Deconstructing ID

Yesterday’s online Christianity Today had an article Deconstructing Dawkins, supposedly a review of Alister McGrath’s book ‘The Dawkins Delusion.’ The review, however, wasn’t much more than a way for the writer, Logan Paul Gage of the Discovery Institute, to raise an all too common protest about taking evolution seriously. After criticizing McGrath for not attacking Darwinism because McGrath “views it as equally compatible with both theism and atheism,” Gage writes,

To see why Darwinism and theism are incompatible, consider random mutations and natural selection—the two elements of modern Darwinian theory. Random mutations are, well, random. By definition, random mutations are unguided…… While theists can have a variety of legitimate views on life's evolution, surely they must maintain that the process involves intelligence. So the question is: Can an intelligent being use random mutations and natural selection to create? No. This is not a theological problem; it is a logical one. The words random and natural are meant to exclude intelligence. If God guides which mutations happen, the mutations are not random; if God chooses which organisms survive so as to guide life's evolution, the selection is intelligent rather than natural.

This is a very common argument for Intelligent Design proponents like Gauge to make: that since the heart of evolution is random mutation, there can be no guiding, intelligent creator behind it. Therefore, Darwinian evolution and a Creator God are incompatible. Unfortunately for ID proponents, the argument is a hollow one. For while it is true that random mutation cannot be said to be purposeful or intelligent, this is not true for the process of evolution as a whole. The progression of evolutionary processes over time is clearly not random and clearly does have a direction. That direction is toward complexity.

Evolution results in more complex organisms coming into being simply because more complex organisms, for a variety of possible reasons, tend to have a better chance at survival than their predecessors. Thus, though evolution results in branches of life shooting off in many different directions, at least some of those directions will always be toward more complex species. The inevitable end result is a species so complex that it has the ability to overcome the constraints of evolution itself by being able to fully manipulate its environment and therefore guarantee its survival. In other words, the inevitable end result is us (or at least a species that is like us in important ways).

It is hard not to see this drive toward complexity as purposeful, yet it does not require any guiding intelligence to be directly involved in evolutionary processes. Evolution really can be blind and unintelligent and yet still directed and purposeful.