Saturday, January 31, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Situating Intelligent Design in the Contemporary Debate by Dr. William Dembski
cyclewala adds:
I should point out that my way of countering Scientism is not through Science, as the ID folk do, as obvious from the last 3 posts, but rather Philosophy. It is obvious to me, that many Big Questions, such as "do we have a free-will"* are not Scientific but rather philosophical questions, and Science oversteps its boundaries when it attempts to answer them. For many the proof is within us, and for others, it is a matter of simply preferring one kind of thinking over another. The fact that there is a "consensus," and that too amongst scientists rather than experts of epistemology- only marks a fashion in thought, and is in no way proof of "rightness."
[*Similarly the First Cause. ]
Science rests on shakier epistemological foundations than it would care to admit. I believe the way is to attack science's -actually Scientism's claims about exclusivity to the Truth.
However, as recently posted, I believe there is a need for the 2 warring bodies of Knowledge- Science & Faith- to acknowledge each other, and I believe that there are signs that this is beginning to happen.
*********************************************************
Situating Intelligent Design in the Contemporary Debate by Dr. William Dembski
Let me now respond to these concerns. I'll start with Eugenie Scott. Design theorists have hardly been reticent about their program. I've certainly laid it out as I see it both in the introduction to Mere Creation and in chapter four of Intelligent Design . What Scott is complaining about has less to do with the forthrightness of design theorists about their intellectual program than with the increased challenge that intelligent design presents to defenders of Darwinism as compared with creationism. Creationism offers critics like Eugenie Scott a huge fixed target. Creationism takes the Bible literally and makes the debate over Darwinism into a Bible-science controversy. In a culture where the Bible has been almost universally rejected by the cultural elite, creationism is therefore a non-starter.
But isn't it true that design theorists are largely Bible-believers and that their reason for not casting intelligent design as a Bible-science controversy is pure expedience and not principle? In other words, isn't it just the case that we realize creationism hasn't been working, and so we decided to recast it and salvage as much of it as we can? This criticism seems to me completely backwards. For one thing, most of the leaders in the intelligent design movement did not start out as creationists and then turn to design. Rather, we started squarely in the Darwinian camp and then had to work our way out of it. The intellectual journey of most design theorists is therefore quite different from the intellectual journey of many erstwhile creationists, who in getting educated renounced their creationism (cf. Ron Number's The Creationists in which Numbers argues that the correlation between increased education and loss of confidence in creationism is near perfect).
In my own case, I was raised in a home where my father had a D.Sc. in biology (from the University of Erlangen in Germany), taught evolutionary biology at the college level, and never questioned Darwinian orthodoxy during my years growing up. My story is not atypical. Biologists Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, and Dean Kenyon all started out adhering to Darwinism and felt no religious pull to renounce it. In Behe's case, as a Roman Catholic, there was simply no religious reason to question Darwin. In so many of our cases, what led us out of Darwinism was its inadequacies as a scientific theory as well as the prospect of making design scientifically tractable.
It's worth noting that the effort to make the design of natural systems scientifically tractable has at best been a peripheral concern of young earth creationists historically. There have been exceptions, like A. E. Wilder-Smith, who sought to identify the information in biological systems and connect it with a designer/creator. But the principal texts of the Institute for Creation Research, for instance, typically took a very different line from trying to make design a program of scientific research. Instead of admitting that Darwinian theory properly belonged to science and then trying to formulate design as a replacement theory, young earth creationists typically claimed that neither Darwinism nor design could properly be regarded as scientific (after all, so the argument went, no one was there to observe what either natural selection or a designer did in natural history).
Intelligent design's historical roots do not ramify through young earth creationism. Rather, our roots go back to the tradition of British natural theology (which took design to have actual scientific content), to the tradition of Scottish common sense realism (notably the work of Thomas Reid), and to the informed critiques of Darwinism that have consistently appeared ever since Darwin published his Origin (e.g., Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard Goldschmidt, Pierre Grassé, Gerald Kerkut, Michael Polanyi, Marcel Schützenberger, and Michael Denton).
Why then are so many of us in the intelligent design movement Christians? I don't think it is because intelligent design is intrinsically Christian or even theistic. Rather, I think it has to do with the Christian evangelical community for now providing the safest haven for intelligent design -- which is not to say that the haven is particularly safe by any absolute standard. Anyone who has followed the recent events of Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center, the first intelligent design think-tank at a research university, will realize just how intense the opposition to intelligent design is even among Christians. Baylor is a Baptist institution that prides itself as being the flagship of evangelical colleges and universities (which includes schools like Wheaton College and Valparaiso University). Although an independent peer review committee validated intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry, the committee changed the center's name and took the center's focus off intelligent design. What's more, after months of censorship by the Baylor administration and vilification by Baylor faculty, I was finally removed as director of the center.
Now my treatment at Baylor is hardly unique among my compatriots in the design movement. Dean Kenyon, despite being a world leader in the study of chemical evolution, was barred by the biology department at San Francisco State University from critiquing the very ideas that earlier he had formulated and that subsequently he found defective. Refusing to have his academic freedom abridged, he was then removed from teaching introductory biology courses, despite being a very senior and well-published member of the department. Only after the Wall Street Journal exposed San Francisco State University's blatant violation of Kenyon's academic freedom was the biology department forced to back down. I am frequently asked what is the latest research that supports intelligent design, and I find myself having to be reticent about who is doing what precisely because of enormous pressure that opponents of design employ to discredit these researchers, undermine their position, and cause them to lose their funding (upon request, I'm willing to name names of people and groups that engage in these tactics -- though not the names of researchers likely to be on the receiving end of these tactics).
To sum up, intelligent design faces tremendous opposition from our culture's elite, who in many instances are desperate to discredit it. What's more, within the United States the Christian evangelical world has thusfar been the most hospitable place for intelligent design (and this despite opposition like at Baylor). Also relevant is that Christianity remains the majority worldview for Americans. Thus on purely statistical grounds one would expect most proponents of intelligent design to be Christians. But not all of them. David Berlinski is a notable counterexample. I could name other counterexamples, but to spare them from harassment by opponents of design, I won't. (By the way, if you think I'm being paranoid, please pick up a copy of the November issue of the American Spectator, which has an article about Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center and my then imminent removal as its director; I think you'll find that my suspicions are justified and that it's the dogmatic opponents of design who are paranoid.)
Well, what then is this intelligent design research program that Eugenie Scott regards as even more disreputable than that of the young earth creationists? Because intelligent design is a fledgling science, it is still growing and developing and thus cannot be characterized in complete detail. Nonetheless, its broad outlines are clear enough. I place the start of the intelligent design movement with the publication in 1984 of The Mystery of Life's Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. The volume is significant in two ways. First, though written by three Christians and critiquing origin-of-life scenarios, it focused purely on the scientific case for and against abiogenesis. Thus it consciously avoided casting its critique as part of a Bible-science controversy. Second, though highly critical of non-telic naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios and thus a ready target for anti-creationists, the book managed to get published with a secular publisher. It took well over 100 manuscript submissions to get it published. MIT Press, for instance, had accepted it, subsequently went through a shake-up of its editorial board, and then turned it down. The book was finally published by Philosophical Library, which had published books by eight Nobel laureates.
The next key texts in the design movement were Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis's Of Pandas and People, and Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial, which appeared over the next seven years. Like The Mystery of Life's Origin, these were principally critiques of naturalistic evolutionary theories, though each of them also raised the possibility of intelligent design. The critiques took two forms, one a scientific critique focusing on weaknesses of naturalistic theories, the other a philosophical critique examining the role of naturalism as both a metaphysical and methodological principle in propping up the naturalistic theories, and especially neo-Darwinism.
Except for The Mystery of Life's Origin, which in some ways was a research monograph, the strength of these texts lay not in their novelty. Many of the criticisms had been raised before. A. E. Wilder-Smith had raised such criticisms within the creationist context, though in a correspondence I had with him in the late 80s he lamented that the Institute for Creation Research would no longer publish his works. Michael Polanyi had raised questions about the sufficiency of natural laws to account for biological complexity in the late 60s, and I know from conversations with Charles Thaxton that this work greatly influenced his thinking and made its way into The Mystery of Life's Origin . Gerald Kerkut about a decade earlier had asked one of his students in England for the evidence in favor of Darwinian evolution and received a ready answer; but when he asked for the evidence against Darwinian evolution, all he met was silence. This exchange prompted his 1960 text Implications of Evolution, whose criticisms also influenced the early design theorists.
