미국 만큼 종교와 생활에 대해 이러쿵 저러쿵 얘기가 솔솔 재미있는 나라도 없다. 다음기사에서 Intelligent Design이라는 곳을 알았다.
창조론이냐.. 진화론이냐..
Why isn't Phillip Johnson celebrating?
Followers of the battles over evolution know Johnson, an emeritus law professor at UC Berkeley, as an intellectual godfather of intelligent design. The movement, whose advocates dismiss Darwinism in favor of a guiding intelligence behind the complexity of life, seems to have won a landmark victory. In an apparent national first, the school board in the small town of Dover, Penn., mandated in October that intelligent design be taught in the classroom.
The board's action came 13 years after Johnson published his seminal "Darwin on Trial," a book that launched the intelligent-design movement and caused Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg to label Johnson "the most respectable academic critic of evolution."
But sitting in his cozy North Berkeley bungalow on a sunny December morning, the avuncular 64-year-old legal scholar in an argyle sweater and glasses hardly resembled a gladiator savoring the fruit of long-sought vindication.
"What the Dover board did is not what I'd recommend," said Johnson. He thinks it was ill-advised to mandate teaching intelligent design, the idea to which he has dedicated a second career of writing and lecturing.
In fact, he does not oppose teaching evolution, but he says it should be presented as a theory not supported by scientific evidence.
"Just teach evolution with a recognition that it's controversial," he said. "A huge percentage of the American public is skeptical of it. This is a problem that education ought to address."
The best teaching guide, he said, is a resolution he drafted that was passed 91-to-8 in the U.S. Senate in 2001 called the "Santorum Amendment," sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum. It said evolution instruction should prepare students to understand the controversy about it, to distinguish verifiable scientific theories, and "to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject."
Requiring intelligent design to be taught raises "the buzzword problem," he said. "It's the problem of stirring up the automatic reaction from the lobbies that exist to protect Darwinism and have great influence with the media. You get this 'religious fanatics are trying to censor science again' kind of coverage."
Johnson chuckled at "mandarins of science" who claim intelligent design is the camel of religion trying to stick its nose under the tent of public education and thereby violate the separation of church and state.
"It's the Darwinists who are religious dogmatists," he said. "The Darwinian revolution allowed the professional scientists to replace the clergy as the priesthood of society. Every society has a priesthood. The priesthood is the body of experts which has exclusive license to tell the creation story to that culture."
Believers in intelligent design acknowledge what is sometimes called "micro evolution," adaptations within a species to changes in environment, but they resolutely dispute "macro evolution" explanations of how new species are created. They engage in extensive debates with evolution scientists over missing intermediate forms and whether natural processes such as random mutation and natural selection could ever have produced so complex an organ as the human eye or even a single cell.
"The cell is a masterpiece of miniaturized complexity that makes a spaceship or super computer look rather low-tech by comparison," Johnson said. "From this we know it is not reasonable to believe that you can produce this quantity and quality of information from random means. Complex, specified information is something which in our experience is produced only by intelligence.
"You don't produce the front page of The Chronicle by taking Scrabble letters in a cup and spilling them out on this table."
Johnson's own university seems to endorse an opposing view in the "Understanding Evolution" Web site created by the campus Museum of Paleontology (evolution.berkeley.edu). Launched this year as a resource for teaching evolution as sound science, the Web site is dismissed by Johnson as part of the neo-Darwinist establishment.
The Web site's co-creator, Integrative Biology Professor Roy Caldwell, said, "As far as I'm concerned, evolution is a fact. We present it as a strongly supported theory, which is as close to a fact as you get in science."
Intelligent design is included in the vast amount of material on the Web site, but Caldwell doesn't believe it belongs as a required theory in school curriculum: "I just think it doesn't have a place in the classroom. It's not a testable hypothesis on how life has changed on this planet."
Johnson may be in the minority in his liberal home town, where he belongs to the 6 percent of voters who are registered as Republican, but he's evidently in sync with prevailing opinion in America. Polls show only 35 percent think Darwinism is supported by the evidence but 83 percent believe God played a role in creating humans.
Johnson readily acknowledges that he is "a Christian theist" and member of the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, but he says the teaching of evolution should not seek to identify who or what the intelligent designer is. That topic, he said, could be addressed in a class on religions or philosophy.
Johnson came to his beliefs relatively late in a life. He was a bright child who grew up in Aurora, Ill., entered Harvard at 17 and graduated first in his class at the University of Chicago law school. He clerked for liberal U. S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and took active part in opposing the Vietnam War when he got to Berkeley.
He became a committed Christian in mid-life after a failed marriage, and the scales of Darwinism fell from his eyes during a 1987-88 sabbatical at University College in London. He wasn't a scientist, but with time to read and a desire to do something more meaningful with his life, he found that neo- Darwinist ideas didn't stand up to his logic.
He views his campaign as "The Wedge of Truth," the title of his 2000 book. Raising questions about evolution in the classroom is edge of a wedge aimed at what the book calls "splitting the foundations of naturalism."
Johnson's "Wedge" book quotes New Testament passages, attempts to foster an eventual "conversation between religion and science," and foresees confronting "the great question that Jesus posed" of who Jesus was and whether he is "the one who was to come, or should we look for another?"
But Johnson, while admitting that he has his own answers as a Christian, said his "Wedge philosophy" requires "that we invite any and all answers for a fair hearing."
Intelligent Design Theory: Why it Matters
Jay Richards is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle. For more information about intelligent design theory, visit Discovery Institute's web site.
