Does Intelligent DEsign Belittle God?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Charlemagne_II
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
edwest2 said:
See Finding Design in Nature by Cardinal Schoenborn, published by the New York Times, available online.
Click to expand...
**“As I see it, the mistake of the “Intelligent Design” school of thought (with which people always wrongly associate me). The attempt of this school to assess high complexity in nature as evidence or proof of “intelligent design” suffers from the fundamental failure in thought, that “design,” plan, directedness to an end cannot be found on the level of causality with which the scientific method (in natural science) is concerned.” --**Cardinal Schönborn

Evolution and Creation
Cardinal Schönborn gave a lecture on March 4 to the Austrian Academy of Sciences on “Creation and Evolution - two paradigms and their mutual relationship”, in which he both calls radical creationism “absurd”, and distinguishes the Catholic Church’s understanding of creation from that of creationism.​

My attempt this evening will be, in (as an amateur but with the greatest interest) listening to the works of the natural sciences, to articulate the contribution of theology.
In this three questions are of particular importance.
  1. A more philosophical preliminary question: Why does “nature” give us answers? Why is it “legible?” Why can it be deciphered, decoded?
  2. What does classical theology understand by “creation?” And what are the most common misunderstanding concerning the concept of creation?
  3. Are the viewpoint of faith concerning creation and the approach of natural science to the development of life compatible?
    …
    Notes on the Theology of Creation
    Here we must begin a more exact presentation of what the great Christian teaching tradition understands by “creation.” Time is too short, but it is necessary to note at least a few key points.
As we saw, Darwin wrestled with “his” theology of creation, and finally parted ways from it, since it seemed to him to be incompatible with his scientific knowledge. In great intellectual and human honesty he accepted no “double” truth, a scientific-rational and a religious-emotional truth. He made a choice, and his choice followed the insights that pushed upon him as certainty.

Darwin began the study of theology in 1828 in Cambridge. I could not pursue the question of what he heard and read, what kind of theology he learned. He was likely not a very diligent student of theology. His real interest certainly lay elsewhere. My impression is that his theological understanding of creation was not at a high level of reflection. For him there was no question that a literal understanding of the six days of creation was incompatible with the most elementary knowledge of the earth’s history. Or was it? Certainly, as we saw, he had great trouble with the view that God had created the individual species. Exactly that he was able to, wanted to refute with his theory.

But how did Darwin see creation? How did he understand God’s creative action? How it was not to be understood, he shows in a quite sarcastic tone in the “Origin of Species”

Do they [the representatives of individual acts of creation] really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth’s history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown?
No, the idea of the creation of completed individual beings or species is absurd. It is as just as unsustainable as the creationist theses of a creation of the world in six 24-hour days, as the pseudo-scientific speculations about a “young” earth, about a historical interpretation of the Flood, etc.

But it is equally an inadmissible simplification, to lump the scriptural-fundamentalist creationism together with a sound belief in creation, as is often done. The scriptural understanding of creationism is certainly not that of the Catholic Church and that of the great Christian intellectual tradition.

Yet the understanding of creation against which Darwin unfolds the “long argument” of his theory is much closer to that of fundamentalist creationism than to that of the great Christian philosophical and theological thought on the theme of creation. My suspicion is that in his quite brief study of theology he scarcely tackled the Christian masters. He read William Paley, his “The Evidence of Christianity,” but in this very apologetic approach to Christianity he hardly found the great Christian intellectual tradition, but rather a strongly pragmatic approach, as the Anglo-Saxon culture preferred, and above all “deism,” which admits a Creator merely a clockmaker at the beginning.

At this point a look back in the field of humanities is necessary. Since the late middle ages, the stream of nominalism brought about an ever clearer mechanization of the world-view. Ever more all causality was reduced to material causality. The classic teaching on the four causes was lost, especially final causality and formal causality. As Werner Heisenberg established, the concept of the four causes became limited to the material and efficient cause, to “the rule of cause and effect”; this limitation reduction ever more the perception of truth to the material.