Nonetheless, compared to previous critics of Darwinism, the early design theorists had a significant advantage: Unlike previous critics, who were either isolated (cf. Marcel Schützenberger, who although a world-class mathematician, was ostracized in the European community for his anti-Darwinian views) or confined to a ghetto subculture (cf. the young earth creationists with their in-house publishing companies), the early design theorists were united, organized, and fully cognizant of the necessary means for engaging both mass and high culture. As a consequence, criticism of Darwinism and scientific naturalism could at last reach a critical mass. In the past, criticism had been too sporadic and isolated, and thus could readily be ignored. Not any longer
I should point out that my way of countering Scientism is not through Science, as the ID folk do, as obvious from the last 3 posts, but rather Philosophy. It is obvious to me, that many Big Questions, such as "do we have a free-will"* are not Scientific but rather philosophical questions, and Science oversteps its boundaries when it attempts to answer them. For many the proof is within us, and for others, it is a matter of simply preferring one kind of thinking over another. The fact that there is a "consensus," and that too amongst scientists rather than experts of epistemology- only marks a fashion in thought, and is in no way proof of "rightness."
[*Similarly the First Cause. ]
Science rests on shakier epistemological foundations than it would care to admit. I believe the way is to attack science's -actually Scientism's claims about exclusivity to the Truth.
However, as recently posted, I believe there is a need for the 2 warring bodies of Knowledge- Science & Faith- to acknowledge each other, and I believe that there are signs that this is beginning to happen.
*********************************************************
Situating Intelligent Design in the Contemporary Debate by Dr. William Dembski
Let me now respond to these concerns. I'll start with Eugenie Scott. Design theorists have hardly been reticent about their program. I've certainly laid it out as I see it both in the introduction to Mere Creation and in chapter four of Intelligent Design . What Scott is complaining about has less to do with the forthrightness of design theorists about their intellectual program than with the increased challenge that intelligent design presents to defenders of Darwinism as compared with creationism. Creationism offers critics like Eugenie Scott a huge fixed target. Creationism takes the Bible literally and makes the debate over Darwinism into a Bible-science controversy. In a culture where the Bible has been almost universally rejected by the cultural elite, creationism is therefore a non-starter.
But isn't it true that design theorists are largely Bible-believers and that their reason for not casting intelligent design as a Bible-science controversy is pure expedience and not principle? In other words, isn't it just the case that we realize creationism hasn't been working, and so we decided to recast it and salvage as much of it as we can? This criticism seems to me completely backwards. For one thing, most of the leaders in the intelligent design movement did not start out as creationists and then turn to design. Rather, we started squarely in the Darwinian camp and then had to work our way out of it. The intellectual journey of most design theorists is therefore quite different from the intellectual journey of many erstwhile creationists, who in getting educated renounced their creationism (cf. Ron Number's The Creationists in which Numbers argues that the correlation between increased education and loss of confidence in creationism is near perfect).
In my own case, I was raised in a home where my father had a D.Sc. in biology (from the University of Erlangen in Germany), taught evolutionary biology at the college level, and never questioned Darwinian orthodoxy during my years growing up. My story is not atypical. Biologists Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, and Dean Kenyon all started out adhering to Darwinism and felt no religious pull to renounce it. In Behe's case, as a Roman Catholic, there was simply no religious reason to question Darwin. In so many of our cases, what led us out of Darwinism was its inadequacies as a scientific theory as well as the prospect of making design scientifically tractable.
It's worth noting that the effort to make the design of natural systems scientifically tractable has at best been a peripheral concern of young earth creationists historically. There have been exceptions, like A. E. Wilder-Smith, who sought to identify the information in biological systems and connect it with a designer/creator. But the principal texts of the Institute for Creation Research, for instance, typically took a very different line from trying to make design a program of scientific research. Instead of admitting that Darwinian theory properly belonged to science and then trying to formulate design as a replacement theory, young earth creationists typically claimed that neither Darwinism nor design could properly be regarded as scientific (after all, so the argument went, no one was there to observe what either natural selection or a designer did in natural history).
Intelligent design's historical roots do not ramify through young earth creationism. Rather, our roots go back to the tradition of British natural theology (which took design to have actual scientific content), to the tradition of Scottish common sense realism (notably the work of Thomas Reid), and to the informed critiques of Darwinism that have consistently appeared ever since Darwin published his Origin (e.g., Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard Goldschmidt, Pierre Grassé, Gerald Kerkut, Michael Polanyi, Marcel Schützenberger, and Michael Denton).
Why then are so many of us in the intelligent design movement Christians? I don't think it is because intelligent design is intrinsically Christian or even theistic. Rather, I think it has to do with the Christian evangelical community for now providing the safest haven for intelligent design -- which is not to say that the haven is particularly safe by any absolute standard. Anyone who has followed the recent events of Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center, the first intelligent design think-tank at a research university, will realize just how intense the opposition to intelligent design is even among Christians. Baylor is a Baptist institution that prides itself as being the flagship of evangelical colleges and universities (which includes schools like Wheaton College and Valparaiso University). Although an independent peer review committee validated intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry, the committee changed the center's name and took the center's focus off intelligent design. What's more, after months of censorship by the Baylor administration and vilification by Baylor faculty, I was finally removed as director of the center.
Now my treatment at Baylor is hardly unique among my compatriots in the design movement. Dean Kenyon, despite being a world leader in the study of chemical evolution, was barred by the biology department at San Francisco State University from critiquing the very ideas that earlier he had formulated and that subsequently he found defective. Refusing to have his academic freedom abridged, he was then removed from teaching introductory biology courses, despite being a very senior and well-published member of the department. Only after the Wall Street Journal exposed San Francisco State University's blatant violation of Kenyon's academic freedom was the biology department forced to back down. I am frequently asked what is the latest research that supports intelligent design, and I find myself having to be reticent about who is doing what precisely because of enormous pressure that opponents of design employ to discredit these researchers, undermine their position, and cause them to lose their funding (upon request, I'm willing to name names of people and groups that engage in these tactics -- though not the names of researchers likely to be on the receiving end of these tactics).
To sum up, intelligent design faces tremendous opposition from our culture's elite, who in many instances are desperate to discredit it. What's more, within the United States the Christian evangelical world has thusfar been the most hospitable place for intelligent design (and this despite opposition like at Baylor). Also relevant is that Christianity remains the majority worldview for Americans. Thus on purely statistical grounds one would expect most proponents of intelligent design to be Christians. But not all of them. David Berlinski is a notable counterexample. I could name other counterexamples, but to spare them from harassment by opponents of design, I won't. (By the way, if you think I'm being paranoid, please pick up a copy of the November issue of the American Spectator, which has an article about Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center and my then imminent removal as its director; I think you'll find that my suspicions are justified and that it's the dogmatic opponents of design who are paranoid.)
Well, what then is this intelligent design research program that Eugenie Scott regards as even more disreputable than that of the young earth creationists? Because intelligent design is a fledgling science, it is still growing and developing and thus cannot be characterized in complete detail. Nonetheless, its broad outlines are clear enough. I place the start of the intelligent design movement with the publication in 1984 of The Mystery of Life's Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. The volume is significant in two ways. First, though written by three Christians and critiquing origin-of-life scenarios, it focused purely on the scientific case for and against abiogenesis. Thus it consciously avoided casting its critique as part of a Bible-science controversy. Second, though highly critical of non-telic naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios and thus a ready target for anti-creationists, the book managed to get published with a secular publisher. It took well over 100 manuscript submissions to get it published. MIT Press, for instance, had accepted it, subsequently went through a shake-up of its editorial board, and then turned it down. The book was finally published by Philosophical Library, which had published books by eight Nobel laureates.
The next key texts in the design movement were Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis's Of Pandas and People, and Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial, which appeared over the next seven years. Like The Mystery of Life's Origin, these were principally critiques of naturalistic evolutionary theories, though each of them also raised the possibility of intelligent design. The critiques took two forms, one a scientific critique focusing on weaknesses of naturalistic theories, the other a philosophical critique examining the role of naturalism as both a metaphysical and methodological principle in propping up the naturalistic theories, and especially neo-Darwinism.
Except for The Mystery of Life's Origin, which in some ways was a research monograph, the strength of these texts lay not in their novelty. Many of the criticisms had been raised before. A. E. Wilder-Smith had raised such criticisms within the creationist context, though in a correspondence I had with him in the late 80s he lamented that the Institute for Creation Research would no longer publish his works. Michael Polanyi had raised questions about the sufficiency of natural laws to account for biological complexity in the late 60s, and I know from conversations with Charles Thaxton that this work greatly influenced his thinking and made its way into The Mystery of Life's Origin . Gerald Kerkut about a decade earlier had asked one of his students in England for the evidence in favor of Darwinian evolution and received a ready answer; but when he asked for the evidence against Darwinian evolution, all he met was silence. This exchange prompted his 1960 text Implications of Evolution, whose criticisms also influenced the early design theorists.
