Is the True Creator an Intelligent Designer?
by George L. Murphy

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Calvary as a Theological Viewpoint

The claims of the Intelligent Design (henceforth ID) movement have received considerable attention from the standpoint of the natural sciences. According to proponents of this movement, biological organisms display complex features which cannot be explained by current evolutionary theories. Michael Behe argues that some biochemical systems are “irreducibly complex” and thus would have had to come into being as a whole rather than by some gradual process, while William Dembski argues that the “complex specified information” embodied in living things could not have developed by any known natural process. They conclude that these things are evidence for “intelligent design,” and that intelligent design and a designer need to be made part of scientific theories.

It is certainly necessary to examine these ideas scientifically: Scientific claims need to be evaluated by scientific means. If they should turn out to be correct either in part or completely then ID would have major implications for the way in which we understand natural processes. But there are also significant theological implications of ID. Proponents of this movement have made explicit religious assertions and there are other theological concepts and claims that are implicit in meaningful concepts of intelligent design. My purpose in this paper is to examine some aspects of ID from a theological standpoint.

It is important to note that I say “from a theological standpoint.” A great deal depends, of course, on the particular theology that we adopt from the spectrum of possibilities within the Christian tradition. Obviously, Christian proponents of ID who have given the matter any thought believe that it is compatible with, and perhaps even required by, their theology. On the other hand, some Young Earth Creationists think that ID is a theologically unacceptable compromise because it does not demand that origins be described in accord with their literal reading of Genesis and leaves open the possibility of biological evolution, albeit not of a strictly Darwinian type.

The theological viewpoint from which I will evaluate ID here is what I have called “chiasmic cosmology,” and can be described briefly with a statement of Luther’s: “True theology and recognition of God are in the crucified Christ.” Our understanding of who God is and how God is present and active in the world should begin from the cross and the resurrection of the crucified One. Luther’s claim is radical because it brings out the radical character of Christianity with full force. Christianity is not generic theism with the cross and resurrection tacked on but is Trinitarian theism demanded by the cross-resurrection event.

The Revelation of the Creator
I have described implications of a theology of the cross for various aspects of the science-theology dialogue in the past and now want to discuss ID in this context. The first implication of the theology of the cross that is germane to the topic has to do with our knowledge of God. God’s revelation in the event of the cross is paradoxically hidden, because nothing is less like our normal concept of God than a man hanging dead on a cross as a criminal. If this is truly a revelation of God, and not merely a tactic God employs for some purpose, then we should expect such concealment to be characteristic of God’s work generally. “Truly you are a God who hides himself,” Isa 45:15 says. Pascal had this verse in mind when he said:

What meets our eyes denotes neither a total absence nor a manifest presence of the divine, but the presence of a God who conceals Himself. Everything bears this stamp.

Contrast that statement with a well known one of ID proponent Phillip Johnson:

God is our true Creator. I am not speaking of a God who is known only to faith and is invisible to reason, or who acted undetectably behind some naturalistic evolutionary process that was to all appearances mindless and purposeless. That kind of talk is about the human imagination, not the reality of God. I speak of a God who acted openly and left his fingerprints all over the evidence.

This deity who leaves “his fingerprints all over the evidence” is clearly not the God who hides himself. The true God must be known first by faith in the crucified One. Furthermore, the hiddenness of God corresponds to the fact that proper Christian theology is, in a classic phrase, faith in search of understanding, not the other way around. God is not absolutely “invisible to reason” but can be “seen” by reason only from the standpoint of faith. The type of demand that Johnson makes falls under Luther’s stricture: “The one who beholds what is invisible of God, through the perception of what is made [Rom 1:20], is not rightly called a theologian.” In fact the idea that God must show off and insist on credit for the divine work, as a human artist might place his or her signature on a work in bold letters, is precisely a product of “the human imagination.” It represents the kind of God we would be if we had a chance to be God!

“But,” the objection often comes, “what about Romans 1:20? Does that not say that we can know God from creation?” Luther had precisely that verse in mind in the statement just quoted, as is clear if we compare his Latin text with the Vulgate. Paul’s argument in Romans 1 is that even though people should be able to know God from creation, sin causes everybody to distort the evidence for God and therefore to construct idols. That is why a supposed natural knowledge of God cannot be the basis for Christian theology. Luther then goes on to say that the person who deserves to be called a theologian is one “who perceives what is visible of God, God’s ‘backside’ [Exod 33:23], by beholding the sufferings and the cross.”