In this reductionistic understanding of reality there are only extrinsic causes working “from without.” It is striking that in Darwin’s criticism of individual acts of creation these causes are understood entirely as material causes (and thus rightfully rejected). God appears as one cause among other material causes that are “within the world.” But that can not be the meaning of “creation.” If the concept of creation is to have meaning, it cannot be as one cause among others in the chain of efficient causes.

(Continued in next post)
 
Cardinal Schönborn’s Evolution and Creation lecture continued:

As I see it, the mistake of the “Intelligent Design” school of thought (with which people always wrongly associate me). The attempt of this school to assess high complexity in nature as evidence or proof of “intelligent design” suffers from the fundamental failure in thought, that “design,” plan, directedness to an end cannot be found on the level of causality with which the scientific method (in natural science) is concerned.

I am convinced that an origin and an end, and thus something that one could call “intelligent design” may be recognized in creation. For me it is a sensible, reasonable point of view to conclude to a creator. But it is not a scientific point of view. I do not expect scientific research to prove God to me. It can do that just as little as it can prove the opposite. Neither lays within the horizon of its method. But the scientist as a man, who thinks about nature, who asks himself the questions of the “from where,” “to where,” and “what for” of the world and of his life, can indeed come to the conclusion that the acceptance of a creator is a more sensible and reasonable point of view than the radical nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche.

When the scientist or the lay person interested in science asks the question about the creation, he has above all the difficulty that we can imagine change, but not creation. We cannot picture the evolution of life in all its particulars, because we cannot reconstruct the whole. But we all have a view of development, indeed we can to some extent active replicate it (just think about technical developments). But in every case it is something already present that develops. Creation in the theological sense, however, means that divine activity, through which there is anything at all, through which the world comes into being.

We approach creation when we ask ourselves in wonder: Why does the world exist? Why do we exist, why do I? Was there a meaning that we came into existence? The research of evolution can only ask how the forms of life developed. But why we are here, what the goal of our existence is, no science can answer. When it claims to do that, it leaves the field of its scientificness and becomes an ideology. To make a clean distinction here seems to me to be decisively important for the future. One could abuse Darwin’s theory of genealogy in an ideological manner for racism or eugenics, for communism or turbo-capitalism. Hence a critique of Darwinism from the viewpoint of ideology is so important, especially by a clear distinction between the scientific theory and its improper expansion. Many things could be said here on the themes of social biology, evolutionary epistemology and ethics, to name just a few examples.

What is most important is to avoid a reduction of the spiritual, ethical, culture and religious realms to the level of purely material causality. We will be able to explain neither the creator nor reason, neither knowledge nor ethics purely scientifically. But we have learned an enormous amount over the evolutionary environments of reason and will, ethics and religion. The evolution of life made all this possible, but it is not the ultimate basis for it. Spirit, will, and freedom cannot be solely the product of material evolution; otherwise they could not to a certain degree emancipate themselves from it, and to some degree take the initiative for their own cultural development, with the full responsibility that is connected with that. Responsibility – to whom? To the future generations! But also to ourselves, to the success of our own lives. And to the creator!

There is responsibility only where to is someone to whom we own an answer. And that can only be to someone whom we can become aware of, whom we can understand, who speaks to our reason. Where instinct determines everything, there is no responsibility.
 
The Cardinal, as well as Pope Benedict, were careful in not involving themselves in the purely ideological version of Intelligent Design. This version of Intelligent Design has some of the characteristics of a weapon. However, the Cardinal does accept a version of “Intelligent Design” to which he connects God. This is a view consistent with Church teaching (see Communion and Stewardship).

The secular world needs clearly defined enemies to attack, whether they are self-styled Institutes or some other entity or individual. This makes it difficult to actually discuss this subject. The false argument here is that science occurs in a sphere of reality separate from all human experience. This is a false but often repeated argument. Science is done by men and is meant to be one instrument of many. To be used by all. The Church regards science and divine revelation to be complementary. This is often rejected by the outside world and science becomes a type of deity. However, the problem is there is a man behind the curtain and men have been known to lie.

So, the outside world must denounce Intelligent Design over and over and over again. The threat is clear: if even some tiny suggestion of a ‘designer’ appears, this might lead people to think about God. Science may not be able to declare this but the Church certainly does, and it is Biblical. We are without excuse.