Nonetheless, compared to previous critics of Darwinism, the early design theorists had a significant advantage: Unlike previous critics, who were either isolated (cf. Marcel Schützenberger, who although a world-class mathematician, was ostracized in the European community for his anti-Darwinian views) or confined to a ghetto subculture (cf. the young earth creationists with their in-house publishing companies), the early design theorists were united, organized, and fully cognizant of the necessary means for engaging both mass and high culture. As a consequence, criticism of Darwinism and scientific naturalism could at last reach a critical mass. In the past, criticism had been too sporadic and isolated, and thus could readily be ignored. Not any longer
Scientific History & Philosophical Defense of Intelligent Design by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
*********************************************************
A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design
By: Stephen C. Meyer
Religion Staat - Gesellschaft, vol. 7, October 7, 2008
Source: The Discovery Institute
Stephen C. Meyer is director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, in Seattle.
Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin of life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. Previously he worked as a geophysicist with the Atlantic Richfield Company
*******************************************
In December of 2004, the renowned British philosopher Antony Flew made worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evi-dence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule. In that same month, the American Civil Li-berties Union filed suit to prevent a Dover, Pennsylvania school district from informing its students that they could learn about the theory of intelligent design from a supplementary science textbook in their school library. The following February, The Wall Street Journal (Klinghoffer 2005) reported that an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution with two doctorates had been punished for publishing a peer-reviewed scientific article making a case for intelligent design.
Since 2005, the theory of intelligent design has been the focus of a frenzy of international media coverage, with prominent stories appearing in The New York Times, Nature, The London Times, The Independent (London), Sekai Nippo (Tokyo), The Times of India, Der Spiegel, The Jerusalem Post and Time magazine, to name just a few. And recently, a major conference about intelligent design was held in Prague (attended by some 700 scien-tists, students and scholars from Europe, Africa and the United States), further signaling that the theory of intelligent design has generated worldwide interest.
But what is this theory of intelligent design, and where did it come from? And why does it arouse such passion and inspire such apparently determined efforts to suppress it?
According to a spate of recent media reports, intelligent design is a new “faith-based” alter-native to evolution one based on religion rather than scientific evidence. As the story goes, intelligent design is just biblical creationism repackaged by religious fundamentalists in order to circumvent a 1987 United States Supreme Court prohibition against teaching creationism in the U.S. public schools. Over the past two years, major newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets in the United States and around the world have repeated this trope.
But is it accurate? As one of the architects of the theory of intelligent design and the direc-tor of a research center that supports the work of scientists developing the theory, I know that it isn't.
The modern theory of intelligent design was not developed in response to a legal setback for creationists in 1987. Instead, it was first proposed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a group of scientists Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olson who were trying to account for an enduring mystery of modern biology: the origin of the digital information en-coded along the spine of the DNA molecule. Thaxton and his colleagues came to the conclu-sion that the information-bearing properties of DNA provided strong evidence of a prior but unspecified designing intelligence. They wrote a book proposing this idea in 1984, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court decision (in Edwards v. Aguillard) that outlawed the teaching of creationism.
Earlier in the 1960s and 1970s, physicists had already begun to reconsider the design hypo-thesis. Many were impressed by the discovery that the laws and constants of physics are im-probably “finely-tuned” to make life possible. As British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics suggested that a designing intelligence “had monkeyed with physics” for our benefit.
Contemporary scientific interest in the design hypothesis not only predates the U.S. Su-preme Court ruling against creationism, but the formal theory of intelligent design is clearly different than creationism in both its method and content. The theory of intelligent design, un-like creationism, is not based upon the Bible. Instead, it is based on observations of nature which the theory attempts to explain based on what we know about the cause and effect structure of the world and the patterns that generally indicate intelligent causes. Intelligent design is an inference from empirical evidence, not a deduction from religious authority.
The propositional content of the theory of intelligent design also differs from that of crea-tionism. Creationism or Creation Science, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court, defends a particular reading of the book of Genesis in the Bible, typically one that asserts that the God of the Bible created the earth in six literal twenty-four hour periods a few thousand years ago. The theory of intelligent design does not offer an interpretation of the book of Genesis, nor does it posit a theory about the length of the Biblical days of creation or even the age of the earth. Instead, it posits a causal explanation for the observed complexity of life.
But if the theory of intelligent design is not creationism, what is it? Intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution. According to Darwinian biologists such as Oxford's Richard Dawkins (1986: 1), livings systems “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” But, for modern Darwinists, that appearance of design is entirely illusory. Why? According to neo-Darwinism, wholly undirected processes such as natural selection and random mutations are fully capable of producing the intricate designed-like structures in living systems. In their view, natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without itself being directed by an intelligence of any kind.
In contrast, the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe for example, the information-bearing properties of DNA, the miniature circuits and machines in cells and the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics that are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected material process. The theory does not challenge the idea of “evolution” defined as either change over time or common ancestry, but it does dispute Darwin's idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected. Either life arose as the result of purely undirected material processes or a guiding intelligence played a role. Design theorists affirm the latter option and argue that living organisms look designed because they really were designed."
A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design
By: Stephen C. Meyer
Religion Staat - Gesellschaft, vol. 7, October 7, 2008
Source: The Discovery Institute
Stephen C. Meyer is director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, in Seattle.
Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin of life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. Previously he worked as a geophysicist with the Atlantic Richfield Company
*******************************************
In December of 2004, the renowned British philosopher Antony Flew made worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evi-dence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule. In that same month, the American Civil Li-berties Union filed suit to prevent a Dover, Pennsylvania school district from informing its students that they could learn about the theory of intelligent design from a supplementary science textbook in their school library. The following February, The Wall Street Journal (Klinghoffer 2005) reported that an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution with two doctorates had been punished for publishing a peer-reviewed scientific article making a case for intelligent design.
Since 2005, the theory of intelligent design has been the focus of a frenzy of international media coverage, with prominent stories appearing in The New York Times, Nature, The London Times, The Independent (London), Sekai Nippo (Tokyo), The Times of India, Der Spiegel, The Jerusalem Post and Time magazine, to name just a few. And recently, a major conference about intelligent design was held in Prague (attended by some 700 scien-tists, students and scholars from Europe, Africa and the United States), further signaling that the theory of intelligent design has generated worldwide interest.
But what is this theory of intelligent design, and where did it come from? And why does it arouse such passion and inspire such apparently determined efforts to suppress it?
According to a spate of recent media reports, intelligent design is a new “faith-based” alter-native to evolution one based on religion rather than scientific evidence. As the story goes, intelligent design is just biblical creationism repackaged by religious fundamentalists in order to circumvent a 1987 United States Supreme Court prohibition against teaching creationism in the U.S. public schools. Over the past two years, major newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets in the United States and around the world have repeated this trope.
But is it accurate? As one of the architects of the theory of intelligent design and the direc-tor of a research center that supports the work of scientists developing the theory, I know that it isn't.
The modern theory of intelligent design was not developed in response to a legal setback for creationists in 1987. Instead, it was first proposed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a group of scientists Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olson who were trying to account for an enduring mystery of modern biology: the origin of the digital information en-coded along the spine of the DNA molecule. Thaxton and his colleagues came to the conclu-sion that the information-bearing properties of DNA provided strong evidence of a prior but unspecified designing intelligence. They wrote a book proposing this idea in 1984, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court decision (in Edwards v. Aguillard) that outlawed the teaching of creationism.
Earlier in the 1960s and 1970s, physicists had already begun to reconsider the design hypo-thesis. Many were impressed by the discovery that the laws and constants of physics are im-probably “finely-tuned” to make life possible. As British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics suggested that a designing intelligence “had monkeyed with physics” for our benefit.
Contemporary scientific interest in the design hypothesis not only predates the U.S. Su-preme Court ruling against creationism, but the formal theory of intelligent design is clearly different than creationism in both its method and content. The theory of intelligent design, un-like creationism, is not based upon the Bible. Instead, it is based on observations of nature which the theory attempts to explain based on what we know about the cause and effect structure of the world and the patterns that generally indicate intelligent causes. Intelligent design is an inference from empirical evidence, not a deduction from religious authority.
The propositional content of the theory of intelligent design also differs from that of crea-tionism. Creationism or Creation Science, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court, defends a particular reading of the book of Genesis in the Bible, typically one that asserts that the God of the Bible created the earth in six literal twenty-four hour periods a few thousand years ago. The theory of intelligent design does not offer an interpretation of the book of Genesis, nor does it posit a theory about the length of the Biblical days of creation or even the age of the earth. Instead, it posits a causal explanation for the observed complexity of life.
