Re: Personally, I have never

I’m sure you’re right, John. The operative word in my comment was ‘personally’!

Nevertheless, there are reasons why I have not jumped into the swirling and treacherous waters of the creationism / intelligent design / evolution debate.

1. I think that the creationist and intelligent design arguments are a priori misconceived. I do not believe that they are required by a reading of Genesis 1-2; and I regard them as theologically incoherent and basically dualistic. I see no reason why God should have left a few cracks in an otherwise self-explanatory, self-sustaining creation, cracks which can only be held together by the duct tape of direct divine causation. I do not expect God to be visible to the sciences.

To give an analogy: The bus I am travelling on breaks down; I have to walk the last part of the journey home, but because of that I bump into an old friend who is on his way to hospital to have a lump scanned; so I pray for him, and when he gets to the hospital, the scan shows that the lump has disappeared. I would argue that neither the coincidence of meeting this man nor the apparent effectiveness of the prayer can be demonstrated scientifically: they are highly meaningful and indeed real events for my friend and me, but they are necessarily invisible to science. Science cannot give a rational account of the chance meeting; and if it cannot explain the disappearnce of the lump, it will simply mark it as an anomaly: it cannot replicate the event, so there’s nothing more that can be done.

My assumption is that the meaning that we attach to our existence relates to scientific accounts of human origins in much the same way.

2. On the whole I find scientific accounts of our origins so stunning that for me they offer a far more compelling and awe-inspiring argument for creation than the blinkered apologetic case put forward by creationists.

3. I am not a scientist and connect expect adequately to evaluate the arguments for myself. Even if I could, it is a rapidly changing field of study and I would have very little confidence that what now looks like a crack in the theoretical edifice won’t be explained away in a few years time.

4. Even if scientists were to reach a consensus that the theory of evolution is wrong, I would still expect them to keep looking for a coherent and complete naturalistic explanation of human origins. As I said, I don’t expect God to show up in the theory.