Ghost in the Wire

Now for Christians who take a bite out of the "I believe in evolution" apple, God is the clock-winder who sets the universe in motion, who creates the rules by which nature can develop and improve itself. These rules are random, punctuated by change, and are, in a certain Christian reading, a testament to the wonder of the Almighty. Free will works here, as well, but there's no requirement to believe that God is actively intervening in the natural world in order to push certain crops or species upward on the evolutionary ladder.

About five or six years ago, I heard a lecture from a pretty prominent chaos theorist at UGA, who gave a lecture arguing for a view of God that depicts him/her/it as an active, divine shaper of nature in a way concordant with the scientific realities of complexity theory. In his view, God set both the rules and the "initial conditions" (a term very important in complexity theory), and then let his will unfold through the "emergence" of natural phenomenon. This view, the theorist argued, was perhaps the most scientific explanation, at least assuming we understand the scientific value of parsimony; see, the variables that come together to form the universe and to produce life on earth are so many, and their confluence so coincidental, that had they been off even a fraction of a fraction, well, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is that some divine force intelligently designed the conditions that produce the universe, and had their intelligence not designed the universe, then all those emergent phenomenon that are unforeseen or unpredictable given the rules of physics would never have obtained.

The problem of course with this view of the world is that you cannot praise the glory and genius of the creator for this initial act of intelligent design and then not simultaneously assign exclusive blame to the Lord your God for every single natural disaster and tragic event outside the confines of free will. In other words, while usually the evil in the world can be explained by blaming Satan, the Devil (those two are different), or free will, in this explanation, a conscious decision was made by God to create conditions by which tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, turbulence, and whatever other natural disaster you can think of would arbitrarily and perhaps even capriciously (given that poorer and less technological advanced peoples suffer more than richer and more technologically protected ones) end human life and induce human misery.

Well that's what you get with just one decision, one act of intelligent design. Modify that theory so that it looks like modern ID, and well, then every subsequent evolutionary step, as well as every natural phenomenon - and all the negative consequences that stem from them - can be laid squarely at God's very culpable feet. Why do humans die when they get too cold? Because God gave their genes a push that didn't include built-in Gore-Tex protection. Why do humans displace animal populations with such ease that it now threatens to undo the natural balance of the world? Because God decided it would be a good idea, so he gave humans technological powers and robbed "lesser" animals of communication skills. Why are humans so warlike? Why do they commit such atrocities? Why do they choose, with their free will, to turn off the call of God, the call of conscience? Because God evolved them that way, i.e., wanted them that way! ID is the one theory that, if followed through to its conclusions, largely vitiates the value of free will as a theodical explanation. We approach something akin to the Young Hegelians, conservative in the most problematic ways, because whatever is, must be that way because of the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good providence of the evolutionary Lord thy God, who chose the world to be this way. In other words, given the active role played in promoting certain evolutionary moves over others, and given the emergent consequences that obtain from those evolutionary conditions, whatever is in the world must be, ergo propter hoc, exactly what God intended. Natural disasters, genocides, and what have you.

How this seems to help out the case for Christiandom eludes me.