But if the theory of intelligent design is not creationism, what is it? Intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution. According to Darwinian biologists such as Oxford's Richard Dawkins (1986: 1), livings systems “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” But, for modern Darwinists, that appearance of design is entirely illusory. Why? According to neo-Darwinism, wholly undirected processes such as natural selection and random mutations are fully capable of producing the intricate designed-like structures in living systems. In their view, natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without itself being directed by an intelligence of any kind.
In contrast, the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe for example, the information-bearing properties of DNA, the miniature circuits and machines in cells and the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics that are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected material process. The theory does not challenge the idea of “evolution” defined as either change over time or common ancestry, but it does dispute Darwin's idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected. Either life arose as the result of purely undirected material processes or a guiding intelligence played a role. Design theorists affirm the latter option and argue that living organisms look designed because they really were designed."
Ted Peters on Science & Religion
Excellent interview, of Ted Peters from
Ted Peters is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, CA. He is an expert on the theological implications of the new gene science and the author of many books, including "Playing God?: Genetic Determinisn and Human Freedom".
QUESTION: Could you tell us where does the idea come from that fiddling with our DNA is somehow sacred?
DR. PETERS: Well, if you go back to the 1950s, people were talking about the secret of life: will scientists discover the secret of life? And then the double helix was discovered. And eventually DNA was described to be what, the secret of life, or sometimes the blueprint of life. And when the Human Genome Project was beginning in 1987-1988, it was described as the holy grail. Boy, if scientists could get into that DNA and find all those genes, they would have the essence, so to speak, of what makes a human being a human being. And I think it's that sort of special status that has drawn our attention towards DNA as being different than other molecules.
QUESTION: You've disagreed with this position that DNA is sacred.
DR. PETERS: Yes. I think what happened is that people began to treat DNA as sacred. By sacred I mean putting up no trespassing signs, saying you can't muck around with it, you can't get in with your wrenches and screwdrivers and mess around because DNA was put there by God. Well, I disagree with that.
QUESTION: Why do you disagree?
DR. PETERS: Well, I think that the DNA that is in your and my bodies right now is sort of an accident of evolution. By accident I don't mean to trivialize it - it's the product of many millions of years of development, but it's not designed in any kind of holy or sacred way. It's full of defects. We may have four or five thousand genes that precipitate diseases, and cause suffering. Now, if God were to design DNA, I think God probably could have done a better job. So, I hesitate to think of it as sacred, holy, special.
QUESTION: Opponents of genetic engineering have often argued that messing with our genes, genetic engineering, is a kind of hubristic "playing God". But you also disagree with that. Why?
DR. PETERS: Well, the phrase "playing God" usually means that we overshoot ourselves, that we're proud, that we're smug, that we think that with our scientific tools we can do more than we actually can. And if we get into the DNA, and if we mess around with it, maybe we'll screw something up. If the genes work in a kind of system with one another, and we modify this gene here, we modify that gene there, maybe the whole system will go out of kilter, and I think people who want to say, don't play God, they want to prevent those big mistakes from happening. And so, by making DNA look sacred, they can say, hands off.
Now, I disagree with that because one aspect of the Human Genome Project that's currently going on that is extremely important is the search for genes that cause disease. And if we can find a gene that causes disease, if we can find the switch that turns it on or turns it off, we can come up with a therapy. And with a therapy, we can help make human life better, right, more healthy in that fashion or another. And I would hate to see a doctrine of the sacrality of DNA that would say, stop that kind f research, stop that kind of improvement of human health.
QUESTION: You've put forward the position that, in fact, by fiddling with our genes we can somehow be "co-creators" with God. Could you explain this concept of co-creation?
DR. PETERS: Well, the first observation I have is that things are always changing. They're not fixed. They don't stand still. Now, the question is, if we're going to influence the direction of change, should we do it for better or for worse? The human DNA is going to change if we do nothing, just out of natural selection, mutation, et cetera. Now, if we have the capacity, if we have the power to alter it in such a way as to make human health better, to relieve human suffering, I think we have a moral responsibility to do that.
Does that mean I'm advocating that we should change the human being entirely, you know, put arms coming out of our heads, perhaps, or eyes on the end of your finger? No, I'm not advocating that kind of thing. But I do think a sensible, careful, step-by-step attempt to improve human health, that's something we are responsible to God for doing.
QUESTION: Are you saying that, in a sense, you see human beings as continuing the work that God as creator started?
DR. PETERS: I do. God is not only creator, God is also a redeemer. God tries to turn bad situations into good situations, tries to turn death into resurrection. And I think your and my task, insofar as we mirror God, insofar as we carry God's image in this world, is to try to make this world a better place. And so, that's the only reason that I think that genetic engineering ought to be advocated. That we would do it for some higher purpose. I think those who want to caution us against the Brave New World syndrome, or turning the power of genetic engineering to the service of a totalitarian government, we need cautions against that kind of thing. There's no question about that. So, I'm not advocating a wholesale getting into the DNA and just making anything out of us. But I think we do need to have a high-minded purpose towards making human life in the future better than it is today -- and we can do that through DNA research.
QUESTION: There is a view developing among some people now that we are determined by our genes - that we are just "gene machines", as Richard Dawkins has put it. From a theological point of view, what is the problem with this genetic determinism?
DR. PETERS: The first problem with genetic determinism is that our culture believes that genes are more determinative than the actual scientist. That is to say, molecular biologists do not see genes as determinative as the newspapers who write headlines about this work. So, we have this kind of cultural picture, not a scientific picture, a cultural picture, that says, it's all in the genes. Well, that understanding of the genes being determinative makes us think, hey, maybe we don't have free will anymore. And so much of our society, including theology, is dependent upon assuming that we DO have free will -- that we can deliberate, we can make decisions, we can take actions, and that we're responsible for those actions. I do not think that any discovery in our DNA and in our genes will destroy that concept of free will, even though popularly maybe people are worried about that.
QUESTION: What do you see as the resolution then?
DR. PETERS: Well, there's a blind alley, and then I think there’s a the clear street. For those who want to combat genetic determinism, the blind alley is to say there's just two determinants: one is our genes, and the other is environment. Here we don't have genetic determinism, we have a two-part determinism.
But I say there's a third factor - and that is the human self. I'm a three part determinist. I say there are genes and the environment, but then the third factor is the self. The human self is a distinct factor in determining, in some cases, even how our genes are going to turn on and turn off. And certainly it can influence our environment. As long as you and I have a human self, then genes become just one factor among others in determining who it is that we are, and what it is that we're going to do.
QUESTION: Many geneticists might argue that the self is simply an emerging property of a genetically determined organism?
DR. PETERS: Even if it is an emergent property, we should underline emergence because when you use the world "emergence" you mean something that’s more than the parts from which it came. So, even if the human self is a product of hundreds of thousands of years in genetic development, it's still more than what it came from. Even if the human self doesn't exist apart from genes, or apart from environment, it's still more than the sum of the genes and more than the sum of the environmental influences.
QUESTION: So, you believe that regardless of how the self gets there, it has inherent free will. Therefore, our behavior isn’t just reducible to genes for aggression, alcoholism, and whatever?
DR. PETERS: That's right. We may have a gene for alcoholism. We may have a gene for aggression. But the human self is more than the sum of its genes. The human self will have the ability to determine whether or not these genes will finally be influenceable. Complete, total self-control, no. I mean, don't we have trouble walking through a grocery store and trying to resist buying fattening foods, or something like that. It is a struggle always between our biology and our self. But those kinds of struggles are evidence that we're not only our biology, or we'd probably buy every fattening thing that was attractive to us.
So, I think we have living examples every day of how it is that the self has some freedom. Not absolute freedom, of course, but there's always a kind of dialectical freedom between genes, environment, and the human self that makes choices.
QUESTION: The notion that our behavior is determined by genes, you have written that that is like a revival of the old idea of original sin, of sin being somehow written into the body.
DR. PETERS: One of the fascinating things that is happening right now is that this discussion of genetic determinism is reminding us of something that the Christian theologians have forgotten, namely original sin. What if we find genes that determine or heavily influence human behavior? Now, a couple of years ago, they found a gene on the X chromosome, for example, that influences violence in men. What if we find lots of genes for anti-social behavior? Well, the theologians have forgotten about the doctrine of original sin. It's coming back through science in a very fascinating way.
Now, again, on the question of free will, will we be able to handle that? As we think about the spirituality that was practiced in the time of St. Augustine, for example, our task was to get control over our biological predispositions, and our biological temptations, and to use the mind, and to use the power of the spirit to do that kind of thing. Can we learn from this -- can we go back to the history of spirituality, and maybe retrieve some of the strengths from that tradition to deal with the emerging [genetic] understanding of human nature?
