Machan's Musings - Puzzles of Intelligent Design
by Tibor R. Machan
When I was a child I was being raised as a Roman Catholic. I was, of course, baptized, took first communion, and was confirmed. I attended church pretty regularly although this was in Communist Hungary where we later learned that many of those giving sermons belonged to what were called "the red priests," members of the clergy who made some kind of appeasement with the Communist government. Yet there were some famous members, as well, who opposed communism with great courage—Cardinal Midszenty, for example.
In time, however, I came to wonder just what I was believing and why. I argued with priests after they gave sermons on angels and the duty of self-sacrifice, finding these notions incredible. But I carried on as a good soldier, blaming myself for daring to question. One time while in the US Air Force, when I was about 19, I went to confession on Sunday and heard myself saying the ritualistic sentence, "And I will do my best not to sin again," when I realized that Monday I was planning to go on a date and had every intention to sin, so I said to the priest hearing my confession, "But father, I am not sure I am being honest about this, since I have a date tomorrow evening and will probably sin and I know this now." Without missing a beat he replied, "Just mean it for now."
This was that proverbial last straw on the camel’s back—it made no sense to me to make a promise you know you are going to break by just intending it "for now." It set me off on a very long journey of re-examination of what I was believing, why, did it make sense, how dare I question something so well established in my world, etc.
Of course, all long I had raised questions of the elementary kind—could God ever make a rock so big He couldn’t lift it? How could God could come from nothing but the world needed Him to create it? If everything in the world needs a cause, does this mean the world itself, which contains all the causes, could be caused by something else—where would that come from? Yes, I was a devil of a kid.
Eventually I decided to take up the study of philosophy in order to refine my inquires, to meet up with some pretty good thinkers—philosophers, theologians, psychologists—who would help me get clear on some of these issues (and many others). At the end of the day—at least for most of the days I recall—I decided I wasn’t going to believe in these things; I simply couldn’t get past my doubts even if it showed strong hubris. (Indeed, another nail in the coffin was reading Thomas E. Kempis' [circa 1379] Imitation of Christ, who had claimed we humans sin by seeking knowledge since this is an affront to God, the only one who can really know.)
Nevertheless, the issue of God is always before us, especially if one teaches philosophy, and being dogmatic in whatever side one takes is very bad form, indeed. So now I am thinking about this "Intelligent Design" position that is making the rounds, although by all accounts it is a variation on what is known as the cosmological argument.
As the Stanford (on line) Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells it, "[i]t uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from certain alleged facts about the world (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally referred to as God. Among these initial claims are that the world came into being, that the world is such that at any future time it could either be or not be (the world is contingent), or that certain beings in the world are causally dependent or contingent. From these facts philosophers infer either deductively or inductively that a first cause, a necessary being, an unmoved mover, or a personal being (God) exists. The cosmological argument is part of classical natural theology, whose goal has been to provide some evidence for the claim that God exists." The current version, ID, holds that since there are numerous facts about our world that are very orderly and work in a lawlike fashion, and since we haven’t got naturalistic (e.g., Darwinian) explanations for all of them, it must have been God, an intelligent designer, who created it all.
This being a fairly big issue, I want to just convey my two big problems with it. First, the design of the world isn’t actually all that intelligent, considering how many matters seem to go awry all the time, especially with us. Second, and more importantly, intelligence is produced by a living brain, so the idea that there had been intelligence prior to the world defies what we know pretty well—a brain requires the world for it to exist.
I guess, I remain unconvinced and the advocates of ID need to go back to the drawing board.
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