But the barricades to the public classroom must be manned and advocates for any form of Intelligent Design must be shouted down. In this period of global advertising for atheism, paganism and hedonism, no hint of God must reach the ears of the public.

Peace,
Ed
 
The teleological argument does see complexity in nature and in the universe as evidence of God’s creative power. Einstein saw this very clearly in the mathematical precision of the universe. The same is obvious in evidence of cosmological fine-tuning – precise balance, harmony and coincidental symmetries which cannot be the product of blind chance.
 
itinerant1 said:
Spirit, will, and freedom cannot be solely the product of material evolution; otherwise they could not to a certain degree emancipate themselves from it,
Click to expand...
This is the Intelligent Design argument (which the Cardinal seems to argue against at the same time). Some evolutionists (I believe the majority) claim that natural processes do explain “will and freedom” (and that spirit does not exist). So, the claim that “science cannot speak about these things” is not true. Science does claim that free-will does not exist because all human decision-making finds its origin in physical laws and matter.
 
Does St. Thomas Aquinas Belittle God?

… no, not at all.

Here is St. Thomas’ teaching on Intelligent Design:

“The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things that lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.”

Note the phrase “not fortuitously, but designedly”. St. Thomas says “it is plain”. This means that it can be observed; it can be seen empirically. Additionally, some of what we see in nature is not the result of “fortuitous” events – in other words, not of accidental, random, unintelligent causes (like Darwinian evolution).

We observe the complexity and precision of natural bodies acting for a purpose – they are directed towards and end. This contradicts evolutionary theory, which claims that evolution is “non-directed” (according to the common textbook definition).

We can see that St. Thomas uses an example of an intelligent process – the firing of an arrow. Only an intelligent being (the archer) can be the cause of the arrow moving to its target. We evaluate that not by philosophy, theology or mysticism – but by observation and physical science.
 
I’ve lately thought that evolution is God’s magnificent Rube Goldberg machine.
 
“Was the universe designed to produce life, or is the universe and everything in it pure accident?” Here again we have the unfortunate and exceptionally misleading postulation of an either/or which denies the consideration of other dynamics. The Universe IS life living, and there is no accident in the universe.

“If the latter, when Dawkins proves it I’m sure he’ll get the Nobel. In the meantime, the only way to argue pure chance is atheism.” Here I agree with Heinlein that materialism is the least likely hypothesis. But then what is going on? The ideas concerning Creation in the Catholic encyclopedia are wrong on at least two counts, and as pretty as your knife theory is, alongside Aquinas’ arrow, both serve ultimately only to postulate an agent, but not a method. The kind of agency that sticks a knife or looses a shaft is not the kind of agency that could be attributed to Deity. Both of you at that stage are simply saying “somebody did it.”

But here is why I keep bringing this up, and will, whether you get pastey on me or not. You are plowing in the wrong field. Aquinas realized this at one point and therefore said what he did about his writings being “as straw” Can you imagine an iota of the humility it had to take to make such a statement given the astonishing perceptions and intellectual acuity embodied in his work? He had to have had a shock of monu-mental proportions, a realization of paramount importance.

Now, of the two kinds of religion, ascending and descending, Catholicism is a strong example of the ascending variety, and like its Eastern equivalents is unbalanced in its biases. It has as its theme the classic “Work now get paid later” theme that bears within itself the seeds of Protestantism, Calvinism, and the like. In either case, a strict practitioner needs to experience a rather sharp shock to come into balance. As in lightening, the greater the opposing polarities, the greater the flash, and the greater the experience of balance. Yet the clouds re left and those witnessing are looking at them saying how wondrous they are in scope and majesty. Thus it is with St.Thomas’ writings. But he himself experienced the flash, and that is not transmittable in an ordinary sense. But it is why Walt Whitman said “I and mine teach not by discourse or argument, but by Presence.” Again, I say that the Presence of the Master must have been absolutely awesome. To those who had eyes and ears.That is indeed a small number of people. And even He took his disciples aside for actual teaching: Mark 4:33,34. The public life and the parables were attractants and filters to discover who could take the strong drink. Not many. It is so today.

