"Throw Those Crutches Away ... "

William A. Dembski's Intelligent Design

In my Beyond Darwin blog yesterday I posted Grounding Faith in Reality?, part of my ongoing critique of William A. Dembski's book Intelligent Design. This book concerns how we can go about assuring ourselves that life's complexity is so extraordinary, the "finger of God" must be behind it.

By life, Dembski means the biosphere of this planet as it has evolved over the eons. For Dembski, though he is a theist, evolution is real. It's just that Darwin's heirs are incorrect: evolution is not rooted in pure randomness. Dembski says that that claim is demonstrably false. His book is in part a "scientific" demonstration of why.

But in part, it is an exercise in theology. Dembski tries to show that life's incredible complexity is a sign from God: an event or combination of events that is so very extraordinary, it must be "uniquely specific" to an alleged sign-giver. In this case, the alleged sign-giver is God.

If a sign can be so validated, it can activate a "test-conditional" of the form if-the-sign-occurs-then-decide-such-and-such. A concrete example Dembski gives: If the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is real, then we ought to believe in our own bodily resurrection ... and all that goes with it in Christian religion. We ought to have faith that the Son of God has, through his own death on a cross, conquered death.

My quarrel with Dembski is over his idea of what faith is and how it works. He disparages faith that is "not grounded in reality." Specifically, he finds fault with the Basque-Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) for saying, "To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as though He did exist."

That formulation is not good enough for Dembski (see p. 42). It leaves room for doubt about God's existence. Dembski hopes to construct an argument about the extraordinariness of life's evolutionary history which can eliminate that doubt.

But I say that where there is no room for doubt, there is no room for faith. Faith is not supposed to be the same thing as palpable certainty. Though the risen Jesus tolerated the "hands-on" confirmation sought by his "doubting" apostle Thomas, clearly the message for us is that faith in itself ought not require such materialistic confirmation.

I would go even farther. I would say that true faith is never to be "grounded in reality." It is the other way around. As I have tried to suggest in earlier posts — Genesis by Observership, Verum Factum, The Pearlescence Principle — we are supposed to ground our reality in faith!

Dembski's argument about Intelligent Design is at best a crutch to belief. For belief to become a reality-grounding and life-generating faith for us, we need to — as the faith healers are wont to say — "Throw those crutches away and walk!"