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INTEGRATING FAITH AND
LEARNING IN THE
TEACHING OF BIOLOGY
Earl Aagaard
Introduction
Seventh-day Adventist schools and colleges were
founded to provide an education that did not alienate children from their
Biblical beliefs and Christian worldview.
If “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, we should never be
afraid to incorporate the Biblical perspective into the educational process,
whether we are parents teaching our own children, or teachers with a roomful of
other people’s children. It seems to me
that in the
I urge Adventist educators to overtly evangelize
their students for Biblical theism.
There are two components to this evangelism – the first (the “learning”
part from our title) is to regularly, explicitly, and boldly expose the fallacy
that is being perpetrated by the materialists in our societies, and that is
repeated and bolstered by lazy, unthinking and/or careless theists. The second (the “faith” part) is to
regularly, explicitly, and boldly let students know of one’s own commitment to
a God-centered and Biblical world view.
The fallacy spreading through our cultures today is the message that
only “religion” is characterized by faith in what we can’t see or touch or
measure, while “science” limits itself to the hard cold facts, and to those
things that can be tested and proved. As
we saw last week, every human being is a “believer” in the sense that we all
have commitments beyond what science can tell us. The “science is only about facts” fallacy is
being highlighted by the Intelligent Design movement , and I urge every SDA
teacher, in science and in other fields, to become familiar with the current
arguments, and to introduce their students to both sides of the issue, as a
“vaccination” against the seductive materialistic influences that surround us.
Part 1: Science is not
neutral.
"Science as a way
of knowing" is the reigning paradigm of Western culture. But, what do we mean when we say
"science"? There are multiple
definitions for the word, as seen by reference to any dictionary. Furthermore,
the definition has undergone "evolution" in the last several decades
-- from a process dealing with facts, data, and truth to a “way of knowing”
that looks for "natural" causes ... the definition of
"science" has gradually become "applied philosophical
materialism".
Richard Dawkins,
Watchmaker, (Penguin Books, 1986, page 1) "Biology is the
study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed
for a purpose." The rest of the book is then dedicated to convincing the
reader that this appearance (the data) is deceptive, and that living things are
the products of blind, natural forces, with no input from intelligence of any
kind.
It is the materialists themselves who tell us that
they are doing a kind of evangelism.
Richard Lewontin wrote:
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"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some
of its constructs, in spite of its
failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the
scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a
prior commitment, a commitment to materialism….The primary problem is not to
provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and
what genes are made of….Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational
and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their
imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as
the only begetter of truth."
Scott C. Todd (1999), of the Department of Biology
at
"Even if all the
data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from
science because it is not naturalistic.
It should be apparent that most practitioners of
science have an atheistic bias, whether consciously or unconsciously. But, this is a relatively new
phenomenon. The “fathers” of science:
Bacon, Galileo, Kepler,
Part 2: What is
Intelligent Design Theory, and what is Darwinism?
Perhaps the earliest ID reference is found in the
Bible. In Romans 1:20, the apostle Paul writes, "Ever since the creation
of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." The argument was most famously expounded by
William Paley of
"In crossing a
heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone,
and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that,
for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it
perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had
found a watch upon the ground, and it
should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly
think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the
watch might have always been there."
Subsequently, Paley
argues
"...that the
watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at
some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose
which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and
designed its use."
Charles Darwin had read and appreciated Paley's work
when a young man. However, on his voyage
in the Beagle,
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Describing examples of man's selection of farm
animals and other organisms,
By 1949, George Gaylord Simpson could bear witness
to his faith, without criticism, in the following words:
"Although many
details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective
phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in
a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They are
readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations
(the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the
mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity.... Man is the result of a purposeless and
natural process that did not have him in mind " (emphasis added)
However, there was a time bomb waiting to go off
under the Darwinists' seemingly impregnable fortress. In 1989, a lawyer named Phillip Johnson
visited
In a series of public lectures, well-publicized
debates, and sharply worded essays and reviews, Phillip Johnson took his case
to the public, promoting his book, Darwin On Trial, and constantly
reiterating his question about the adequacy of the Darwinian explanation. Young scientists, philosophers,
mathematicians, and others dissatisfied with the scientific dogma of the day,
read his work or heard him speak, and began to get in touch with Johnson and
with each other. The early efforts of
what became the Intelligent Design Movement were written by a lawyer and by a
couple of philosophers, and were easy for the scientific mainstream to
ignore. The first really effective
"shot across the bows" of materialism was fired in 1996, when Michael
Behe, a working biochemist, published
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The real challenge in Behe’s analysis lies in the
hyper-gradual nature of evolutionary change envisioned by Charles Darwin and
his followers. Quite simply, if all the
pieces must be present in order for a cilium, or other organelle, to function
and give its owner an advantage, then the pieces could not possibly be
accumulated step by tiny step. Only if a
cilium were "created" all at once, could it give survival advantage,
and thus be retained and passed along to future generations. Darwin himself, in The Origin of Species, laid out a way to disprove Evolution by
natural selection:
"If it could be
demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been
formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would
absolutely break down."
