The “Just So”
Theory of Human Origins. (
While it is never truly possible to
understand what motivates people to believe what they do, even when they give
you this or that reason for their behavior, and I am thinking particularly here
of the Intelligent Design theory of creationism that is currently being
championed by right-wing fundamentalists to do away with Darwinism as part of
public school curricula across the country, I suspect that the motivation has
more to do with power than it does with the validity that has been won by one
side or the other in the debate.
Creationism has always been about power.
When the idea that an all-powerful Creator of the universe first came
into human consciousness as an active agent in the world, a model for seizing,
holding, and executing power on a more human scale was also and simultaneously
born. If God holds and executes absolute
dominion over His creation, then it only stands to reason that human agents must
also exist who have the right and power to exercise dominion over their fellow
creatures. When George W. Bush reacts to
the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that the phrase “under God”
in the Pledge of Allegiance is a violation of the First Amendment prohibition
against the government’s attempt to establish religion by asserting that all
human rights “are derived from God,” he is making a claim, all too
traditionally held in American culture, that people are bound in thrall to the
all-powerful will of their Creator and do not have any independent right to
freedom or self-determination at all, apart from that which has been granted to
us by God. Even worse, since God is
supernatural and completely outside the realm of human experience, even incomprehensible
to mere human intellect, there must be an agent of God, on the ground, as it
were, who is empowered by divine selection to mediate His incomprehensible will
to the rest of us. The Pope performs
that role in the Catholic Church. George
W. Bush wraps himself in that mantle, at least in so far as his absolutist
rhetoric is concerned since 9/11, as the divinely anointed President of the
One way to understand how someone
like George W. Bush can get sucked down the black hole of such massive
arrogance is to recognize the fact that creationist ideologies, especially the
evangelical brands, have a fully fleshed out road-map that can hardly carry
away a true believer to any other destination.
The essential ground of the ideology has always been the idea that God
created human beings as a kind of final act in a six-part operation that
brought the world into factual reality.
I can say here essentially that a kind of contradiction already exists
in this perception since it is difficult to understand why anyone would
attribute the actions of a mythological character, God, to a production which
resulted in the creation of a factually real world. In other words, why attribute to God, who has
always been defined as a supernatural entity, if not an extremely absolute
extra-terrestrial force, the activity of creating nature and earth itself? This, of course, is exactly what Intelligent
Design creationists have been doing.
They also argue that the whole purpose and object of the process of
creation was to make human beings the dominant force of the entire natural and
material world. William A. Dembski, for
instance, in “What Every Theologian Should Know About Creation, Evolution and
Design,” says that “I don't believe in fully naturalistic evolution controlled
solely by purposeless material processes, and Yes, I do believe that organisms
have undergone some change in the course of natural history (though I believe
that this change has occurred within strict limits and that human beings were
specially created).” As I understand his
argument, God created the world initially and then oversaw its development
through small changes in the biological life that populated it from the
beginning, which addresses the issue of “old world” fossils, but then
intervened at some subsequent point in time by creating human beings
specifically. Dembski seems content to
accept whatever time-line paleontologists have established in dating the
emergence of human beings (Homo sapiens)
as creatures dependent on God for their coming into existence. Prior types, say Homo habilis, or Homo erectus,
etc., do not count as forerunners to true humans because they were not created
by God, apparently, but only appeared at all as a result of this or that
“small” change that did occur among the various types of biological life that
existed in general. I am assuming a lot
here about Dembski’s position because I have not actually found anything in his
writing that specifically addresses this issue.
The point here is that Dembski’s argument accounts for the existence of
the fossilized remains of proto-humans and also conveniently explains how Homo sapiens came into existence without
any biological connection to prior types, where evolution maintains a more or
less direct link between one and the other through natural selection.
A second paper, one that even gives
a name to the idea of man’s dominion over nature and all created reality, by
Hugh Ross (“Design and the Anthropic Principle”),
argues that “everything about the universe tends toward man, toward making life
possible and sustaining it.” Ross does
not mean for anyone to take this statement as a neutral or half-hearted
endorsement for the notion that man constitutes the supreme object of all
created reality, since his intent is precisely that; to insist that God created
the universe, not for itself as it were, but for human beings alone to have,
occupy, and exploit in whatever ways they saw fit. There is nothing new in this idea, of course,
since Christian thinkers have always expressed this same notion as a
fundamental aspect of their belief system.