In informal discussions Denis Lamoureux has made another important point about Romans 1 in connection with ID claims. Paul was writing for people in the Mediterranean world of the first century and whatever evidence for God in nature he had in mind must have been understandable to people in that cultural context. Thus this text cannot be invoked in support of modern ID claims which appeal to complex phenomena discovered by modern biologists. Paul and his contemporaries knew nothing about bacteria, let alone the bacterial flagellum (a staple of ID arguments), and information theory was many centuries in the future. Similar considerations hold for other texts that are sometimes appealed to in support of claims for a natural knowledge of God, such as Psalm 19.

The Word of God
Johnson’s statement illustrates the belief of many supporters of ID who are not trained in theology: If God is really doing anything in the world then we ought to be able to find scientific evidence for that activity. The fact that this is theology at a popular level does not mean that it should be despised or ignored. It does not, however, represent the best that can be mustered in support of ID.

Let us turn then to more sophisticated theological arguments on behalf of ID made by William Dembski, who has said that “intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” Some critics have jumped on this statement as evidence that ID is simply religion dressed up as science, but I think that such a criticism misses the point. Scientific theories are not to be evaluated qua science in terms of the beliefs that motivate them but by how fruitful they are in enabling us to understand natural processes and predict novel facts. Everybody knew, for example, about the anti-religious ideas that were part of the motivation of the steady state cosmology, but the theory still had to live or die (and in fact has died) by comparison with observation.

My concern here is a different one. Dembski’s statement that I just quoted is obviously theological, but is it good theology? The way that he states a theological case for ID in his book Intelligent Design suggests that the answer is “No.” The basic problem can be stated simply: Dembski’s use of the Logos theology of John’s Gospel ignores the feature that makes it distinctively Christian, the claim that “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). Dembski emphasizes almost entirely the role of the logos asarkos, the “unfleshed” pre-incarnate Word. I do not mean to suggest that he ignores the Incarnation, for he explicitly affirms the Chalcedonian doctrine of Christ as fully divine and fully human. But the Incarnation does not play the critical role in the discussion of ID that it should, and the cross is not part of his discussion here at all.

Dembski discusses the etymology of the Greek word logos and connects it with our word “intelligent” and the concept of choice which he sees as central to the idea of design. He is certainly right in saying that logos means more than just the English “word.” The way in which the word is used in the Johannine prologue probably shows the influence of reflection on this concept in Hellenistic Judaism and enabled early Christian apologists to make contact with philosophical ideas in their culture about a cosmic Reason. Today this provides a way to deal in theological terms with the rationality of the world which science discloses. A number of writers on theology and science have used the opening words of the Fourth Gospel as a basis for the idea of creation by the Reason of God. But the primary meaning of logos in the Gospel is indeed “Word,” and its root is biblical -- God’s creative speech in Genesis 1 and the prophetic “Word of YHWH” which also has creative power.

That, however, is a relatively minor qualification. The more important point was made long ago by Augustine. He said that in the Platonists he had found some of what John says about the Logos but not that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Without the Incarnation we would not know who the Logos is: It would be merely a piece of philosophical speculation or, at most, a kind of catalogue for possible worlds.

“The Logos became flesh.” The word sarx, “flesh,” is highly significant here. John does not say that “the Logos became human.” True as that is, it would allow us to imagine Christ as some kind of ideal of humanity, not subject to the weaknesses and trials of our everyday life. The biblical meaning of “flesh” here is something quite different because it refers precisely to the limitations, weakness and vulnerability of humanity. “All flesh is grass” (Isa 40:6) and “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 15:50). The Word assumed this flesh, and assumed it under the conditions of sinful and corrupted humanity – “the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3), Paul said. As Calvin put it: “Christ of his boundless grace joins himself to base and ignoble men.”

More than that, “we beheld his glory.” That does not mean what one might think at first, namely, the revelation of God’s glory in the Transfiguration, about which we read in the Synoptic Gospels. In John, Jesus’ words on Palm Sunday make it clear that the “hour” in which the Son of Man will be glorified is the hour when the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, the hour when he will be lifted up from the earth to draw all people to himself (John 12:23-33). Christ’s glory is revealed pre-eminently in the cross.

The theology of John’s Gospel is then a theology of the cross. It is true that it does not give us the stark picture of Mark’s Gospel in which the centurion’s confession calls us to faith in the moment of darkness and death. John’s approach is in a sense the reverse, with the one we know by faith as the Son of God falling into the earth and dying. And it is this which tells us who the Logos of John 1 is – the one who is willing to die for the sake of the world which came into being through him. He is indeed the source of the world’s intelligibility, but the intelligibility of creation should not immediately be equated with the order that science is able to discern in the world. We are to understand the creation and preservation of the world in the light of the cross, not the other way around.

