By far the largest human effort in America today relates directly or indirectly to the presence of disease and of the distortion of Creative Intent in the area of human life. It is a major error to look in the wrong direction for the cause of a disease. It would seem to me to be an even more serious error not to notice the existence of intelligent evil at all.
Posts tagged #intelligent design
Where Intelligent Design Fails to See Intelligence
By Ralph D. Winter
In saying that some of our creationists are glossing over the surprisingly prominent reality of intelligent evil in nature, I don’t mean that any of these ID people really deep down are unwilling to confront the enigmatic reality of evil. I just mean that, from the current discussion as seen in their written materials, that would appear to be the case.
As a matter of fact, I myself have all my life believed in what C. S. Lewis called “that hideous strength.” Yet only recently have I begun to reflect on the possibility that this hideous and intelligent evil must not reasonably be dealt with among us any longer merely by superficial references to the philosophical concept of sin and to a fall of man. Why? Because the mere idea of sin is not personifyable. Sin as an abstraction is defined by some as the departure from what is right. In that case the concept itself does not necessarily imply the potent and powerful existence of a diabolical personality any more than would a wrong score on a third-grade arithmetic test. The key question is, “Does it make any practical difference if we conceive of ourselves, on the one hand, as tempted by freedom to sin or, on the other hand, fighting against an evil one who tempts us intelligently?”
Note, for example, the huge difference, back in the days of the Second World War, between, on the one hand, the often nearly invisible icebergs that sent many ships to the bottom of the ocean and, on the other hand, the stealthy, intelligent submarines which caused far greater damage. What if the sinking of thousands of ships had been conceived of as merely the result of inanimate forces? What if scientists had not figured out a way to bounce underwater sound off steel-hulled submarines in such a way as to distinguish the difference between an iceberg and a submarine? This technique, to be called sonar, came late in the war, and implementing it took even longer. By that time not a thousand ships had been sunk, not two thousand, but six thousand ships crossing the Atlantic, loaded with food and war material, had gone to the bottom. It may be hard to believe but the outcome of that enormous war turned on the subsequent success in fighting these intelligent submarines.
It could be alleged that I am missing a main point. A conversation I had with Philip Johnson several years ago brought this forcibly to my attention. I began by congratulating him (and Michael Behe) on the potent logic of the ID movement, but I said, “When you look at your computer screen and if it says suddenly, ‘Ha, I just wiped out your hard disk,’ you have not the slightest difficulty in concluding that you have suffered the onslaught of a computer virus concocted by an intelligent, real person. Curiously, then, when we contemplate a real biological virus, which, though only a tiny assemblage, assails the health of an enormously larger human being, why do we have trouble concluding that we are dealing with an intelligent EVIL design?”
His answer, essentially, was, “Ralph, in my writings and public appearances I can’t even mention God much less Satan. I have a very specific battle to fight, namely, to take apart the logic of unaided evolution. That is all I am trying to do.” Okay, I have respected that response. I have not pestered him further. In fact, I am not even now endeavoring to fault the ID movement and its objectives.
Rather, I would ask a larger question. There are very many people, even Bible-believing Christians (not just non-Christians), who are to this day profoundly puzzled, perplexed, and certainly confused by the extensive presence in the created world of outrageous evil, created apparently by what we believe to be a God who is both all-powerful and benevolent. In coping with this, they may frequently attribute to God what is actually the work of an evil intelligence, and thus fatalistically give not the slightest thought to fighting back.
- When my wife died in 2001 more than one person tried to console me by observing that, and I quote, “God knows what He is doing.”
- When Chuck Colson’s daughter concluded that her brain-damaged son was, and I quote, “exactly the way God wanted him to be,” the impressively intelligent and influential Colson actually applauded her conclusion.
- When Jonathan Edwards fatally contracted smallpox in his effort to try out a vaccine that might protect the Indians in Western Massachusetts, the vast majority of the hyper-calvinistically trained pastors of Massachusetts concluded that God killed him because, to quote them, “he was interfering with Divine Providence.” These pastors went on to organize an anti- vaccination society.
- Going further back in time, a Mother Superior in Spain woke up one morning and detected a small lump in her forehead. She concluded that it must be God who was doing something to her presumably to deepen her devotion and nourish her character. When it finally turned out that a worm was burrowing there, and had broken the surface so you could see exactly what it was, she concluded that it was God’s worm. When she would stoop over to pick something up, and it would occasionally fall out, she would replace it so as not to obstruct the will of God.
These are, however, only a few examples compared to the thousands of times a day among even modern Evangelicals that some blatant evil goes unattacked because it is resignedly if not fatalistically assumed to be the initiative of God. I am not so much interested in the philosophical or theological aspects of this situation as I am in the resulting passivity before eradicable evil, the practical fatalism.
I will go one step further. If we are dealing with an intelligent evil, even our thinking about that fact may likely be opposed and confused by that same evil force, that evil power, that evil personality. Is there any evidence of this additional complexity? In what form would it appear? How could we identify it?
