How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [9]
The Templeton Foundation has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting a reconciliation between science and religion, including the grant of the single largest cash prize in history for “progress in religion.” On the day I wrote this introduction, in fact, it was announced that physicist Freeman Dyson won the prize valued at $964,000, for such works as Disturbing the Universe, one passage of which is often quoted by ID theists: “As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” Mathematical physicist Paul Davies also won the Templeton prize, and we can understand why in such passages as this from his 1999 book The Fifth Miracle:
In claiming that water means life, NASA scientists are … making—tacitly—a huge and profound assumption about the nature of nature. They are saying, in effect, that the laws of the universe are cunningly contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity, somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity. If life follows from [primordial] soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: “Make life!” And, through life, its by-products: mind, knowledge, understanding. It means that the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct.
Indeed, it would be wonderful. But not any more wonderful than if it were not correct. If life on Earth is unique, or at least exceptionally rare (and in either case certainly not inevitable, as I demonstrate in the final chapter), how special is our fleeting Mayfly-like existence; how important it is that we make the most of our lives and our loves; how critical it is that we work to preserve not only our own species, but all species and the ecosystem itself. Whether the universe is teaming with life or we are alone, whether our existence is strongly necessitated by the laws of nature or it is highly contingent, whether there is more to come or this is all there is, either way we are faced with a worldview that is equally breathtaking and majestic in its sweep across time and space.
In the Touchstone issue on Intelligent Design, Whitworth College philosopher Stephen Meyer argues that ID is not simply a “God of the gaps” argument to fill in where science has yet to give us a satisfactory answer. It is not just a matter of “we don’t understand this so God must have done it” (although to me, and to all scientists I have spoke to about ID, this is how these arguments always appear). ID theorists like Meyer and Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, and Paul Nelson (all leading IDers and contributors to this issue) say they believe in ID because the universe really does appear to be designed. “Design theorists infer a prior intelligent cause based upon present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships,” Meyer writes. “Inferences to design thus employ the standard uniformitarian method of reasoning used in all historical sciences, many of which routinely detect intelligent causes. Intelligent agents have unique causal powers that nature does not. When we observe effects that we know only agents can produce, we rightly infer the presence of a prior intelligence even if we did not observe the action of the particular agent responsible.