook is highly redundant - all science is theory, since humans are not infinite in scope and so can only say "this thing meets our measurement and understanding of reality the best so far". And if ID and Creationism does not meet the standard of science, should it be taught in a science classroom? And since faith does not require evidence, anything that cannot be proved wrong could be someone's faith. There are not enough hours in the day to teach all the possible variations of Intelligent Design.