Now, that's not enough to deal with the question of original sin, because the deeper understanding of original sin does not have to do with biological temptation. It really has to do with the unity of the human race in its relationship to God. And, as St. Augustine put it, we are all one in Adam. That is to say, the whole human race is in a fallen condition. Also, we are all one in Jesus Christ. That is to say, the whole human race has been redeemed by an act of God's grace. That's the deeper understanding of original sin. And it doesn't have much to do with the struggles that you and I have in terms of governing the genes and their influence on our daily behavior.
QUESTION: Does the new scientific version of original sin, though, seem even more overwhelming because at least with the original theological doctrine, people had could rise above it. Yet what the new scientific determinism seems to be suggesting is that you can't rise above your biological makeup. Its almost like you’re trapped.
DR. PETERS: The contemporary version of original sin coming from genetic science is fatalistic - it's all in the genes. Your Honor, I could not help myself; I committed this crime, but my genes made me do it. It is fatalistic. Whereas, in terms of medieval Christian spirituality we had biological propensities, but we also had spiritual resources with which to handle them, and with which to rise above them. If you're going to be a genetic determinist and a materialist, where are those spiritual resources? So, yes, I think contemporary genetic determinism is more fatalistic than traditional Chrsitian spirituality.
QUESTION: Could you tell us about your work with the Human Genome Project.
DR. PETERS: The Human Genome Project is a worldwide research project in which geneticists in many countries are trying to do three things. They want to sequence the nucleotides in the DNA. They want to locate all of the genes and find out what they do. And then, finally, they want to find those genes that precipitate disease and then look for therapies.
Well, right now, at this point, there's been tremendous success in mapping the genome and finding the genes. There has been a little bit less success in sequencing the DNA. And there has been moderate but exciting success in finding those disease genes.
I headed a team for three years at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and our task was to monitor the progress of the Human Genome Project worldwide to see what kinds of implications it might have for religious consciousness, and for theological reflection. We asked questions such as, what will this new knowledge about genetics have to do with our understanding of God and how God creates, and how God acts in the lives of the human race? What's the relationship between God's freedom and human freedom, and these kinds of questions.
Now, as we proceeded, the ethical questions seemed to stand out. And we gained a sense of urgency over a number of ethical issues. The most important one is genetic discrimination. If an employer who handles your health insurance finds out that you have six or seven defective genes, will you be denied health coverage? Will you lose your job, or not be able to obtain a new job? We believe that state legislatures need to be attending to this issue of genetic discrimination to help provide fairness in insurance coverage. Some states are actually doing that.
But we ran into a number of other ethical issues, such as genetic determinism. Am I responsible before the law for the crimes I commit if I claim that my genes made me do it? We've had at least two major cases, one was a murder case in Georgia in which a woman was declared innocent on the grounds that she had the gene on chromosome 4 for Huntington's disease and was under that influence when she shot her son three times. And the court said, well, you're innocent because your genes made you do that. What kind of a precedent will that set? What kind of a stigma for other people who have Huntington's disease? Will we treat them as dangerous people now? If you have Huntington's disease, you don't want that stigma, do you?
These are some of the social problems that are going to be coming out of the Human Genome Project, and these are the kinds of things that we ended up addressing in our research project.
QUESTION: Why do you see a need for the theological and genetic communities to be talking to each other?
DR. PETERS: It's important to understand who we are as human beings, what our capacities are, what our potentials are. We Christians have also tried to cultivate a sense of understanding ourselves in relationship to God, understanding ourselves as loving one another. To learn more about ourselves through genetic science is going to enrich our understanding as people of faith with regard to our lives. We also want to remind the scientific community that the material world and the physical world is not all there is. There's a human world, and there's a realm of spirit. And all of these things are necessary for understanding, at least holistically, who it is that we are and the reality of which we are a part.
Ted Peters is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, CA. He is an expert on the theological implications of the new gene science and the author of many books, including "Playing God?: Genetic Determinisn and Human Freedom".
QUESTION: Could you tell us where does the idea come from that fiddling with our DNA is somehow sacred?
DR. PETERS: Well, if you go back to the 1950s, people were talking about the secret of life: will scientists discover the secret of life? And then the double helix was discovered. And eventually DNA was described to be what, the secret of life, or sometimes the blueprint of life. And when the Human Genome Project was beginning in 1987-1988, it was described as the holy grail. Boy, if scientists could get into that DNA and find all those genes, they would have the essence, so to speak, of what makes a human being a human being. And I think it's that sort of special status that has drawn our attention towards DNA as being different than other molecules.
QUESTION: You've disagreed with this position that DNA is sacred.
DR. PETERS: Yes. I think what happened is that people began to treat DNA as sacred. By sacred I mean putting up no trespassing signs, saying you can't muck around with it, you can't get in with your wrenches and screwdrivers and mess around because DNA was put there by God. Well, I disagree with that.
QUESTION: Why do you disagree?
DR. PETERS: Well, I think that the DNA that is in your and my bodies right now is sort of an accident of evolution. By accident I don't mean to trivialize it - it's the product of many millions of years of development, but it's not designed in any kind of holy or sacred way. It's full of defects. We may have four or five thousand genes that precipitate diseases, and cause suffering. Now, if God were to design DNA, I think God probably could have done a better job. So, I hesitate to think of it as sacred, holy, special.
QUESTION: Opponents of genetic engineering have often argued that messing with our genes, genetic engineering, is a kind of hubristic "playing God". But you also disagree with that. Why?
DR. PETERS: Well, the phrase "playing God" usually means that we overshoot ourselves, that we're proud, that we're smug, that we think that with our scientific tools we can do more than we actually can. And if we get into the DNA, and if we mess around with it, maybe we'll screw something up. If the genes work in a kind of system with one another, and we modify this gene here, we modify that gene there, maybe the whole system will go out of kilter, and I think people who want to say, don't play God, they want to prevent those big mistakes from happening. And so, by making DNA look sacred, they can say, hands off.
Now, I disagree with that because one aspect of the Human Genome Project that's currently going on that is extremely important is the search for genes that cause disease. And if we can find a gene that causes disease, if we can find the switch that turns it on or turns it off, we can come up with a therapy. And with a therapy, we can help make human life better, right, more healthy in that fashion or another. And I would hate to see a doctrine of the sacrality of DNA that would say, stop that kind f research, stop that kind of improvement of human health.
QUESTION: You've put forward the position that, in fact, by fiddling with our genes we can somehow be "co-creators" with God. Could you explain this concept of co-creation?
DR. PETERS: Well, the first observation I have is that things are always changing. They're not fixed. They don't stand still. Now, the question is, if we're going to influence the direction of change, should we do it for better or for worse? The human DNA is going to change if we do nothing, just out of natural selection, mutation, et cetera. Now, if we have the capacity, if we have the power to alter it in such a way as to make human health better, to relieve human suffering, I think we have a moral responsibility to do that.
Does that mean I'm advocating that we should change the human being entirely, you know, put arms coming out of our heads, perhaps, or eyes on the end of your finger? No, I'm not advocating that kind of thing. But I do think a sensible, careful, step-by-step attempt to improve human health, that's something we are responsible to God for doing.
QUESTION: Are you saying that, in a sense, you see human beings as continuing the work that God as creator started?
DR. PETERS: I do. God is not only creator, God is also a redeemer. God tries to turn bad situations into good situations, tries to turn death into resurrection. And I think your and my task, insofar as we mirror God, insofar as we carry God's image in this world, is to try to make this world a better place. And so, that's the only reason that I think that genetic engineering ought to be advocated. That we would do it for some higher purpose. I think those who want to caution us against the Brave New World syndrome, or turning the power of genetic engineering to the service of a totalitarian government, we need cautions against that kind of thing. There's no question about that. So, I'm not advocating a wholesale getting into the DNA and just making anything out of us. But I think we do need to have a high-minded purpose towards making human life in the future better than it is today -- and we can do that through DNA research.
QUESTION: There is a view developing among some people now that we are determined by our genes - that we are just "gene machines", as Richard Dawkins has put it. From a theological point of view, what is the problem with this genetic determinism?
DR. PETERS: The first problem with genetic determinism is that our culture believes that genes are more determinative than the actual scientist. That is to say, molecular biologists do not see genes as determinative as the newspapers who write headlines about this work. So, we have this kind of cultural picture, not a scientific picture, a cultural picture, that says, it's all in the genes. Well, that understanding of the genes being determinative makes us think, hey, maybe we don't have free will anymore. And so much of our society, including theology, is dependent upon assuming that we DO have free will -- that we can deliberate, we can make decisions, we can take actions, and that we're responsible for those actions. I do not think that any discovery in our DNA and in our genes will destroy that concept of free will, even though popularly maybe people are worried about that.
