I read William A. Dembski’s book Intelligent Design. It explores the complex relationship between science and religion, focusing on the long-standing confrontation between evolution and creationism, and highlights the theory of intelligent design.
Religion, like science, has been around since the dawn of mankind, and like science, it has shaped and expanded its power over time. However, while the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period was a time when many different religions had a small share of adherents, Christianity has been the de facto leader of the religious world for the past two millennia, the first two thousand years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (according to Christian doctrine), and the last 1700 years or so since the fourth century, when Christianity was recognized as the state religion in Rome. Of course, Islam has the largest number of adherents as a single religion, but most of the world’s leading scientific nations are Catholic or Protestant, and Christianity is the religion that science is most often confronted with because Christian doctrine itself conflicts with science (e.g., preexisting theories of the universe, creationism).
The conflict between religion and science is one of the most important debates in human history. Religious beliefs emerged as early humans sought to explain natural phenomena, which gradually became systematized into religious dogma. Scientific inquiry, on the other hand, has sought to uncover the laws of nature through experience and experimentation. In this context, religion and science have sometimes clashed and come into conflict. The confrontation between Christianity and science was particularly prominent in medieval Europe, and it remains an important social and cultural issue today.
The theory of evolution is a theory, but it has had such an enormous impact on the scientific community that it is accepted as de facto orthodoxy by most scientists. However, by the time evolutionary theory made its debut, creationism had already taken root as an orthodoxy, and unlike the theory of evolution, which has been completely dismantled by concrete evidence, creationism remains a strong force because there is still no complete proof of evolution. Evolution and creationism have been at loggerheads for 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s theory in the mid-19th century.
Intelligent design is the quest to determine whether the object of inquiry is intentional or accidental. Intelligent beings are called “intelligent agents,” but it is not a metaphysical approach that relies solely on the Bible, as creationism does. The author, William Dembski, criticizes Darwin’s theory of evolution from a scientific standpoint and argues that what Darwin’s theory fails to explain is the intricate design of an intelligent being. He doesn’t directly say that this intelligent designer is God. Although it is clear that he himself believes it is.
The “irreducible complexity” of intelligent design, which is specifically presented in Chapter 5 of Intelligent Design, is the best description of the theory of intelligent design. A system is said to be irreducibly complex if it is composed of several interconnected parts, and if the removal of any one part results in a complete loss of function. An example of this is a mousetrap, which cannot function properly if any of its supports, hammers, springs, latches, or anchoring rods are removed. But is the mousetrap analogy a good one to describe the structure of the human body?
As evolutionary theory explains, organisms didn’t start out with the perfect structure. Mutations gave rise to genes that favored survival, and the survival of the fittest was the rule. But did the first humans or the first other life forms have all the organs that we have today? The answer is no. I don’t think anyone would say that the organs that the first humans had were capable of performing all the functions that the organs of living humans can perform.
Also, think about the “obvious complexity” emphasized by intelligent design. The theory is that a structure that is both obvious and complex could never have arisen by chance, but the book basically tends to downplay the effects of chance. In fact, in the last few thousand years alone, there have been many developments and evolutions of life, including humanity. But the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and life is 3.6 billion years old, including microorganisms. No one would argue that coincidences are unlikely to happen in such a long history. In one of his papers, French mathematician Émile Borel published what he called the infinite monkey theorem. It states that it is almost certain that a monkey typing away at a typewriter will at some point type all the books in the French National Museum. Of course, this is an improbable theory, even over a very long period of time, but the odds are so great that it’s hard to ignore them. However, the birth and evolution of life is more likely than the monkey typing correctly. If a monkey makes a typo in the middle of a book, he has to start all over again, whereas in life, if someone makes a typo and someone makes a correct typo, the monkey who made the typo (failed to evolve or evolved) will be culled, and the monkey who made the correct typo (evolved) will survive to make the next typo.
In the Korean movie Bungee Jumping, the main character Seo In-woo says the following. “If you set up a tiny needle anywhere in this world, and a tiny wheat seed fell from the sky, the probability that it would be a flower on that needle… the probability that you and I met is incalculable.” If everything happened by chance alone, there would probably be nothing on Earth right now. It is not advisable to view every coincidence as design by an intelligent being. The relationship between religion and science has always developed in tension and conflict, and in the process, humanity has expanded its knowledge and understanding through deeper questions and inquiry. The debate between the two will continue to play an important role in humanity’s understanding of itself and its exploration of the world.