But that is well and good. But the problem is, because the particular Presence that was gone as Person became historicised into dogma and canon, the historicization became a prophylactic to the actual teaching. It is so today. It is so despite that teaching being alive and well under the original auspices. It is why every major body of thought includes as a dictum “Know Thyself.”

Without that key activity and its palpable result akin to what Aquinas must have experienced, all teaching is as straw. It is nutritious to the animal until it discovers itself to be far more. It is this discovery that is being resisted in the teaching of the Church by claiming a diffraction in the nature of Creation that is not true to fact. As long as it clings to that diffraction it will send many on a road well traveled, but one which ultimately dissolves into nothingness at the point of Understanding.

In the mean time, being a race that sees Jesus in pizza crusts and Mary in dirty windows, and genitalia in fruits, vegetables and trees, and behaviors and motives in other people that are simply not there, we will have such ideas as Intelligent Design and Creation/Creationism. It is so today.

Those are simply not true to fact, as they rely on a postulated “reality” that is predicated on subject/object awareness. That mode of awareness presupposes and projects on to everything an entitlement of discreet being. This is not the case. It is all of a piece, on, whole, inseparable. No part can exist without the whole. Any competent physicist will nowadays tell you that. And the Whole is GOD=IS=ALL.

Saying it will be useless, and thinking about it will be self defeating. The only recourse is to look at and question one’s own self nature. When you discover everything you yourself are not, and know that in excruciating detail, you will perhaps understand why Aquinas said what he did, I’ll bet that St. Thomas would say not that someone did it, as you claim, but that “Summa One IS it All as I AM.” Thus it ever was, is and shall be.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
liquidpele

*Also, as I’ve said before, the very poor design is something you should probably be pretty pissed off at God over. The rate of birth defects and genetic diseases is quite high. Perhaps you can ask him why he designed aids or autism, or designed 99% of all species to go extinct over the last 4 billion years? *

For once we agree … in both being agnostic. I don’t know. I’m not going to answer your questions in this life. I hope we both get the answers in the next one.

Maybe if Dawkins decides to approach God without a sneer, even he might get them. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
 
Nonsense. Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church. His comment about straw is in humble acknowledgement of the mind of God, which is infinite. No one, through self examination, understands everything that needs to be known about himself. Each one of us carries an inborn sin nature that manifests itself in varying degrees in each of us. It is a fatal flaw that needs to be dealt with. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life.

Intelligent Design recognizes not accident, not coincidence, but order. Pope John Paul II recognized it as well.

Peace,
Ed
 
Of course Aquinas is a doctor of the Church. It doesn’t mean that, like Meister Eckhart, he didn’t wake up. Such is common with great minds like that of Aquinas. And of course his statement was an acknowledgement. Who would question that? Where we might differ here is in what it is that constitutes self inquiry. I’m talking about something radically different than the ordinary sense of examinaton of conscience here. It is exactly delving into the structure of what is non sense. The inborn sin nature you speak of is the adamant and persistant insitance that the subject/object state (knowledge of good/evil) of perception is the sole way of “human” awareness. It is not.

Granted that the other is rare after we are trained out of it by necessity, but with much work it can be regained, if even for a moment. But that can be the crack in the world that allows a deeper and more profound perception of who and what we are in the image and likeness of God. Faith by itself is inadeqate in this matter, though sufficient to fullfill the needs of most in day-to-day. I am only speaking to the few who might understand that there is more, and who might wish enter a path of discovery that can reveal much about the teaching of the Master.
 
itinerant

*What is most important is to avoid a reduction of the spiritual, ethical, culture and religious realms to the level of purely material causality. We will be able to explain neither the creator nor reason, neither knowledge nor ethics purely scientifically. *

The operative word is “purely.” No one alleges we can do that. Unless it be a deist like Einstein, who in saying this would certainly belittle God.
*
As I see it, the mistake of the “Intelligent Design” school of thought (with which people always wrongly associate me). The attempt of this school to assess high complexity in nature as evidence or proof of “intelligent design” suffers from the fundamental failure in thought, that “design,” plan, directedness to an end cannot be found on the level of causality with which the scientific method (in natural science) is concerned.*

Here I think the Cardinal has painted himself into a corner. The Big Bang (which deals with the origins of causality) now cannot be associated with the Creation of the universe. Why? Because the Big Bang would belittle God? The Cardinal must think that Aquinas went overboard to belittle God because he gave reason to believe that God not only designed the universe, but caused it to come into being.