The Work of the Designer
To this point our discussion may have seemed somewhat remote from the topics of the science-theology dialogue. But we can now address one of the most glaring problems for ID, the question of how complex specified information and irreducible complexity are supposed to have been introduced into biological systems.

Proponents of ID have sometimes argued that the Designer need not be God, especially when they are trying to get ID concepts introduced into the science curricula of public schools. But if the Designer is meant to be some natural agent then it is of little interest for theology and of no value for the attack on naturalism which is a major motive for ID. Thus, I assume will that the putative Intelligent Designer is indeed supposed to be God.

And of course all Christians believe that the Holy Trinity has brought about the complex features of living things – the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, and all of the other complex phenomena to which ID proponents call attention. But how has God done this? By working with and through lawful natural processes, or by doing something that is beyond the capacity of natural processes? Has God created these complex structures mediately, by divine cooperation with creaturely agents, or immediately, without the use of creaturely agents – which is to say, miraculously?

To begin with we should note is that the Bible speaks of the origin of living things in Genesis 1 in the first way: “Let the earth put forth vegetation” (Gen 1:11), etc. Ernest Messenger has described the way in which many of the church fathers understood God’s first creation of living things as mediated through powers given to the earth and waters. In fact there is nothing in scripture that indicates that the creation of life must be any more a miracle than the creation of inorganic nature.

And the first mode of divine action, cooperation with natural processes, is how God normally works in the world. That is how God brings babies to birth, supplies our daily bread and keeps planets in orbit. The successes of science in explaining the world in terms of natural processes, without reference to God, testify to this fact when we view them from the standpoint of Christian faith. ID proponents have pointed out correctly that there are features of biological systems that science has not yet explained. But if they can be understood in terms of natural processes -- though perhaps processes that we are ignorant of at present -- then there will be no need to make a theological concept, the Intelligent Designer, part of the scientific theories that describe those phenomena.

That does not mean that God is not involved in those processes. Christians will believe that the properties of light atomic nuclei have been designed by God so that carbon-12 can be formed in stellar interiors, thus making carbon-based life possible in the universe. But we also understand the properties of the electromagnetic and nuclear interactions that allow the fusion of three helium-4 nuclei to form carbon at an appropriate rate. God has carried out this particular intelligent design, but science does not need to invoke the idea of God to explain it.

The second possibility is that the development of complex biological structures cannot be accomplished by natural processes even with divine cooperation. They then would be miracles in the strictest sense of the word. One can maintain for various reasons that this is the case, and the possibility of such miracles cannot be denied a priori. But then it has to be made very clear that there can be no further scientific investigation into the causes of these structures. Their sole cause is God, who cannot be subjected to such investigation.

But what does an adequate theology of divine action have to say about this? For an approach based on the theology of the cross there is little doubt that we should speak of God acting in the world through natural processes. The divine kenosis which Paul speaks of in connection with the Incarnation in Phil 2:7, Christ’s emptying or self-limitation, is the model for God’s work in the world generally. If God limits divine action through natural processes to what can be accomplished in accord with the rational patterns which we try to approximate by our laws of physics, then God will, as our earlier discussion leads us to expect, remain hidden from direct observation. Created things are then not only the instruments with which God works but also, as Luther says, the “masks of God, behind which He wants to remain concealed and do all things.”

Science observes, and can understand in detail, the instruments which God uses, but it cannot penetrate behind these masks to observe God. The God who works with these instruments is known by faith – not faith as mere wishful thinking, as Johnson seems to imagine in the statement of his that I quoted earlier, but trust in the God revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Conclusion
Does this all mean that any form of Intelligent Design theory is simply to be ruled out theologically? I do not think that we can make that conclusion from this brief survey. G
#337;del’s theorem about undecidable propositions suggests that the universe is not a logically closed system, and thus that there may be phenomena which science cannot explain. The God made known to us in Christ is always active in the world, and Eph 1:10 tells us that God’s design is to unite all things in him. But we can at least say that ID proponents need to do some serious thinking about their theological approach.

On the other hand, a theological approach which is centered on the cross of Christ and the resurrection of the crucified, and which views the natural world from that standpoint, removes much of the need that some Christians feel for some divine “fingerprints” which can be seen independently of God’s cruciform revelation. Signs of the presence and activity of the true creator in the world are to be seen in the light of the cross and not without it. We can then be willing to leave phenomena which current scientific theories have not explained for the continued research of scientists who try to understand the world in terms of natural processes, trusting that God is at work “in, with and under” phenomena, whether we understand them scientifically or not.

About the Author
George L. Murphy is a physicist and ELCA pastor who is presently serving as a pastoral associate at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio. He has written extensively on theology-science issues and has taught courses in that area at Trinity Lutheran Seminary and The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.