Michael Behe claimed that he had found not one such
organ, but an entire cell full of them, and that this data relegates Darwinism,
as a mechanism for origins, to the proverbial scrap bin for theories that have
been tested and found wanting.
3. Why Intelligent Design is “more scientific” than
Darwinism
Darwinism owes its popularity and staying power to
its materialistic core. But, science
itself is beginning to suffer from the straitjacket into which it has been
shoved. By eliminating an entire class
of explanations from consideration (the very explanations that address the
newest discoveries in the Biology laboratories), Darwinists have assured that
they will have only increasingly lame “just-so stories” to explain much of what
we know.
Until very recently, Intelligent Design was in the
same boat. The ID position had not been
put on a fully scientific footing in 1998, when Bill Dembski published his
monograph, The Design Inference.
William Dembski had real academic weight, with doctorates in both mathematics
and philosophy, as well as earned degrees in theology and psychology and two
fellowships from the National Science Foundation. In his book, he offered a “signature” for
design – the presence of what he called “specified complexity” (or “specified
small probability”). That is to say,
design is recognized in highly improbable events (complexity) that also make up
an independently identifiable pattern (specification). The concept is familiar to anyone who has
seen the movie First Contact, which came out several years ago. In the film, scientists are receiving and
analyzing radio signals from outer space.
To our ears, it sounds like a lot of static, but a whole bank of
computers are listening for patterns.
When, through the static, comes what sounds like Morse code, the
scientists are all on the alert. And
when the computers interpret the code to be a sequence of prime numbers, in
precise order from the lowest through progressively higher primes, everyone
listening knows that this radio signal is the result of intelligent
design. Among the random dots and dashes
streaming in from outer space, the Morse code for 1,3,5 would have provoked
little excitement, because the probability of that sequence occurring is small,
but not unimaginably so. However, when
these were followed by the code for 7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31, etc. even the
naturally skeptical were convinced. A
highly improbable sequence of dots and dashes, conforming to a pattern known
ahead of time, was recognized by the scientists in the film as being the
product of intelligence. Furthermore, no
film reviewer wrote that they were foolish to accept such a proposition, and no
scientist complained about the “non-scientific” premise of the film.
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The 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey shows us that
it doesn’t take a string of prime numbers to indicate intelligence to
reasonable human beings with open minds.
In the film, a monolith appears at various times and places. It is a simple shape – a polished rectangular
block shaped much like an enormous domino – but it is immediately obvious to
anyone who sees it, that it did not occur naturally. Never do natural processes give us such an
object. Like Paley’s pocket watch, the
monolith appeals to us as a designed object because we immediately recognize
the impossibility of a natural origin. (see http://www.2001principle.net/)
Unlike Paley, who depended on our intuition to infer
design, Dembski carefully outlined an objective method for detecting his
signature of design. Any string of 23
letters is highly unlikely to occur – a student of statistics can very quickly
tell us the chances of randomly producing any particular string. Each position has a 1 in 26 chance of having
any particular letter of the alphabet, if every letter is equally likely to
appear. All of these probabilities must
be multiplied together to get the probability of the entire specific string.
So, MNBVCXZASDFGHJKLPOIUYTR fulfills the first part of the criterion – it is of
vani
This particular phrase was not chosen at random by
Dembski. It is used by Richard Dawkins
in The Blind Watchmaker to illustrate his contention that achieving such
specified complexity is not so difficult as the Intelligent Design theorists
say. In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe
tells us that today’s scientists are like detectives carefully investigating a
room, observing and measuring, as they try to account for the death of a
crushed and flattened body on the floor.
Their textbook, “Everything You
Need To Know To Be A Detective” says that detectives “always get their
man”, so they are looking for a man, and totally ignoring the large gray
elephant standing in the corner. Since
science textbooks teach that the physical laws of the universe, chance events,
and natural selection are sufficient to account for life and its variety,
scientists are totally ignoring the “elephant” of intelligent design, standing
in the corner. One of Richard Dawkins’
little stories in The Blind Watchmaker,
is a perfect illustration of Behe’s accusation.
Dawkins tells us that it is obvious that a random process will never
assemble a protein, any more than a monkey hitting at the typewriter keys will
come up with the words of Shakespeare.
BUT, he says, natural selection is the key to solving the problem. If a monkey sits and types at a computer
keyboard; and if there is a string of letters on the screen
(QWERTYUIOPLKFDSAZXCVBNM); and if there is a “target phrase” of “METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL”;
and if, every time the monkey types a string of letters in which one of the
letters corresponds to the “correct” one at that particular position in the
target phrase, the result of that keystroke is “selected” and saved; then, it
would take a relatively short time to achieve the desired phrase.
