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Letter from AmericaIntelligent Design?Time magazine recently sported a new front page article recording the latest evolution v. creation educational debate. In America, ever since the much storied Scopes trial (the ‘Monkey Trial’) in 1925, the culture wars have been shaped by the controversial and, in the end, almost universal teaching of evolution in High School classrooms. Various attempts by conservative Christians have been made to challenge this educational hegemony, but none so successful as the contemporary ‘Intelligent Design’ movement. As evidence of that movement’s increasing influence, witness the concern of various heavy hitting atheists, including Steven Pinker from Harvard University, who equates belief in Intelligent Design with belief that the sun goes round the earth. All this heat and little light seems to mean we are about to enter a new stage in the political sparring match between the religious right and the non-religious left. George Bush, asked his opinion about Intelligent Design, said that it was fair to teach both sides of the debate. To wary liberals that apparently sage advice merely seemed a smoke screen for beginning a process towards a faith-based science. StatisticsThe political problem rarely faced by the atheistic supporters of evolution is that statistics traditionally reveal that acceptance of an evolutionary position was only ever around 50%, and a new set of statistics puts those who reject evolution over the half-and-half mark. What’s more, the traditional appeal to church-state separation enshrined in the American Constitution is likewise tricky because, after all, many of the framers of that Constitution were ardent believers in a Creator, inheritors of the Puritans who surely saw nothing fishy about praying before class (or lunch, for that matter). We are here for his glorySo this all looks set up for a nice long arm wrestle. As a fan of Jonathan Edwards (and with a new monograph on Edwards published by UPA due out this month so my attention once again drawn to his approach), I can’t help but wonder what would Edwards say? It is interesting that Edwards’s one published treatise on creation was not about the origin but the purpose of our universe. The End for which God Created the World is a salutary reprieve to focusing exclusively upon fossils and molecules. We are here for his glory. Even the burgeoning more secular outlook on the natural world in which Edwards’s age was immersed, provided Edwards with ammunition not for a ‘God of the gaps’ response (so common at the time and since) but with a total overhaul of the underlying principles of nature, so that in our mind’s eye God is seen as always present, and we more a figment of his imagination than the other way around. I wonder whether these basic principles are at least as fruitful a place for dialogue. Still, if the question ‘what would Edwards say’ is worth asking, we must also be drawn to ask the more important question: ‘What would Jesus say?’ To that we have a ready answer: ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s’ (Matthew 22.21). What that means for Intelligent Design I’ll leave up to you. Josh Moody© Evangelicals Now - September 2005 |