A few words about the conflict between intelligent design and evolution, and what these things mean. What bothers me about the whole question is not that there is no God, or that the Religious Right is foisting it's ideas on society. What bothers me is that the Right is committing a strange kind of blasphemy.
The whole idea that the world is too beautiful for it not to have been created by God is at the heart of Anti-Darwinism. Well, that, and a profound ignorance of the recent advances in evolutionary biology. Why is God so limited that the universe can only be made, bit by bit, like some sort of cosmic sculpture? Why can't God be responsible for a dynamic universe? My thoughts on this are that one of the lines dividing sides in the culture war are two interpretations of God. The difference between sides is an almighty force, a God that
is, as opposed to a God who
does. A God who does, it seems, is a jealous God, and one who is demanding of mankind to hold to static ideas and practices. A God who does will have built a large universe and then placed us inside of it, to be beholden to the invisible limits that have been handed down through time and the bible.
A God that is, however, exists most clearly as the growth and change of the universe, of nature, and of mankind. The very fact that the universe is to beautiful, complex, and strange for us to imagine it arising from itself is proof, to many, that God does exist. I agree, for different reasons than the Religious Right. God
is evolution. God
is the different ways that we put our free will to work. God
is the complexity of the universe that escapes our understanding. God
is that we decide for ourselves what the right thing to do in the context of our place in the universe, and that with each world-changing discovery, we realize how much more we
don't know. Ironically, I think that this interpretation of God is compatible with both Agnosticism and Humanism, which correctly assume that people exist in a physical world and that they have the free will to do what they think is right, but decide not to directly involve a God as necessary to understand the world.
I am not sure how the conflict between these two understandings of the profound will play out, but I do think that it will remain at the root of most of our other conflicts in the culture wars.
