How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [77]
This is a fallacy of fuzzy definitions. What does Johnson mean by supernatural? Cosmologists who find God in the anthropic principle are both theists and naturalists. Supernatural simply means a lack of knowledge about the natural. We might as well call it ignatural. To medieval Europeans the weather was caused by supernatural forces; they abandoned that belief when natural forces were understood. This is, once again, the “God of the Gaps” argument, which is what philosophers call “arguments from ignorance.” The rules of logical reasoning do not allow the following: “You cannot explain X, therefore Y must be the cause,” or, to cut to the chase, “Science cannot explain all life, therefore God must be the cause.” Of course, just as naturalism allows us to tell creationists that they cannot “prove” God through science, we cannot “disprove” God through science. After all, as the anthropologist Eugenie Scott cleverly notes, an “omnipotent God by definition can do anything it wants, including interfering in the universe to make it look exactly like there is no interference!”
Even if we did allow creationists to make the gaps argument, it is easily countered. Although in their public debates and published works creationists replace “God” with such obfuscating phrases as “abrupt appearance” and “intelligent design,” their true colors fly when you attend their church services and monitor their Internet chat rooms. There is no question in anyone’s mind that when creationists argue for an intelligent designer they mean God, and it is almost always the Judaeo-Christian God and all that goes with it. But why must an intelligent designer be God? Since creationists like William Dembski argue that what they are doing is no different from what the astronomers do who look for intelligent design in the background noise of the cosmos in their search for extraterrestrial intelligent radio signals, then why not postulate that the design in irreducibly complex structures such as DNA is the result of an extraterrestrial experiment? Such theories have been proffered, in fact, by some daring astronomers and science fiction authors who speculated (wrongly, it appears) that the Earth was seeded with amino acids, protein chains, or microbes billions of years ago, possibly even by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Suffice it to say that no creationist worth his sacred salt is going to break bread or sip wine in the name of some experimental exobiologist from Vega. And that is the point. What we are really talking about here is not a scientific problem in the study of the origins of life, it is a religious problem in dealing with the findings of science.
Finally, at the core of the new creationists’ argument is the arrogant and indolent belief that if they cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, it must mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. (This argument is not unlike those who, because they cannot think of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, assume these structures must have been built by Atlantians or aliens.) It is a remarkable confession of their own inabilities and lack of creativity. Who knows what breakthrough scientific discoveries await us next month or next year? The reason, in fact, that Behe has had to focus on the microscopic world’s gaps is that the macroscopic gaps have mostly been filled. They are chasing science, not leading it. Also, sometimes we