Science Hooey?

I'm off to San Diego to start hitting the 15 biggest cities in the USA and learn what I can, show what I can, and eat what I can.

(Not necessarily in that order)

Tomorrow I'm at Carlton Lutheran Church in Santee, my host is a friend who hosted me a long, long time ago, Rev. Rick Schowalter.

As I leave, I'm looking at a letter from a former FINK user who doesn't understand what we mean by Intelligent Design and seems to be lumping us in with some of the farest right folks when we use the term.

Seems to me, if you believe and confess the First Article of the Apostles' Creed, you're saying you believe in my definition of Intelligent Design.

The "Creator of Heaven and Earth" and the "all things visible and invisible" from the Nicean Creed make you an ID person in the best sense of the word.

At the risk of sounding brass, I think some people may be judging us without enough information. Maybe they suppose we’re going along with someone else’s definition of Intelligent Design. I’m not sure, I’d love it if you would grace me a momentary benefit of the doubt. I’d value your honest critique of what we’re really doing based on what we’re really doing, not on what someone might prejudge us as doing because of all of the baggage that goes with the term Intelligent Design.

If I might be a friendly pest, here’s a little history:

As I've said before, I've been fascinated by the complexity of the universe all my life - from the micro to the macro. I've also been dismayed by folks who:

1. Don't think I have a functioning brain if I confess in the first article of the Apostles’ Creed and thereby question the universe creating itself, or

2. Others who don't I'm a proper Christian if I don't believe the earth was created in six literal 24 hour days.

I take issue with both groups, although I enjoy wrestling with them both in a respectful, informed way. In the words of the old Episcopal newspaper campaign, “Jesus Christ came to take away your sins, not your brain.”

As I've also said before, whether or not people believe this belongs in the schools, in the churches, or in realm of science fiction, it's a hot topic right now and I believe and it shouldn't be ignored or bypassed by people working with senior high youth. A good discussion on the complexity of the universe and the philosophy of how it may or may not have happened is usually worth the time with kids.

In our version of Intelligent Design, we teach, among other things:

1. The heavens are telling the glory of God… if we listen. And when we listen with the best measurements currently available, we see that the Universe looks 13.7 billion years old. A “day” (yom) in God’s time may not be the same as a day in our time. God could have done it in six literal 24 hour days. God is God. However, in Hebrew, a day is "sunrise, sunset" so it might have been 12 hour days. Anyway, if you read the Bible and you read the heavens, they both proclaim God did it. How God did it is another matter.

2. From the macro to the micro, this amazingly complex universe is mathematically improbable. Yet here we are. It may be more rational to believe that there is a grand designer behind this grand design than to believe that random, purposeless chance is responsible. Einstein: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest is detail.”

3. Either God made it, or it made itself. But since a system cannot create itself, Houston we have a problem. Chance – a concept – cannot create a thing. Chance is no thing. Nothing. And we all know nothing comes from nothing. At the end of science we enter philosophy. At the end of philosophy we enter either God or nothing. Take your pick.

4. Life at its smallest forms is infinitely and intricately designed – not a glob of plasma as postulated a couple centuries ago when Darwin did his work. There are elegant micro machines responsible for every system and sub-system from the single-cell bacterial flagellum that oscillates at 100,000 rpm to the advanced system that makes your blood clot. Again, such grand designs may have evolved… but in a random, purposeless fashion? There simply was not enough time since the earth cooled 3.9 billion years ago.

5. The human is not simply another animal – the sum of our parts. There is an eternal soul, created in the image of God.

We expect to get flack from the six day Creationists and lose many of them as customers. We also expect to get flack from those in the church who confess the First Article every Sunday but don’t really believe it. Through it all, we hope to engender a great and respectful discussion, put a new spin on the term Intelligent Design (it’s actually a wonderful phrase), sadly lose some old friends and make some new.

In the process, we hope to help a lot of kids think.

And when they go off to college, we hope to keep them in the faith.

That’s the basis of everything we’re developing. After this comes “Why Jesus?” and after that comes “Why the Bible.” We’ll need designers to help us get started, writers to help us flesh them out, and testers to help us see what needs to stay and what needs to go,

Now, to get to the specifics (and take on all honest critiques of our logic, our research, and our conclusions) one of the reasons we’re hitting 60 cities is to get the discussion going. This is a work in progress, so if you’re at all up for it (and whether you think 1 – 5 above is a pile of hooey) I would be extremely pleased and honored and delighted to grill you a burger on the deck of our office in Stillwater some Tuesday or Thursday in Sept/October or buy you a subway sandwich in San Diego, LA, San Fran, Phoenix, Boston, Long Island, Phillie, Milwaukie, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, or Charlotte in the next six weeks and get your honest appraisal of what we have created, as well as suggestions as to how to make it even better.

Comments

[elisabeth]

I think the extreme right (and left) tend to co-opt these terms and then use them to polarize us. We have the choice of redefining them like you are...or creating our own vocabulary....of reframing the issue....and of course widening the audience.

Let me know when you'll be where in MN and I'll try to come. I'm always happy to have a free lunch and a bit of heated discussion....although my guess is I will agree with much of what you are thinking :-)