This entry was excerpted from an essay Ralph Winter wrote in the Winter of 2003 entitled, "Where Darwin Scores Higher Than Intelligent Design." The full essay can be read here.
Was Darwin More Concerned About God's Reputation Than We Are?
By Ralph D. Winter
According to Deborah Cadbury’s book entitled The Terrible Lizard which tells us about early dinosaur hunters, the tumble of new bones being dug up right in England soon became a significant factor in a vast and widespread shift away from what came to be called a “bondage to Moses,” that is, bondage to the Bible.
Cornelius Hunter’s book, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, demonstrates conclusively that even Darwin, only a little later, was still concerned about the Christian faith in that he was pained until the day he died by the intellectual task of explaining how a good and all-powerful God could have authored the cruelty which he saw so pervasively in nature, and which many of the discoveries of dinosaur bones dramatically highlighted.
Both Hunter and Cadbury show that in the 1820s Biblical perspectives were major factors filtering interpretations of the bones being discovered of earlier life forms. This was true at Oxford University, for example, which was in that era a citadel of defense of the literal text of the Bible, somewhat of a Moody Bible Institute.
Today we have the wonderful and effective work of the Evangelical pioneers in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, a perspective portrayed magnificently in the Illustra Media video, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. But neither the writings of these pioneer ID people nor this magnificent video reflect any stated concern whatsoever for the perplexing presence of pervasive evil, suffering and cruelty throughout all of nature. Strange, because the lurid presence of evil (“Nature red in tooth and claw”) was a major factor in Darwin’s thinking and the thinking of quite a few other key people who in his day were confused about how the existence of violent forms of life could be congruent with the concept of a benevolent Creator.
Thus, it would appear that some of our present-day creationists are so eager to give God all the credit for all of creation that the virtually unavoidable presence of evil to be seen there has become strangely less important than it was in Darwin’s day and even to Darwin himself. Would it not be very ironic if the man we usually accuse of destroying faith in a Creator God were to turn out to be more interested in preserving the good reputation of that God than are we?
This entry was excerpted from an essay Ralph Winter wrote in the Winter of 2003 entitled, "Where Darwin Scores Higher Than Intelligent Design." The full essay can be read here.
Countering Evil by Eradicating Disease
By Jeff Havenner
Ralph Winter once asked whether pathogenic microorganisms represented "evil intelligent design." My initial thought considering that question was that a "yes" answer gave the devil too much credit. That was my off the cuff response, having never thought much in terms of evil regarding microbial pathogens. My response was like that given in a word association game. Someone says a word and the respondent answers with the first word or phrase that comes to mind. The patterns of immediate answers give clues to the way a person's mind works.
Before we can understand evil with respect to pathogens, we must ask more basically whether science recognizes evil at all. Most practitioners in the sciences have been taught to believe that everything exists as a result of a natural or material cause. Such causes are assumed morally neutral. The understanding of facts or conditions in terms of evil or good is outside of the realm of science. For the microbiologist, the presence of pathogenic microorganisms simply is fact. The fact of pathogens existence and the diseases they manifest represents, at most, some form of species coevolution. Neither God nor the devil are viewed as being behind them.
This view works in an academic sense. Ironically, when pathogenic microorganisms begin interacting badly with human populations and causing epidemic diseases, our attitude changes. Humanity begins to respond to those pathogens as if they are an evil to be combatted and subdued. Just as with word association, our immediate response to disease, our desire to cure it with an antibiotic or other drug or to prevent it by vaccination or even to eradicate it entirely gives us a clue as to how our collective mind seems to work. Whether we admit it or not, we act as if evil does exist as a force that must be fought with intellectual and physical effort.
Thomas Malthus
Eradication programs are global responses to diseases that are perceived to be evil on a multinational level. The impulse to eradicate disease seems to come from the desire to eliminate a seemingly purposeful enemy of our human existence. This runs counter to what one might expect from a purely Malthusian and Darwinian frame of reference.
Thomas Malthus, an English cleric and 18th Century social theorist, believed that natural disaster, including famine and diseases were acts of God, beneficial in the overall sense to prevent the overpopulation of the planet. The naturalistic view of Darwinian thought was drawn from Malthus and asserted that whatever purely environmental forces do not kill off a species, end up leaving that species stronger over time and can give rise to a whole new species.
The human response to diseases, however, inclines toward preventing and curing them so as to free humanity from their ravages and the deaths they cause. Rather than the reference frames of either Malthus or Darwin, our response to disease thus bears more resemblance to that of Jesus, who, as the Gospels tell us, came into the human world to heal and to cast out evil.
Reference: A review of Malthus' theories in relation to those of Charles Darwin.
Jeff Havenner graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in microbiology. He worked at the Frederick Cancer Research Center in oncogenic virology. Following that he was directly commissioned in the US Army and worked at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Department of Rickettsial Diseases. After leaving the Army he continued his career working in the field of radiation safety and safety management.