It would appear that the Cardinal is spinning his wheels, unable to settle on a point of view that is logically consistent. First he comes out for intelligent design, then recants. Then he complains that he was always wrongly associated with intelligent design advocates. Oh, by the way, Father Coyle was also deceived as to the Cardinal’s intent? I don’t think so.

We do better to listen to an agnostic astronomer like Robert Jastrow, when he says in God and the Astronomers:

“Now we see how astronomical evidence leads to the biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment of time, in a flash of light and energy…. For the scientist who has lived by the faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

And by the way, what is the Cardinal’s view of Aquinas stomping on Siger of Brabant’s twofold truth thesis?

Lest we forget, it is the adamant view of Richard Dawkins, without any scientific proof whatever, that the first single-celled creatures (with reproduction capacity to boot) came to be by accident. Does the Cardinal agree with that too? 😉
 
Here is Thomas Jefferson’s view expressed in a letter to John Adams. Clearly, there being no brain surgeons back then, a brain surgeon was not need to figure our intelligent design by observing the physical universe.

"I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and infinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, the generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite members of man who have existed through all time, they have believed in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.”
 
It’s just that “an eternal pre-existence of a creator” and "a self-existent Universe.” are exactly One and the same.
 
I saw and heard the Hippies. Free your mind. Expand your mind (usually with illegal and dangerous drugs). This led nowhere.

The human individual and human family are clearly laid out in the Bible. Our final end is there as well. This life is temporary for all, eternity isn’t.

There is design and a plan that is unfolding, right now.

Peace,
Ed
 
"I saw and heard the Hippies. Free your mind. Expand your mind (usually with illegal and dangerous drugs). This led nowhere. And this has what to do with the thread?

"The human individual and human family are clearly laid out in the Bible. Our final end is there as well (emphasis mine) Exactly why all Christians and other world religions are in such close conert with each other as to the specifics of all that.

“There is design and a plan that is unfolding, right now.” This may very well be so, but perhaps the bigger picture is largely obscured by limited thinking?
 
“limited thinking”? What does that mean?

Faith comes from hearing the Gospel. Then things are made clear.

Peace,
Ed
 
EdWest
Since you tacitly agree with my other points, I’m surprised you ask what you do. Faith is limited thinking. It bases action and consequences on an unproved premise. It also limits thinking to strictly adhere to the viewpoint of one system’s deliniation of events. We don’t trust a purely scientific, Republican, Democratic, Communist, Libertatrian, whatever ideogical system to give us all the facts. But because our faiths, whatever they are, purport to have the one and only truth, we tend to stop looking, whether we are Muslim, Jew, or Christian. Instead of questioning our own lineage of belief, we accept it at face value and militate against other systems, failing to realize that the wholeness of the picture may bear more clearly on our position than just our own belief. Yet because it is ours, we project it as Truth onto the world. I call that limited, whatever your religion and whatever you call upon to substantiate it in terms of faith, because ultimately, that is belief, not fact, and therefor limited, I think, in anyone’s book.

This kind of thing reminds me of the woman who wouldn’t learn Spanish when it would have served here very well to do so. When asked why not, she said “God writ the Bible in English, and that’s good enough for me.” More limited that most religionists, but the pattern is identical.
 
*“Perhaps the root of the problem within the world and within yourself is the refusal to face conflicting beliefs, which are obliterated by correct Identity.” ~ Kenneth G. Mills *

Or perhaps the real problem with the world and within ourselves is the refusal to face the reality that conflicting truths cannot be equally true.

In other words, if you are going to get in bed with a woman, why not your wife?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top