Of course, Dawkins is correct, as far as he
goes. But, he is ignoring the “elephant”
in his zeal to solve the problem by naturalistic means. First, the very concept of a “target phrase”
is ruled out by the Darwinian view. The
title of his book is “The Blind
Watchmaker”, and in its very first chapter, he assures us that Darwinism
involves no planning, no knowledge of the future, and no design. But, in his analogy, each letter typed by the
monkey is scrutinized in terms of a phrase that the computer programmer had in
mind, and that was programmed into the computer’s memory. In nature according to Dawkins, there is no
“programmer”, and thus, no way to “think
ahead” to some irreducibly complex improvement at which we would like to arrive. Secondly, Darwinism requires that each change
be selected solely on the basis of its present-day value for survival. In the analogy, there is no more meaning in
MWERTYUIOPLKJHGFDSAVBNL than there is in the original string, although two of
the 23 positions (1 and 23) now have the correct letters. If the string of letters were required to be
functional at communicating the message, neither of these strings would have an
advantage, since unless the reader already had the target phrase in mind
(something specifically denied to natural selection), there would be no way of
knowing which string was “better”; that is, closer to
“METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL.” Because of
his commitment to materialism, Dawkins is unable to see the “elephant” of
intelligent design gazing at him from the pages of his own book.
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The heart of Dembski’s insight is found on page 134,
in the “explanatory filter” he has devised for detecting, or rejecting,
design. The phenomena we see on a daily
basis can be separated into three categories.
The first of these is “necessity”; what happens is the result of some
law that determined the outcome. This
means that events can be predicted ahead of time, because they happen the same
way whenever the original conditions are the same. Dropping a book on one’s foot is a good
example of the result of “necessity”, or law.
Second, something may be due to chance…the result of random occurrences
over which no one has any control, and which might turn out very differently if
the experiment were run again.
Encountering a good friend exactly at lunch-time, outside the door of a
new restaurant that neither of you had planned to eat at that day, is an
example of a chance occurrence. Finally,
there is design. Events are assigned to
the “design” category only when we are unable to put them into the other
categories. If you go to your regular
lunch-time spot on your birthday, and as you walk in you notice that most of
your co-workers are sitting at various tables around the restaurant, you will
be excused for thinking that this is not a chance occurrence. Of course, it is possible that they all just
happened to pick this day to eat at the place you are known to go for lunch
every day, but it is not very probable.
It is much more likely that at some point, “Happy Birthday to You” is
going to break out, and there will be a cake with ice cream placed at your
table, with everyone congratulating you on your 40th birthday! In other words, their presence in the
restaurant is not the result of law, or of chance, but of design.
Some critics have raised the possibility of unlikely
coincidences fooling us into thinking (falsely) that design is present. Dembski refutes this objection using the
(historical) example of the Shoemaker-Levy comet, that apparently impacted the
planet of Jupiter exactly 25 years, to the day, after the Apollo 11 moon
landing. Although some might think that
such startling correlations/coincidences must be attributed to design, the
complexity-specification criterion is sufficiently robust to resist this
problem. The key is to set the
probability that triggers a judgment of design sufficiently high. Dembski writes that if we allow the moon
landing to be a specification for the comet cra
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1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
would be due to chance. Only if it were LESS likely than this would
it be ascribed to design.
The reason that all of this is so exciting to the
“design crowd” is that we no longer need to argue about whether something is or
isn’t designed; could or could not have come about by random means. Complexity and specification are both
“testable” and “quantifiable” characteristics, and Dembski has established an
objective method for testing structures, processes, DNA sequences, etc. to
determine if they are the result of law, chance, or design. This isn’t really “new” science, either. It borrows from the same kind of work that
goes on constantly in archaeology, in forensic science, etc. These branches of science examine patterns to
determine whether they are produced by intelligence (a tool, or a murder) or by
chance (a rock, or an accident). The
methods are commonplace, and the process is reasonably well understood.
This is a watershed in the science of origins. Today, it is Intelligent Design that is
testable; that is falsifiable; and that best fits the current data. It represents the most scientific way of
looking at the world. This is very good
news indeed, because the Biblical story of Creation is fully compatible with
ID, even though the specifics are not in any way “proved” by these new
developments. There is still a need for
faith. However, I contend that all
Christian teachers (especially in the sciences) should get a basic
understanding of the argument and its implications, and share it with their
students.
