Naturalism and Supernaturalism: Materialism and Intelligent Design

As I have written previously, the observable universe demonstrates design. This evokes a Grand Designer as the inference to the best explanation. That is in the presence of design, the existence of a designer is deemed as the best explanation among others. Materialists maintain the existence of the universe can be explained by evolutionary processes due to forces of nature working randomly to produce a universe that appears designed. The complexity of biological systems and the inherent fine tuning demonstrated in the universe that allowed for life has greatly reduced the potency of the materialist’s advocacy of evolution with its natural laws combined with randomness as the explanation of how the universe currently appears.

And yet the idea of an intervening creator, the Grand Designer, violates the naturalism that science is based. Since naturalism is seemingly jettisoned, the knee jerk reaction by the Scientific Materialist is to reject the critique of evolution and the hopeless implausibility of the presence of complexity by random processes, as exist in the cell.

Natural Philosophers, the term for scientists prior to the 19^th century, have taken several approaches to explain natural occurrences from Supernaturalism to Naturalism. The situation upon which the divine intervenes continually in nature is called Supernaturalism. Under this position God intervenes when wood starts to burn or winds blow or lightning strikes. God is the cause of all things and all observable events. A modern would rightfully deem this to be a primitive view, although the 18^th British Philosopher, George Berkeley, argued God wills us to experience matter. So it is not matter we experience but God working in the universe. Of course philosophically speaking there’s no way to tell the difference.

The Intelligent Designer hypothesis sees immanent design in the universe and presumes there must be a Grand Designer who intervened at some point or points in time in history of the cosmos. Naturalism presupposes that there are secondary causes set in motion at the inception of the universe, where a divine being (a position generally called Deism) or some primordial force caused these secondary forces to astir themselves. You must know that the prevalent view of many non-deistic natural philosophers including Aristotle was that the universe was eternal without origin.  Even as late as the Mid-20^th Century the Steady State theory of the cosmos was the dominant view, the term Big Bang being a pejorative term. Under Steady State the universe had no point of origin. Oops, here comes the Big Bang with its so called singularity an infinitely small point of origin. Virtually, all of the Christian natural philosophers in the past have been naturalists who saw God working in the common course of nature through secondary forces including Galileo.

I accept the Bible as a book of great spiritual wisdom. Yet, the Genesis creation account is best interpreted with the incorporation of scientific discoveries. The creation account is an accommodation to the audience to which it was written. With this in mind seven separate creation events over time has been proposed as a way to view this creation event not seven contiguous days. Adam and Eve represent genotypes or I prefer inhabitants of a specific location, one might call “paradise” from which they were expelled. Some have proposed the duration in paradise might have been in the time span of only one afternoon. This idyllic location, existing under God’s will, was subsequently swept away while the fallen natural earth we inhabit remained. God knew beforehand what the result of his test to Adam and Eve would be and the provident need for a means of salvation, through incarnation of a mediator.  

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Evolutionary processes do little to explain the rise of complex biological machines. There’s way too much information and complexity involved. Just like the tremendous amount of information that is contained in the DNA helix. Random selection could not conceivably build this. But the only force materialism employs is what Aristotle called the efficient cause. This is the one force that acts on others such as gravity or the force of expansion of gas in a vacuum.

Yet, Aristotle posited three other forces: Material, Formal and Final. Modern science dismissed these with the scientific revolution of the 17^th century. Francis Bacon wrote in his Advancement of Learning (1605) that natural science "doth make inquiry, and take consideration of the same natures : but how? Only as to the material and efficient causes of them, and not as to the forms.” Meaning to say science is meant to consider efficient causes not formal ones. Here scientific materialism fails.