QUESTION: What do you see as the resolution then?
DR. PETERS: Well, there's a blind alley, and then I think there’s a the clear street. For those who want to combat genetic determinism, the blind alley is to say there's just two determinants: one is our genes, and the other is environment. Here we don't have genetic determinism, we have a two-part determinism.
But I say there's a third factor - and that is the human self. I'm a three part determinist. I say there are genes and the environment, but then the third factor is the self. The human self is a distinct factor in determining, in some cases, even how our genes are going to turn on and turn off. And certainly it can influence our environment. As long as you and I have a human self, then genes become just one factor among others in determining who it is that we are, and what it is that we're going to do.
QUESTION: Many geneticists might argue that the self is simply an emerging property of a genetically determined organism?
DR. PETERS: Even if it is an emergent property, we should underline emergence because when you use the world "emergence" you mean something that’s more than the parts from which it came. So, even if the human self is a product of hundreds of thousands of years in genetic development, it's still more than what it came from. Even if the human self doesn't exist apart from genes, or apart from environment, it's still more than the sum of the genes and more than the sum of the environmental influences.
QUESTION: So, you believe that regardless of how the self gets there, it has inherent free will. Therefore, our behavior isn’t just reducible to genes for aggression, alcoholism, and whatever?
DR. PETERS: That's right. We may have a gene for alcoholism. We may have a gene for aggression. But the human self is more than the sum of its genes. The human self will have the ability to determine whether or not these genes will finally be influenceable. Complete, total self-control, no. I mean, don't we have trouble walking through a grocery store and trying to resist buying fattening foods, or something like that. It is a struggle always between our biology and our self. But those kinds of struggles are evidence that we're not only our biology, or we'd probably buy every fattening thing that was attractive to us.
So, I think we have living examples every day of how it is that the self has some freedom. Not absolute freedom, of course, but there's always a kind of dialectical freedom between genes, environment, and the human self that makes choices.
QUESTION: The notion that our behavior is determined by genes, you have written that that is like a revival of the old idea of original sin, of sin being somehow written into the body.
DR. PETERS: One of the fascinating things that is happening right now is that this discussion of genetic determinism is reminding us of something that the Christian theologians have forgotten, namely original sin. What if we find genes that determine or heavily influence human behavior? Now, a couple of years ago, they found a gene on the X chromosome, for example, that influences violence in men. What if we find lots of genes for anti-social behavior? Well, the theologians have forgotten about the doctrine of original sin. It's coming back through science in a very fascinating way.
Now, again, on the question of free will, will we be able to handle that? As we think about the spirituality that was practiced in the time of St. Augustine, for example, our task was to get control over our biological predispositions, and our biological temptations, and to use the mind, and to use the power of the spirit to do that kind of thing. Can we learn from this -- can we go back to the history of spirituality, and maybe retrieve some of the strengths from that tradition to deal with the emerging [genetic] understanding of human nature?
Now, that's not enough to deal with the question of original sin, because the deeper understanding of original sin does not have to do with biological temptation. It really has to do with the unity of the human race in its relationship to God. And, as St. Augustine put it, we are all one in Adam. That is to say, the whole human race is in a fallen condition. Also, we are all one in Jesus Christ. That is to say, the whole human race has been redeemed by an act of God's grace. That's the deeper understanding of original sin. And it doesn't have much to do with the struggles that you and I have in terms of governing the genes and their influence on our daily behavior.
QUESTION: Does the new scientific version of original sin, though, seem even more overwhelming because at least with the original theological doctrine, people had could rise above it. Yet what the new scientific determinism seems to be suggesting is that you can't rise above your biological makeup. Its almost like you’re trapped.
DR. PETERS: The contemporary version of original sin coming from genetic science is fatalistic - it's all in the genes. Your Honor, I could not help myself; I committed this crime, but my genes made me do it. It is fatalistic. Whereas, in terms of medieval Christian spirituality we had biological propensities, but we also had spiritual resources with which to handle them, and with which to rise above them. If you're going to be a genetic determinist and a materialist, where are those spiritual resources? So, yes, I think contemporary genetic determinism is more fatalistic than traditional Chrsitian spirituality.
QUESTION: Could you tell us about your work with the Human Genome Project.
DR. PETERS: The Human Genome Project is a worldwide research project in which geneticists in many countries are trying to do three things. They want to sequence the nucleotides in the DNA. They want to locate all of the genes and find out what they do. And then, finally, they want to find those genes that precipitate disease and then look for therapies.
Well, right now, at this point, there's been tremendous success in mapping the genome and finding the genes. There has been a little bit less success in sequencing the DNA. And there has been moderate but exciting success in finding those disease genes.
I headed a team for three years at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and our task was to monitor the progress of the Human Genome Project worldwide to see what kinds of implications it might have for religious consciousness, and for theological reflection. We asked questions such as, what will this new knowledge about genetics have to do with our understanding of God and how God creates, and how God acts in the lives of the human race? What's the relationship between God's freedom and human freedom, and these kinds of questions.
Now, as we proceeded, the ethical questions seemed to stand out. And we gained a sense of urgency over a number of ethical issues. The most important one is genetic discrimination. If an employer who handles your health insurance finds out that you have six or seven defective genes, will you be denied health coverage? Will you lose your job, or not be able to obtain a new job? We believe that state legislatures need to be attending to this issue of genetic discrimination to help provide fairness in insurance coverage. Some states are actually doing that.
But we ran into a number of other ethical issues, such as genetic determinism. Am I responsible before the law for the crimes I commit if I claim that my genes made me do it? We've had at least two major cases, one was a murder case in Georgia in which a woman was declared innocent on the grounds that she had the gene on chromosome 4 for Huntington's disease and was under that influence when she shot her son three times. And the court said, well, you're innocent because your genes made you do that. What kind of a precedent will that set? What kind of a stigma for other people who have Huntington's disease? Will we treat them as dangerous people now? If you have Huntington's disease, you don't want that stigma, do you?
These are some of the social problems that are going to be coming out of the Human Genome Project, and these are the kinds of things that we ended up addressing in our research project.
QUESTION: Why do you see a need for the theological and genetic communities to be talking to each other?
DR. PETERS: It's important to understand who we are as human beings, what our capacities are, what our potentials are. We Christians have also tried to cultivate a sense of understanding ourselves in relationship to God, understanding ourselves as loving one another. To learn more about ourselves through genetic science is going to enrich our understanding as people of faith with regard to our lives. We also want to remind the scientific community that the material world and the physical world is not all there is. There's a human world, and there's a realm of spirit. And all of these things are necessary for understanding, at least holistically, who it is that we are and the reality of which we are a part.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Allama Iqbal & Pakistan
[From the Iqbalians website]
****************************************
IQBAL THE VISIONARY
Iqbal joined the London branch of the All India Muslim League while he was studying Law and Philosophy in England. It was in London when he had a mystical experience. The ghazal containing those divinations is the only one whose year and month of composition is expressly mentioned. It is March 1907. No other ghazal, before or after it has been given such importance. Some verses of that ghazal are:
At last the silent tongue of Hijaz has announced to the ardent ear the tiding
That the covenant which had been given to the desert-dwellers is going to be renewed vigorously:
The lion who had emerged from the desert and had toppled the Roman Empire is
As I am told by the angels, about to get up again (from his slumbers.)
You the dwelles of the West, should know that the world of God is not a shop (of yours).
Your imagined pure gold is about to lose it standard value (as fixed by you).
Your civilization will commit suicide with its own daggers.
A nest built on a frail bough cannot be durable.
The caravan of feeble ants will take the rose petal for a boat
And inspite of all blasts of waves, it shall cross the river.
I will take out may worn-out caravan in the pitch darkness of night.
My sighs will emit sparks and my breath will produce flames.
For Iqbal it was a divinely inspired insight. He disclosed this to his listeners in December 1931, when he was invited to Cambridge to address the students. Iqbal was in London, participating in the Second Round Table Conference in 1931. At Cambridge, he referred to what he had proclaimed in 1906:
I would like to offer a few pieces of advice to the youngmen who are at present studying at Cambridge ...... I advise you to guard against atheism and materialism. The biggest blunder made by Europe was the separation of Church and State. This deprived their culture of moral soul and diverted it to the atheistic materialism. I had twenty-five years ago seen through the drawbacks of this civilization and therefore had made some prophecies. They had been delivered by my tongue although I did not quite understand them. This happened in 1907..... After six or seven years, my prophecies came true, word by word. The European war of 1914 was an outcome of the aforesaid mistakes made by the European nations in the separation of the Church and the State.
