The heart of this post, I hope, can be summarily found in a statement by James Emery White. “What decisively marks a Christian mind is that it is informed by revelation … and then proceeds to think in light of that revelation.” – White, J.E., Serious Times, (Inter Varsity Press, 2004), p.104
With that said I just want to make it clear that my main goal in this post is to demonstrate the natural consequences of biblical compromise. So while I do make many statements against an evolutionary worldview, my intention is simply to highlight the compromise position of the piece for Christian readers – being that it is allegedly written from a Christian’s perspective – and not to engage in great detail on the finite details of the evolutionary worldview. Therefore I do not intend to allow (or argue against) conclusions drawn by non-Christians, who do not accept such authority in the first place and have their own a priori materialistic paradigms and philosophies that will not, by definition, permit some of the conclusions I have made.[1] Those discussions belong in a separate area.
The article (written a few years ago now) by Peter Sellick is titled “Intelligent Design – Damaging Good Science and Good Theology” – Friday, 9 September 2005. But it does represent a growing view among some evangelical Christians. For example, the recent book by Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?
I have not dealt with every comment in Sellick’s article because it’s just too long. But I think I have captured and responded to the main points.
According to the On Line Opinion webpage, Peter Sellick is currently an Anglican deacon working in Perth (Western Australia) with a background in the biological sciences. This, I am sure, makes him far more qualified than I to speak on theology or science, but I humbly offer this criticism as one who cares about the truth of Scripture.
The idea of intelligent design is that the universe, particularly the life contained therein, is too complex to have happened by chance as the theory of evolution would have it.
A more complete representation of Intelligent Design (ID) would also mention the observation of what appears to be irreducibly complex systems and specified information with those systems.
Therefore its sole basis lies in a negative:
Keep in mind that this claim is right at the beginning of Sellick’s article and he immediately poisons the well. To the contrary, as many in the ID movement have pointed out, it is not some fall-back position that people cling to because they’re blinded to the wisdom of an evolutionary worldview. It is based on a positive: an innate ability to discern design in our world. It is supported by a historical knowledge of cause and effect, acknowledging that it is most reasonable to think that the source of information and complexity contained in living systems is due to the actions of an intelligent agent. This is a completely reasonable premise upon which ID can stand. It certainly does not lie ‘in a negative’.
On the other hand, evolution by natural selection (which Sellick seems to support) is a dysteleological process seen to act on systems already possessing the information and complexity that it is claimed to have produced, and therefore provides no reasonable basis to explain the origin of these systems in the first place.
the failure to imagine how natural selection could arrive at the complexity of life we see all around us.
Imagination isn’t the problem. Rationality is. Put simply, many people think it is more reasonable that complex information-bearing systems are the product of intelligence rather than the result of random mindless forces. If observation counts for anything in science, natural selection is extremely limited in what it can achieve. (See for example Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution). It simply acts on pre-existing complex systems. It cannot create them or add information to them. In fact, it is the contention of ID-ists like Phillip Johnson that natural selection has no demonstrable creative power at all.
“Darwinian theory insists that natural selection is a creative force of immense power … We have already seen that the hypothesis of creative natural selection lacks experimental support” [chapters 2 and 3] “and that it is disconfirmed by the fossil record. The molecular evidence adds further doubt … The hypothesis that natural selection has the degree of creative power required by Darwinist theory remains unsupported by empirical evidence … [But] Darwinist know that the mutation-selection mechanism can produce wings, eyes, and brains not because the mechanism can be observed to do anything of the kind, but because their guiding philosophy assures them that no other power is available to do the job. The absence from the cosmos of any Creator is therefore the essential starting point for Darwinism.” – Johnson, P.E., Darwin On Trial, (Inter Varsity Press 1993, 2nd edition), p. 95, 98, 117.
In the scenario above the organism with the mutation has indeed – to use evolutionary language – gained an advantage over the other H. pylori in an environment with the antibiotic present. So has the H. pylori evolved? Well that depends on what you mean by evolution. Is the change that occurred in the organism in the direction for the bacterium to develop new body parts or body plans; is it on it’s way to becoming a baboon, a bird, or a badger? Most certainly the answer is NO. The information change is a negative one, not a positive one. In fact in this example not only is no new information created but the mutation destroyed the information in the bacterium’s genome that would normally have allowed it to produce an enzyme. So the non-evolved H. pylori can make the enzyme and the so-called evolved ones cannot; a damaging mutation with a beneficial side effect. Yet examples just like this (information-destroying changes) are often used to provide support for macro evolution, which requires observable information-gaining changes.