The failure of materialism can be clearly demonstrated in amino acid folding. Amino acids in order to function, after RNA generates a proper sequence, need to have the correct folding or position. A force akin to Aristotle’s formal force can be detected in this folding, the possibilities of the arrangements of the amino acids are far too great to be explained by random mutation upon which an evolutionary advantage might be gained. I would propose that something like secondary formal causes acted to generate the hugely complex bio-mechanical system of life, set in motion by a purposeful divine being. Just as this divine being set in motion the efficient causes like gravity and the sub-atomic forces. In contrast to the ID model where God intervenes directly as an intelligent agent, these work to build the intricate biological machines. And Promissory Materialism can only propose a process of random forces acted on to provide an advantage to survival, which in many cases fall short of explanation. Or the promise of a not yet arrived at explanation in the future.  

Much like the just so stories offered regarding how life arose in a tidal pool with chemicals sloshing around for billions of years. Of course those chemicals didn’t have billions of years only millions of year after the earth cooled down.

 These formal causes can be seen at work in the construction and maintenance of basic cells. How these cells first came together again I posit a formal and material causes but can not rule out the direct act of a Grand Designer either, as the inference to the best explanation.

This Formal Force or Cause preserves naturalism; i.e. virtually all we experience is within the ordinary course of events and not an immediate divine intervention. One of the reasons that the Medievals studied nature was to attempt to discern the miracle from ordinary.  They believed that God constrains himself to work within what is considered ordinary means not miraculous ones.

Almighty God acts through the ordinary course of nature by secondary forces but this doesn’t preclude Him from intervening directly in the cosmos. “And on the Seventh Day God rested from all his work” (Genesis 2:2) is quoted to denote God set in motion secondary forces to maintain the universe.

The Intelligent Design advocate sees features like the bio-mechanics of the one cell organism that demonstrate the activity of design and intelligence and proposes that an intelligent power directly intervened to create it. The Promissory Materialists see the same bio-mechanical organisms packed with design and intelligent purpose and presume that we will discover eventually the process in which they were generated, despite the fact that the current explanation of random evolutionary forces explains nothing how these incredibly complex systems were generated. Promissory Materialists dismiss the intelligent design explanation as simply God in the gaps answer. Formerly, thunder and lightning was explained as God or Thor or some Divine power acting directly in nature. Science dismissed God’s interventions with natural explanation, thus the gap in natural explanation was closed so to speak.

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Materialism makes exaggerated claims about its explanatory ability and the eventuality it will explain all the fundamental truths. Its claim that it’s been right so far, is powerfully deceptive. Despite all we now know about things, there is a vast realm of what it doesn’t explain including the origin of life or the big bang or a whole host of events. Even the Cambrian explosion, whereby we seen rise of the invertebrates, remains a mystery 150 years after its discovery. The “binding” problem is unexplained; that is the feeling we all possess a unified self (only those that don’t are deemed insane or mentally disabled) that modern brain science tells us is an illusion. How did consciousness arise, since life is said to have arisen from unthinking primordial chemicals? Or is consciousness just an illusion like many brain expects seem to think? The instantaneous spooky action at a distance of related sub-atomic particles is a known physical event. But science lacks an explanation other than be termed simply a quantum event. This strange quantum “event” is unexplained by any known action of material forces such as gravity, the strong force, the weak force or electromagnetic processes.  The hypothetical quark of the sub-atomic particle is unseen and only guessed at.  The list goes on and on and on. Not that science hasn’t created numerous gadgets and thing-a-ma-gigies; those amazing technologies that affect our daily lives.

Plus the explanations change over time. Newtonian physics was to explain bodies in motion but then it needed to Einstein to posit relativity. In late 19^th century atoms are a kind of gooey raisin… no they’re made of composite particles which are made of composite particles. Oops! There are no particles just wave functions. Continents are stable. Wait a minute they move. The universe is steady and eternal; no it’s expanding and has an origin. The explanations keep changing; there seem to be in need of revision. Who’s to say in one hundred years what the universe will be said to be like? Having an iPod doesn’t mean you have the meaning of the universe. Science gives us useful explanations and control of the observable universe but not fundamental answers like how we behave and who we are or even what is the fundamental nature of the universe.