Ross supports his version of the design argument by citing sixteen
principles and constants, all drawn from previous scientific inquiry and
theory, that had to have been fixed or regulated within incredibly narrow
limits for life to have arisen at all in the universe as a whole. Walter L. Bradley, in “The Designed ‘Just So’
Universe,” makes a somewhat shorter list that includes “electromagnetic force,”
“gravity force,” “nuclear strong force,” and the “weak force coupling
constant,” as aspects of the universe that had to be set at levels of
performance neither higher nor lower than where they actually are in order for
life to emerge and sustain itself in the natural world. There are so many such constants in nature,
set at such narrow spans of force, that no sensible
person could believe that all of them came into existence without the design
motivation of a Supreme Being. God’s
creative intent, therefore, was to make a world ideally suitable for human
occupation and the fact that these constants are now identifiable within such
“just so” and narrow limits proves that an intelligent designer must have
created the world.
Owen Gingerich, in his essay
entitled “Is There a Role for Natural Theology Today?”, makes a similar case
for “just so” conditions after acknowledging the fact that “science’s great
success has been in the production of a remarkably coherent view of nature
rather than in an intricately dovetailed set of proofs . . . .” He goes on from here to assert that design
theory also has a “legitimate place in human understanding even if it falls
short of proof”; and suggests that what we need in place of proof “is a
consistent and coherent world view, and at least for some of us, the universe
is easier to comprehend if we assume that it has both purpose and design.” The “purpose and design” Gingerich refers to
here, of course, is the same one that every other Intelligent Design advocate
embraces; namely, that the universe was created by God for the sole purpose of
providing a place where man could exercise his dominion over nature and his
fellow creatures. Gingerich makes his
case for design by drawing from the fact that conditions at the Big Bang had to
be perfectly “balanced between
too much and too little energy” for the subsequent expansion of available
matter. He goes on to state that
“During
the past decade this narrow balance has been the focus of ever greater
attention, and cosmologists versed in the intricacies of the general theory of
relativity found that the situation was more acute than they had earlier
imagined. If the universe has too little energy to expand forever, its global
geometry corresponds to what mathematicians call Riemannian or spherical space.
If it has an excess, the global geometry is called Lobachevskian or hyperbolic
space, and if it hangs in the balance in between, the familiar Euclidian
geometry holds and the space is referred to as flat even though the universe
has more than two dimensions.”
Gingerich’s grasp of mathematical
principles, ones which hardly anyone on the far Christian right has knowledge
of or even acquaintance with, I presume, makes his argument about spherical
(Riemannian) and hyperbolic (Lobachevskian) and flat Euclidean space seem more
significant than it might actually be, since there is no real guarantee that
life, human or otherwise, cannot exist in a spherical or hyperbolic space just
as well, if perhaps differently configured, than it does in the one we know
from experience in our “flat” Euclidian world.
Gingerich pushes the point when he says that “[t]he
wonderful discovery was that in the very earliest stages of the expansion, the
universe had to be incredibly flat to maintain its present near-flatness. Even
a tiny departure one way or the other would cause a runaway situation that
would bend the space one way or the other,” where such a distortion would have
prevented the emergence of life altogether, according to advocates of the “just
so” design argument. Maybe yes, maybe
no; but Gingerich has already slipped the constraints of having to produce
“proof” of his position, that life is only possible in a flat universe, when he
expresses a willingness to acquiesce to what only seems reasonable from his
point-of-view, where actual proof is less important than finding an intellectual
comfort zone in a world that has “purpose and design.”
