Come On Conservatives! Give God a Little Bit of Credit!!

By Alan S. Miller

Marin County, California
September 19, 2005

Whether God is a He or a She, a First Cause or a Big Bang, a Yahweh or an Allah, he or she or it is a great deal smarter than those who have been plumping for a theory of “Intelligent Design” to replace our long-standing, scientifically acceptable theory of evolution.

Recognizing that the religious right’s “creationist” approach to understanding the universe (no evolution, a cosmos less than 6000 years old, dinosaurs roaming the planet at the same time as Homo sapiens and a batch of other primitive mythologies) is intellectually credible to virtually no one who is in tune with the world as it really is, the more sophisticated segment of the anti-science group has come up with a new approach. The anti-evolutionists seem to be evolving.

Okay, they say. Let’s acknowledge that the planet may perhaps be a bit older than the creationists claim and the universe even more ancient. But the cosmos itself is so complex, say the ID folk, that evolution—natural selection—could not possibly have brought all the mysteries of creation into being.

Therefore, there must have been an “intelligent designer” lurking in the background, starting the engine of the cosmos whenever that may have been, and guiding it down the freeway of life ever since.

That’s fine for many of us—even for a lot of scientists. Lots of us believe in God. But to use the God concept to criticize and put down science is to misuse an important truth.

In their zeal to combat the heresy of evolutionary thinking, the intelligent designers seem to have placed the very idea of God inside a very small box.

If there is a designer, a first cause—for good or bad, an almost universal belief—why could not that power have initiated all of the complicated mechanisms that have fueled and enabled all the works of the universe and each of the wondrous life forms?

If we believe in God, why can’t we give God (however we may name that reality), a bit of credit for some pretty skillful management of the world for the past 14 billion years?

Now I’m not one for doing much thinking or talking about God. I’d rather go along with Moses who, in the Exodus account in the Old Testament, was presumptuous enough to ask God his name when he saw the burning bush in the Sinai desert.

It didn’t take long for Moses to be put in his place. The word that came to him was essentially, “Don’t ask so many questions. I am who I am. That’s all you need to know! There are some things you’ll never understand”.

As Barbara and I were looking at the Milky Way the other night near our cabin in the mountains, we remembered that this galaxy of ours contains 400 billion stars.

The universe contains at least 130 billion galaxies. That means the number of stars in the universe has 50,000 billion billion stars, some of which must be not all that much different from our own personal star, the sun.

Wow! That should be enough to humble any creationist or intelligent designer who tries to place human beings and our tiny planet at the center of everything that is.

No, I trust the scientists to explain most of the what and the how of life. I trust philosophers and open minded religious thinkers who try to sort out the why—the big questions of how we got here and what it’s all about and how we go about being responsible people.

One thing becomes clearer to me the older I get. We can’t use religion to prove anything about science. We can’t use science to really prove anything about religion.

We need to just be thankful for who we are and for what we have. And for goodness sake, as we work to keep the ideologues out of our bedrooms and the state out of our religions, so should we keep the creationists and the other tiny thinkers out of our classrooms.

And if we talk about God, let’s give him or her or it the credit for putting things together in a quite amazing fashion, in ways that no one of us will ever be able to understand. Thank heavens for that!

Copyright © 2005 Alan S. Miller
Last updated: September 23, 2005