It should be stressed that Iqbal felt he had received a spiritual message in 1907 which even to him was, at that juncture, not clear. Its full import dawned on him later. The verses quoted above show that Iqbal had taken a bold decision about himself as well. Keeping in view that contemporary circumstances, he had decided to give a lead to the Muslim ummah and bring it out of the dark dungeon of slavery to the shining vasts of Independence. This theme was repeated later in poems such as "Abdul Qadir Ke Nam," "Sham-o-Sha'ir," "Javab-i Shikwa," "Khizr-i Rah," "Tulu-e Islam" etc. He never lost heart. His first and foremost concern, naturally, were the Indian Muslims. He was certain that the day of Islamic resurgence was about to dawn and the Muslims of the South Asian subcontinent were destined to play a prominent role in it. Iqbal, confident in Allah's grand scheme and His aid, created a new world and imparted a new life to our being. Building upon Sir Sayyid Ahmed's two-nation theory, absorbing the teaching of Shibli, Ameer Ali, Hasrat Mohani and other great Indian Muslim thinkers and politicians, listening to Hindu and British voices, and watching the fermenting Indian scene closely for approximately 60 years, he knew and ultimately convinced his people and their leaders, particularly Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah that:
"We both are exiles in this land. Both longing forour dear home's sight!" "That dear home is Pakistan, on which he harpened like a flute-player, but whose birth he did not witness."
Many verses in Iqbal's poetry are prompted by a similar impulse. A random example, a ghazal from Zabur-i Ajam published in 1927 illustrates his deepseated belief:
The Guide of the Era is about to appear from a corner of the desert of Hijaz.
The carvan is about to move out from this far flung valley.
I have observed the kingly majesty on the faces of the slaves.
Mahmud's splendour is visible in the dust of Ayaz.
Life laments for ages both in the Ka'bah and the idol-house.
So that a person who knows the secret may appear.
The laments that burst forth from the breasts of the earnestly devoted people.
Are going to initiate a new principle in the conscience of the world.
Take this harp from my hand. I am done for. My laments have turned into blood and that
blood is going to trickle from the strings of the harp.
The five couplets quoted above are prophetic. In the first couplet Allama Iqbal indicates that the appearance of the Guide of the Era was just round the corner and the Caravan is about to start and emerge from "this" valley. Iqbal does not say that the awaited Guide has to emerge from the centre of Hijaz. He says he is going to appear from a far flung valley. For the poet the desert of Hijaz, at times, serves as a symbol for the Muslim ummah. This means that Muslims of the Indian sub-continent are about to have a man who is destined to guide them to the goal of victory and that victory is to initiate the resurgence of Islam.
In the second couplet, he breaks the news of the dawn which is at hand. the slaves are turning into magnificent masters. In the third couplet he stresses the point that the Seers come to the world of man after centuries. He himself was one of those Seers. In the fourth couplet he refers to some ideology or principle quite new to the world which would effect the conscience of all humanity. And what else could it be, if it were not the right of self-determination for which the Muslims of the sub-continent were about to struggle. After the emergence of Pakistan this right became a powerful reference. It served as the advent of a new principle and continues to provide impetus to Muslims in minority in other parts of the world such as in the Philippines, Thailand and North America.
In the fifth couplet Iqbal indicates that he would die before the advent of freedom. He was sure that his verses which epitomized his most earnest sentiments would stand in good stead in exhorting the Muslims of the sub-continent to the goal of freedom.
IQBAL & POLITICS
These thoughts crystallised at Allahabad Session (December, 1930) of the All India Muslim League, when Iqbal in the Presidential Address, forwarded the idea of a Muslim State in India:
I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Provinces, Sind and Baluchistan into a single State. Self-Government within the British Empire or without the British Empire. The formation of the consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of the North-West India.
The seed sown, the idea began to evolve and take root. It soon assumed the shape of Muslim state or states in the western and eastern Muslim majority zones as is obvious from the following lines of Iqbal's letter, of June 21, 1937, to the Quaid-i Azam, only ten months before the former's death:
A separate federation of Muslim Provinces, reformed on the lines I have suggested above, is the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and save Muslims from the domination of Non-Muslims. Why should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are.
There are some critics of Allama Iqbal who assume that after delivering the Allahbad Address he had slept over the idea of a Muslim State. Nothing is farther from the truth. The idea remained always alive in his mind. It had naturally to mature and hence, had to take time. He was sure that the Muslims of sub-continent were going to achieve an independent homeland for themselves. On 21st March, 1932, Allama Iqbal delivered the Presidential address at Lahore at the annual session of the All-India Muslim Conference. In that address too he stressed his view regarding nationalism in India and commented on the plight of the Muslims under the circumstances prevailing in the sub-continent. Having attended the Second Round Table Conference in September, 1931 in London, he was keenly aware of the deep-seated Hindu and Sikh prejudice and unaccommodating attitude. He had observed the mind of the British Government. Hence he reiterated his apprehensions and suggested safeguards in respect of the Indian Muslims:
In so far then as the fundamentals of our policy are concerned, I have got nothing fresh to offer. Regarding these I have already expressed my views in my address to the All India Muslim League. In the present address I propose, among other things, to help you, in the first place, in arriving at a correct view of the situation as it emerged from a rather hesitating behavior of our delegation the final stages of the Round-Table Conference. In the second place, I shall try, according to my lights to show how far it is desirable to construct a fresh policy now that the Premier's announcement at the last London Conference has again necessitated a careful survey of the whole situation.
It must be kept in mind that since Maulana Muhammad Ali had died in Jan. 1931 and Quaid-i Azam had stayed behind in London, the responsibility of providing a proper lead to the Indian Muslims had fallen on him alone. He had to assume the role of a jealous guardian of his nation till Quaid-i Azam returned to the sub-continent in 1935.
The League and the Muslim Conference had become the play-thing of petty leaders, who would not resign office, even after a vote of non-confidence! And, of course, they had no organization in the provinces and no influence with the masses.
During the Third Round-Table Conference, Iqbal was invited by the London National League where he addressed an audience which included among others, foreign diplomats, members of the House of Commons, Members of the House of Lords and Muslim members of the R.T.C. delegation. In that gathering he dilated upon the situation of the Indian Muslims. He explained why he wanted the communal settlement first and then the constitutional reforms. He stressed the need for provincial autonomy because autonomy gave the Muslim majority provinces some power to safeguard their rights, cultural traditions and religion. Under the central Government the Muslims were bound to lose their cultural and religious entity at the hands of the overwhelming Hindu majority. He referred to what he had said at Allahabad in 1930 and reiterated his belief that before long people were bound to come round to his viewpoint based on cogent reason.
In his dialogue with Dr. Ambedkar Allama Iqbal expressed his desire to see Indian provinces as autonomous units under the direct control of the British Government and with no central Indian Government. He envisaged autonomous Muslim Provinces in India. Under one Indian union he feared for Muslims, who would suffer in many respects especially with regard to their existentially separate entity as Muslims.
Allama Iqbal's statement explaining the attitude of Muslim delegates to the Round-Table Conference issued in December, 1933 was a rejoinder to Jawahar Lal Nehru's statement. Nehru had said that the attitude of the Muslim delegation was based on "reactionarism." Iqbal concluded his rejoinder with:
In conclusion I must put a straight question to punadi Jawhar Lal, how is India's problem to be solved if the majority community will neither concede the minimum safeguards necessary for the protection of a minority of 80 million people, nor accept the award of a third party; but continue to talk of a kind of nationalism which works out only to its own benefit? This position can admit of only two alternatives. Either the Indian majority community will have to accept for itself the permanent position of an agent of British imperialism in the East, or the country will have to be redistributed on a basis of religious, historical and cultural affinities so as to do away with the question of electorates and the communal problem in its present form.
Allama Iqbal's apprehensions were borne out by the Hindu Congress ministries established in Hindu majority province under the Act of 1935. Muslims in those provinces were given dastardly treatment. This deplorable phenomenon added to Allama Iqbal's misgivings regarding the future of Indian Muslims in case India remained united. In his letters to the Quaid-i Azam written in 1936 and in 1937 he referred to an independent Muslim State comprising North-Western and Eastern Muslim majority zones. Now it was not only the North-Western zones alluded to in the Allahabad Address.