Prominent
among several questions raised by the Intelligent Design theory in my mind,
especially with respect to the backward looking conceptualization that claims
both intelligence and design depends on there being a human presence in the
universe before either one or the other can be posited, is the one that wants
to know why Homo sapiens, as opposed
to other kinds of human-like creatures, even other kinds of animals in general,
are considered to be the end-all of the Deity’s creative process. This question has answers on a number of
different levels. From a purely
creationist point-of-view, for instance, a standard answer to the question
would encompass a reference to the inclusion of the immortal soul in the
fabrication of human beings by the Creator that sets man significantly apart
from, and most certainly above, every other animal, presumably including
proto-human species, that exist anywhere in the known world. In other words, man is considered the object
of God’s creative impulse because only he has the requisite immortal soul,
where no other living thing does or can have such a thing, and that alone
elevates man above all other aspects of created reality. There are a number of things wrong with this
view from a scientific point-of-view. In
the first place, no application of science can demonstrate the existence of the
human soul. There was a time in
scientific history when efforts were made to verify its existence, an activity
no one tries anymore, but nothing like success was ever achieved. Proving the existence of the human soul,
however, has never been a problem for most people because virtually no one has
ever argued that the soul does not exists, mostly because human has always been
defined, first and always, as a life form that possesses an immortal soul. Put simply: the existence of the human soul
is an a priori given that has never
been seriously challenged by analysis.
Another problem with the concept is that most of the attributes of the
human soul, as they have been outlined, defined, and expressed by theologians
over the years, are functions that are generally interchangeable with ones that
are performed by the human brain. Most
early writers were not aware of brain-functions and so attributed to the soul
what the mind actually accomplishes in human behavior. This is a problem for two reasons: the brain
is finite, not infinite, and obviously dies when the body does, making it
mortal and not immortal. Hence, the mind
is not something that elevates human beings much above any other animal that
also has a functioning brain. While one
can still make an argument for human dominance, on the ground that our brains
are more advanced than other animals, the idea that humans possess something
utterly unique in the animal world which elevates us above everything else is
an argument that cannot be verified or sustained at all on the ground of simple
observation.
The
question this raises about Intelligent Design concerns the fact that making the
existence of the Designer dependent on the existence of human beings, as the
object of design in the first place, is whether or not an intelligent design
can be said to function as a cause of the universe if human beings cease to
exist or if human beings had not appeared on the stage of the universe in the
first place. Everything about the world
stays exactly as it is. One exception:
there are no human beings anywhere in the universe. According to the Intelligent Design argument,
there would be no evidence to support the idea of intelligent design if there
were no people in the world. Without
human beings, the world would be exactly what Dembski calls it; that is, it
would be the result of a “naturalistic evolution controlled
solely by purposeless material processes.”
That human beings, even ones in possession of
an immortal soul, are a necessary component of the design argument makes God’s
existence dependent on human reality rather than the other way around. Another aspect of this same problem arises
from the fact that an excessive amount of creation went into the production of
a single animal species. Traveling from
the earth to the edge of the “created” world, and moving at the speed of light,
the journey would require approximately 16 billion years to complete. In that space there are thousands of galaxies
and billions of stars. While it is one
thing to say that God’s actions are mysterious, it is quite another argument to
say that He found it necessary to fashion a universe of nearly unimaginable
extent only in order to create a tiny, insignificant spec of ground on which to
house, as it were, the crowning glory of His creative impulse. If earth is all He needs to sustain us, what
is all the rest of it for? Put another
way: why did God create such a massive reality, make its crowning glory human
beings, and then demand no more from that glory than the determination of one
man to fly a balloon around the earth in fourteen days? The idea that a 16 billion light-year-wide
creation was necessary so that Steve Fossett could
fly his balloon around the world in 2002 AD, drinking a celebratory “Bud Light”
in the Australian outback after he landed, is so ludicrous that it defies
comprehension. And this one is a
positive human achievement. Consider the
fact that 19 individuals hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001 AD, all claiming to have acted on the command of
the God they believe created the world, and the argument about “intelligent
design” shifts just ever so slightly on the scale toward profound stupidity
that it becomes hard to imagine why or how anyone could make such an argument
in the first place. Try George W. Bush’s
response to 9/11 and you are left with the realization that its most recent glory
was the accidental bombing of a wedding party in
(All the articles cited here can be
found at http://www.origins.org/menus/design.html).