Conclusion
The Intelligent Design movement is crucially
important for all Adventist educators, especially for those in science, in the
integration of faith and learning in their classrooms. This is because this perspective reveals an
important truth about the “science” of Origins to our young people. Darwinism presents itself as strictly a
product of empirical observations, and flatly states that its scenario of
“slime to man” is a “fact” supported by all of the evidence. Students need to learn that the Darwinists are
as much believers as we are, that their position ALSO rests on faith, and that
the current evidence is actually more compatible with the general thrust of the
Biblical view than it is with the Darwinist one. The main objective of this
paper is A. to convince all SDA teachers, particularly those dealing with
biology, of the importance of teaching their students about Intelligent Design,
and B. to assure them that they can do this honestly.
However, I am convinced that this is not the end of
our responsibility. SDA science teachers
(as well as all others) should also be role models of rational, thoughtful, and
educated (perhaps even scientifically trained) people who are simultaneously
men and women of faith, willing to accept the authority of Scripture. I must confess that I spent several years
inadvertently failing students in my college classes (as well as their
tuition-paying parents) in this regard.
Now, I go out of my way, regularly during the quarter, to make it
abundantly clear that I accept the Bible account as true, just as it is written. Some may wonder how can I affirm such a
fundamentalist, literalistic interpretation of Scripture? For me, it comes down to the central doctrine
of the Christian faith – the Story of Redemption. Anything, clearly taught in Scripture, that
is essential to a coherent and convincing Story of Redemption, I take
literally, regardless of the current state of the scientific evidence.
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It is essential that we keep in mind, and share with
our students, an important truth: there
is no story about origins, including Darwinism, without significant scientific
problems. Many origins scenarios also
pose serious theological questions. At
some point, we all have to choose what to believe for ourselves. I have chosen the story that makes the most
spiritual sense to me, and for the time being, I just have to live with the
scientific questions it raises.
Intelligent Design has already made this part of my life a lot easier,
and I see even more promise for the future.
If there are students who are shocked by my
“unscientific attitude”, I ask them what they think Richard Lewontin, or
Stephen Jay Gould, or Richard Dawkins would say (or would have said, in some
cases) about their belief in the spontaneous generation of life…. Every materialist testifies to his faith in
spontaneous generation whenever the subject comes up – despite the fact that
all of the experiments to show how it might have happened have been failures,
even with the substantial “cheating” that was done in setting them up, as
clearly exposed in Thaxton’s book, The
Mystery of Life’s Origin. The reason
for their abandonment of empiricism, and the resort to faith, in the matter of
life’s origin is easy to find. Whenever someone (whether they are
creationist or evolutionist is immaterial) is faced with data and an
interpretation that flatly contradicts her worldview, she falls back on
faith. This is not a “religious”
tendency, it is a “human” tendency. We
need to make this clear (using examples as often as possible) to our students
again and again and again. It is like an
“inoculation” against the abandonment of their faith in the face of the daily
assault that is being made against it.
Finally, it is distressingly common to find
Seventh-day Adventist teachers with a genuine disinclination to affirm a
literal, seven-day creation as described in the Bible. This is not, in my opinion, a praiseworthy
“scientific attitude” in an SDA teacher.
Every materialist professor, wherever he is teaching, will testify
proudly to his faith in the spontaneous generation of life, regardless of the
state of the evidence, because it is an integral part of his world-view. If a professor believes that “In six days,
God created the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that in them is”, as the
Bible reports, then he should be willing and eager to say so to his students,
to explain the reasons for his belief, and to share the scientific evidence
that is consistent with the Bible story, along with the challenges and how he
deals with them. Anything less abandons
students to the culture around them, and this will surely undermine the mission
of the church that the pioneers had in mind when our schools and colleges were
set up in the first place; the mission for which our church and its members
continue to spend so much human and financial capital.
Addendum: There is a wonderful website with numerous
articles about Intelligent Design (these can be downloaded – the handout is
from this website), a subscription offer for the journal Origins and Design, and a list of books, audio and video tapes, and
study kits about Intelligent Design. All
these products can be ordered, using a credit card, from the site’s secure
server. In addition, there is a list of
related websites, and a discussion forum which one can read, or even join in to
ask questions or to make a point. All of
this can be found at: www.arn.org.
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LITERATURE CITED
Behe,
Michael (1996) Darwin’s Black Box, The Free Press,
Dawkins,
Richard (1986) The Blind Watchmaker,
Penguin Books,
Dembski,
William (1998) The Design Inference.
Dembski,
William (1999) Intelligent Design, InterVarsity
Press, IL
Johnson, Phillip (1991) Darwin on
Trial, InterVarsity
Press, IL
Lewontin,
Richard (1997) Billions and Billions of Demons, in
Paley,
William (1802) Natural Theology - or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, Quoted in Dawkins, 1986
Simpson,
George Gaylord (1949) The Meaning of Evolution: a Study of the
History of Life and of
its Significance for Man,
Thaxton, Charles, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen
(1984) The
Mystery of Life’s Origin,
Philosophical Library,
Todd,
Scott C. (1999) letter to the editor. Nature, volume 401, September 30