In response to the obvious design and purpose demonstrated in the universe, the fine tuning we see, an Anthropic principle was proposed: the universe happened as we see it because we are here to observe it. This is the shit happens explanation. When someone gets cancer, gets abandoned by spouse or lover, sees someone they love die or don’t get the research grant we were expecting, all of this can be termed shit happens… but even better than that we have universes pop out of nothing into existence every so often, it seems. That is out of the singularity comes the Big Bang. Poof! Pink Rabbit appears on my desk out of nothing…I mean an entire universe inhabited by conscious self-aware beings appears. An occurrence so wildly implausible it would be like winning the lotto 365 times in a row. If it were happen, somebody would begin to question, whether the lotto was rigged. Not our promissory materialists. Remember “shit happens”. Someone else has proposed it’s like a firing squad of 50 Sharpshooters at 20 paces bent upon my execution manage to miss me. Wow, that must have been my lucky day, nothing special there, one of these would say. An entire universe pops into existence. The “shit happens” explanation is old, Democritus and Epicurus philosophized we are simply a random assemblage of atoms. Does that make them right? No, because the dominant idea of the ancient world maintained there was purpose.

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 When we posit an intelligent agent acting immediately and directly as cause of events, we fall into the risk of having God act, when no other explanation is available, a God in the gaps explanation. Classic example is thunder. Thor’s hammer and all that. We currently have a far better understanding of the natural processes of thunder storms and no one believes its Thor’s hammer or God being angry.

Where’s God here we might ask? God constrains himself to working through secondary natural forces in the ordinary course of nature. I do not discount the possibility God, the grand designer of a masterfully designed mechanism like the cell, could have acted directly in the creation of cellular mechanics. But since the success of science providing understanding of natural occurrences, many scientists discount any explanation other than the standard evolutionary one, despite the complete absence of a process based in reality; the primal soup doesn’t count folks. Completely implausible. The inference to the best explanation becomes direct creation by a grand designer. Yet I propose a force set in motion by a Divine power that could have generated an irreducibly complex mechanism like the cell. This force could be deemed a formal force, something we see operating today in amino acid folding.

In addition the billiard ball universe, critiqued by David Hume in the 18^th century, miscarries when it meets the quantum world of the infinitely small. Note in the bizarre quantum world of subatomic particles, in what Einstein called spooky action at a distance, distant particles work in synchronization and can even be in two places at once like a wave. There are NO forces working on each other. There are no inherent variables present prior to the particles separating. But the particles, beyond space and time, work inexplicably in synchronization.

Promissory materialism based on random events subject to natural laws alone without purpose can’t explain a miraculously fine-tuned universe. Some have proposed the fatuous idea of the existence of trillions of multiple universes; we inhabit the one that “works”. It’s pure fancy, a theory without falsification or verification since the answer lies beyond the singularity, based on a world view that sees empirical science as the only truth. A truly unscientific idea.

The Genesis account in the Bible presumes that life makes sense and has purpose in the midst of our suffering; creation is good and there’s an eternal moral principle operating in the universe. Not dumb chance where shit just happens.  

On the Seventh Day God rested it says in Genesis. If God were to be acting in a direct and immediate manner the universe would have fallen apart upon God’s repose, but God set in motion natural forces, secondary forces. Science investigates these natural forces. Intelligent design purports to say that God intervened immediately and directly in creation in a supernatural way. I have no doubt that an Almighty God could do this and intervene but scientific analysis looks to natural forces and rejects supernatural explanations. Science has been very successful at arriving at natural solutions and dispelling supernatural ones. Nonetheless, despite what science claims it has been far from completely successful, as mentioned above with quantum mechanics and the origin and fabrication of highly complex bio-mechanics among others.

Thus I propose a secondary formal cause set in motion by a divine agent to explain natural occurrences that the “promissory materialism in the gaps” explanations fail to explain. This implies the universe has form and purpose, something materialists can’t abide by.