There are some within Pakistan and without, who insist that Allama Iqbal never meant a sovereign Muslim country outside India. Rather he desired a Muslim State within the Indian Union. A State within a State. This is absolutely wrong. What he meant was understood very vividly by his Muslim compatriots as well as the non-Muslims. Why Nehru and others had then tried to show that the idea of Muslim nationalism had no basis at all. Nehru stated:
"This idea of a Muslim nation is the figment of a few imaginations only, and, but for the publicity given to it by the Press few people would have heard of it. And even if many people believed in it, it would still vanish at the touch of reality."
ALLAMA IQBAL & THE QUAID E AZAM
Who could understand Allama Iqbal better than the Quaid-i Azam himself, who was his awaited "Guide of the Era"? The Quaid-i Azam in the Introduction to Allama Iqbal's lettes addressed to him, admitted that he had agreed with Allama Iqbal regarding a State for Indian Muslims before the latters death in April, 1938. The Quaid stated:
His views were substantially in consonance with my own and had finally led me to the same conclusions as a result of careful examination and study of the constitutional problems facing India and found expression in due course in the united will of Muslim India as adumbrated in the Lahore Resolution of the All-India Muslim League popularly known as the "Pakistan Resolution" passed on 23rd March, 1940.
Furthermore, it was Allama Iqbal who called upon Quaid-i Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah to lead the Muslims of India to their cherished goal. He preferred the Quaid to other more experienced Muslim leaders such as Sir Aga Khan, Maulana Hasrat Mohani, Nawab Muhammad Isma il Khan, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Nawab Hamid Ullah Khan of Bhopal, Sir Ali Imam, Maulvi Tameez ud-Din Khan, Maulana Abul Kalam, Allama al-Mashriqi and others. But Allama Iqbal had his own reasons. He had found his "Khizr-i Rah", the veiled guide in Quaid-i Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah who was destined to lead the Indian branch of the Muslim Ummah to their goal of freedom. Allama Iqbal stated:
I know you are a busy man but I do hope you won't mind my writing to you often, as you are the only Muslim in India today to whom the community has right to look up for safe guidance through the storm which is coming to North-West India, and perhaps to the whole of India.
Similar sentiments were expressed by him about three months before his death. Sayyid Nazir Niazi in his book Iqbal Ke Huzur, has stated that the future of the Indian Muslims was being discussed and a tenor of pessimism was visible from what his friends said. At this Allama Iqbal observed:
There is only one way out. Muslim should strengthen Jinnah's hands. They should join the Muslim League. Indian question, as is now being solved, can be countered by our united front against both the Hindus and the English. Without it our demands are not going to be accepted. People say our demands smack of communalism. This is sheer propaganda. These demands relate to the defence of our national existence.
The united front can be formed under the leadership of the Muslim League. And the Muslim League can succeed only on account of Jinnah. Now none but Jinnah is capable of leading the Muslims.
Matlub ul-Hasan Sayyid stated that after the Lahore Resolution was passed on March 23, 1940, the Quaid-i Azam said to him:
"Iqbal is no more amongst us, but had he been alive he would have been happy to know that we did exactly what he wanted us to do."
But the matter does not end here. Allama Iqbal in his letter of March 29, 1937 to the Quaid-i Azam had said:
While we are ready to cooperate with other progressive parties in the country, we must not ignore the fact that the whole future of Islam as a moral and political force in Asia rests very largely on a complete organization of Indian Muslims.
According to Allama Iqbal the future of Islam as a moral and political force not only in India but in the whole of Asia rested on the organization of the Muslims of India led by the Quaid-i Azam.
The "Guide of the Era" Iqbal had envisaged in 1926, was found in the person of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The "Guide" organized the Muslims of India under the banner of the Muslim League and offered determined resistance to both the Hindu and the English designs for a united Hindu-dominated India. Through their united efforts under the able guidance of Quaid-I Azam Muslims succeeded in dividing India into Pakistan and Bharat and achieving their independent homeland. As observed above, in Allama Iqbal's view, the organization of Indian Muslims which achieved Pakistan would also have to defend other Muslim societies in Asia. The carvan of the resurgence of Islam has to start and come out of this Valley, far off from the centre of the ummah. Let us see how and when, Pakistan prepares itself to shoulder this august responsibility. It is Allama Iqbal's prevision.
IQBAL AND THE PAKISTAN MOVEMENT
The Holy Prophet has said
"Beware of the foresight of the believer for he sees with Divine Light"
Although his main interests were scholarly, Iqbal was not unconcerned with the political situation of the, country and the political fortunes of the Muslim community of India. Already in 1908, while in England, he had been chosen as a member of the executive council of the newly-established British branch of the Indian Muslim League. In 1931 and 1932 he represented the Muslims of India in the Round Table Conferences held in England to discuss the issue of the political future of India. And in a 1930 lecture Iqbal suggested the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslims of India. Iqbal died (1938) before the creation of Pakistan (1947), but it was his teaching that "spiritually ... has been the chief force behind the creation of Pakistan."
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Quaid e Azam's Last Speech
Quaid-i-Azam's Speech
On the occasion of the Opening Ceremony of
The State Bank of Pakistan on 1st July, 1948.
"Mr. Governor, Directors of State Bank, Ladies and Gentlemen.
The opening of the State Bank of Pakistan symbolises the sovereignty of our State in the financial sphere and I am very glad to be here today to perform the opening ceremony. It was not considered feasible to start a Bank of our own simultaneously with the coming into being of Pakistan in August last year. A good deal of preparatory work must precede the inauguration of an institution responsible for such technical and delicate work as note issue and banking. To allow for this preparation, it was provided, under the Pakistan Monetary System and Reserve Bank Order, 1947, that the Reserve Bank of India should continue to be the currency and banking authority of Pakistan till the 30th September, 1948. Later on it was felt that it would be in the best interests of our State if the Reserve Bank of India were relieved of its functions in Pakistan, as early as possible. The State of transfer of these functions to a Pakistan agency was consequently advanced by three months in agreement with the Government of India and the Reserve Bank. It was at the same time decided to establish a Central Bank of Pakistan in preference to any other agency for managing our currency and banking. This decision left very little time for the small band of trained personnel in this field in Pakistan to complete the preliminaries and they have by their untiring effort and hard work completed their task by the due date which is very creditable to them, and I wish to record a note of our appreciation of their labours.
As you have observed, Mr. Governor in undivided India banking was kept a close preserve of non-Muslims and their migration from Western Pakistan has caused a good deal of dislocation in the economic life of our young State. In order that the wheels of commerce and industry should run smoothly, it is imperative that the vacuum caused by the exodus of non-Muslims should be filled without delay. I am glad to note that schemes for training Pakistan nationals in banking are in hand. I will watch their progress with interest and I am confident that the State Bank will receive the co-operation of all concerned including the banks and Universities in pushing them forward. Banking will provide a new and wide field in which the genius of our young men can find full play. I am sure that they will come forward in large numbers to take advantage of the training facilities which are proposed to be provided. While doing so, they will not only be benefiting themselves but also contributing to the well-being of our State.
I need hardly dilate on the important role that the State Bank will have to play in regulating the economic life of our country. The monetary policy of the bank will have a direct bearing on our trade and commerce, both inside Pakistan as well as with the outside world and it is only to be desired that your policy should encourage maximum production and a free flow of trade. The monetary policy pursued during the war years contributed, in no small measure, to our present day economic problems. The abnormal rise in the cost of living has hit the poorer sections of society including those with fixed incomes very hard indeed and is responsible to a great extent for the prevailing unrest in the country. The policy of the Pakistan Government is to stabilise prices at a level that would be fair to the producer, as well as the consumer. I hope your efforts will be directed in the same direction in order to tackle this crucial problem with success.
I shall watch with keenness the work of your Research Organization in evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life. The economic system of the West has created almost insoluble problems for humanity and to many of us it appears that only a miracle can save it from disaster that is not facing the world. It has failed to do justice between man and man and to eradicate friction from the international field. On the contrary, it was largely responsible for the two world wars in the last half century. The Western world, in spite of its advantages, of mechanization and industrial efficiency is today in a worse mess than ever before in history. The adoption of Western economic theory and practice will not help us in achieving our goal of creating a happy and contended people. We must work our destiny in our own way and present to the world an economic system based on true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice. We will thereby be fulfilling our mission as Muslims and giving to humanity the message of peace which alone can save it and secure the welfare, happiness and prosperity of mankind.
May the Sate Bank of Pakistan prosper and fulfil the high ideals which have been set as its goal.
In the end I thank you, Mr. Governor, for the warm welcome given to me by you and your colleagues, and the distinguished guests who have graced this occasion as a mark of their good wishes and the honour your have done me in inviting me to perform this historic opening ceremony of the State Bank which I feel will develop into one of our greatest national institutions and play its part fully throughout the world."
Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah
1st July, 1948 at the State Bank of Pakistan website
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