In this scientific age, it is impossible to quarantine the claims of science. They invariably leak into other cultural domains. So we should attend to what scientists tell us. Sometimes it is quite important.
For instance, in The Meaning of Evolution, George Gaylord Simpson repeats what is surely the "official" dogma of the contemporary scientific guild: "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." This far-reaching claim contrasts with earlier scientific wisdom, which held that man was designed by an intelligent being, a fact that grounded both his freedom and his moral responsibility.
Darwin and the materialist view of reality
So what changed? While most historical events have multiple causes, Charles Darwin's theoretical coupling of natural selection with random variations clearly provided the impetus for removing the concept of design from the biological sciences.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
It was not an appeal to historical change or "evolution" that made Darwin's theory unique. Nor was it the concept of universal common ancestry or the modest claim that natural selection explains some things. Darwin's theory was revolutionary because it banished the concept of intelligent design from biology, consigning it to a marginal theological ghetto. For the first time, there seemed to be a plausible materialistic explanation for all those ingenious biological mechanisms -- the brain and the eye, digestion and circulation, feathers and fins.
Others extended Darwin's ban on intelligent design to include the origin of life and the universe itself. With help from intellectuals such as Marx and Freud, we were left with a view of humans as mere animals or machines who inhabit a universe ruled by chance, and whose behavior and thoughts are determined by the immutable and impersonal forces of nature and environment.
This materialistic interpretation of reality slowly has permeated every area of our culture. As Daniel Dennett says in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology. But it threatened to leak out, offering answers, welcome or not, to questions in cosmology, going in one direction back to the big bang and psychology, going in the other direction, to explain the human mind and spirit. ... Darwin's idea thus also threatened to spreadall the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.
"Darwin's Dangerous Idea" has seeped into American life in a number of subtle ways, slowly compromising the basis of our legal and political rights. If we are nothing more than the sum of chance, impersonal law and environment, then we are not free and responsible individuals, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Because we are not free, we are not responsible; so, paradoxically, we can do whatever we "want."
Some understood this implication early on, including the authors of a criminology textbook published in the 1930s: "Man is no more 'responsible' for becoming willful and committing a crime than the flower for becoming red and fragrant. In both instances the end products are pre-determined by the nature of protoplasm and the chance of circumstances."
A world of more than protoplasmic blobs
The materialistic scheme dissolves our sense of responsibility for our actions as well as the ethical framework that makes our laws meaningful. Accordingly, materialists invariably define claims of right and good as mere code words for the will to power.
Political philosopher Jay Budziszewski recently observed that materialistic logic even has found its way into the deliberations of the Supreme Court. Whereas the founding fathers grounded our legal system in "the laws of nature and of nature's God," our current court has declared that Americans have a constitutional "right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life" (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 1992). This may sound like praiseworthy tolerance, but it does not take a legal scholar to work out the relativistic implications of such a principle.
This is unfortunate, but what can we do? Materialism seems to enjoy the endorsement of the firmest scientific knowledge. Perhaps we must conclude that Darwin's teaching, as Nietzsche said, is "true but deadly." Clearly Darwin's teaching is deadly, but is it true -- that is, in its widest application?
For decades, scientists have been amassing evidence that contradicts both Darwin's theory and the grand materialistic gloss that usually accompanies it. Many physicists and cosmologists now recognize that the universe had a beginning and that many physical laws look suspiciously "fine tuned" for the existence of intelligent life. In addition, biochemists and biologists have discovered a microscopic world of mesmerizing complexity belying the simple blobs of protoplasm that Darwin imagined.
Moreover, we now know that the DNA that specifies all life is like an information-rich language. Inside every human cell sits a tiny encoded DNA coil five-thousandths of a millimeter in diameter, which, if unfolded, would be one meter long. Even Bill Gates has observed: "DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created." This new evidence requires a new explanation not shackled by materialistic dogma.
In his book Darwin's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe argues that many biological systems are "irreducibly complex," which means that their individual parts hang essentially together. If even a single part is removed, the system becomes inoperative. These are just the sorts of things produced by intelligent agents and that Darwin's theory cannot explain.
Not surprisingly, Behe and other "intelligent design theorists" defend the concept of intelligent design as the best explanation for these phenomena. After all, only collective amnesia prevents us from recalling that a program requires a programmer. My Discovery Institute colleague Phil Gold puts this nicely: "Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. He was right. God plays Scrabble."
Between religion and Darwinism
But does this not lead us back to the realm of religion? While it certainly evokes religious questions, design theory is not religion encroaching on the jurisdiction of science.
We now have a reliable scientific method, formalized by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski (in The Design Inference, Cambridge University Press, 1998), for detecting designed objects and distinguishing them from the products of chance and impersonal laws. Scientists already use the design inference intuitively in fields such as cryptography, archaeology and forensics. When applied to nature's fine-tuned laws, DNA sequences and Behe's irreducibly complex biochemical systems, the clear conclusion is that they are intelligently designed.
Not surprisingly, these matters are provoking fierce debate. Many guardians of current scientific orthodoxy are casting aspersions to prevent these new insights from gaining a hearing, and even threatening the freedom of scientists to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Their furor is understandable, for they realize that intelligent design in the natural sciences, like scientific materialism, would have profound social consequences. No longer would science seem to underwrite a materialistic world view, in which human beings are neither accountable nor responsible.
What Darwinism and scientific materialism have dismantled, intelligent design theory could help restore.