Church Times - Fight to recall the wonder

Church Times - Fight to recall the wonder

Simon Conway Morris is Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

From this perspective, it is easy to appreciate the intellectual attraction of the quasi-scientific/quasi-theological movement known as Intelligent Design (ID). You might think: get me out of here! Intelligent Design: what, another recruit?

Please, revive yourselves. In my opinion, ID is a false and misleading attraction. There would be little point in reiterating the many objections raised against ID, especially those made by the scientific colleagues, but opponents, of Michael Behe and Bill Demski, its two principal proponents.

Rather, ID has a more interesting failing, a theological failing. Consider a possible analogy, that of Gnosticism. Who knows where this claptrap come from, but it could have been an attempt to reconcile orphic and mithraic mysteries with a new, and, to many in the Ancient World, a very dangerous Christianity.

So, too, in our culture, those given over to being worshippers of the machine and the computer model, those admirers of organised efficiency — they would not expect the Creator (that is, the one identified as the engineer of the bacterial flagellar motor, or whatever your favourite case study of ID might be) to be encumbered with the customary cliché of bearing a large white beard, but to be the very model of scientific efficiency, and so don a very large white coat. ID is surely the deist’s option, and one that turns its back not only on the richness and beauty of creation, but, as importantly, on its limitless possibilities. It is a theology for control freaks.

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