Given nothing? Or given everything?

The Intelligent Design vs Atheistic Evolution debate has been on my mind more and more often, recently. Particularly, I am reminded of a specific atheist’s question: “what has Intelligent Design ever gotten us?” I answer that question with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead:

I do not think…that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labors of scientists would be without hope…. My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology.

In other words, meaningful scientific dialog is dead without the theological assumptions held by early scientists. Indeed, as I have briefly mentioned in an earlier post, it seems to me that everything about modern science has been built upon the back of the assumptions of Intelligent Designers. This line of thought in turn gave rise to the realization that this debate is simply a matter of philosophy. The hecklers spouting off that there is no science behind the notion of Intelligent Design are biased spin-doctors, trying to silence an opposition they fear (or hate, ether way it makes no difference). For there is just as much ’scientific’ proof behind the notion that there is no God and that that evolution (understood as a process of random change “directed” by nature’s survive-or-perish judgments) is the sole cause of human development as there is behind the idea that God exists, is the prime mover and first cause of all creation and that the universe is ordered, rational and inherently meaningful.

So again I ask the question: exactly what HAS an atheistic, Darwainistic, evolutionary worldview ever gotten science truly? What value has the idea that all is bound by randomness ever garnered an endeavor that strives to find the correlations between all things in the universe (namely the sciences)? As I study the arguments of atheists, I find in them a disturbing level of unreflectiveness. Rarely do they seem to ponder the underlying worldview assumptions that make up their ’scientific’ mindsets. Of course, it seems to me that this philosophical oversight is willful for two reasons: first being that any sort of examination of modern science’s past reveals wave after wave of men developing theories based off the assumption that the universe has some sort of creative power behind it. Secondly, as we discover more and more about the world around us, the less random processes are able to account for what is being observed and it seems to be that it would hinder an atheist’s claims against design to consider such things.

Irregardless, I will end, again, with a word from Mr. Whitehead:

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity [comes from] sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deduction.

The more I examine this ’scientific’ duel between ID and Evolution, the less it seems scientific at all. And the sooner we might admit that this is all a game of philosophy and metaphysics, the better off we will be.

~ by Parker on 23 May, 2008.