EVOLUTION OF A DICHOTOMY

Blame evil on the Great Designer

By Ron Grossman
> Tribune staff reporter<br>
> June 26, 2005<br>
> Scientifically speaking, there's no great novelty to the theory of Intelligent Design, the Bible Belt's latest alternative to Darwin.<br>
> The greatest of the medieval theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas, taught that the order we see all around us proved God's existence. But Intelligent Design does frame with renewed clarity a philosophical question that has haunted humans ever since they developed a capacity for wonderment: Why does evil exist?<br>
> If the universe is governed by a benevolent power--call it God or the dialectic or Mother Nature or whatever--why are we tormented by disease, famine, cruelty and war?<br>
> Intelligent Design envisions a universe in which impeccable logic reigns.<br>
> Evolution is predicated on blind chance. Darwin reasoned that many a litter or seed pod contains oddballs whose differences give them a leg up in coping with their environment. They prevail over siblings, and from those myriad small changes the infinite variety of living creatures evolve, from amoebas to modern man.<br>
> Especially in this country, churchgoers can be troubled by that picture.<br>
> In England, Darwin's homeland, and in Europe, even the more conservative denominations have long since made peace with evolution. But the idea that apes and men have a common ancestry still troubles a broad swath of Middle America, where people take a simple and straightforward piety to Sunday services.<br>
> To them, evolution bespeaks a godless world and, by extension, a world without ethical moorings. The creator of the Old Testament account goes about his work logically, making land for Adam to stand on, adding a companion in Eve, and giving them food to eat.<br>
> With parallel rigor, Jehovah establishes ethical limits, all those &quot;thou shalt not&quot; injunctions of the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. But if the cosmos is the product of accident and chance, wouldn't &quot;good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; be arbitrary?<br>
> Some believers think they've found a way out of that ethical cul-de-sac via a hole they perceive in evolutionary theory. Virtually no scientists agree with them, but for the moment, let's look at it from their perspective.<br>
> Too complex for accident<br>
> Intelligent Design's partisans argue that life is too complex to be the product of accident intersecting with environmental advantage. Humans depend upon dozens of organs, each made up of numerous smaller systems, all of which have to mesh perfectly.<br>
> There wouldn't have been enough time, even in the billions of years the universe has been around, for all of that to evolve by trial and error, Darwin's opponents argue. Therefore, there must have been a blueprint for life--and thus a designer to bring a cosmic T-square and triangle to it.<br>
> On an intuitive level, Intelligent Design has a certain appeal.<br>
> Recall a gorgeous sunset over a bucolic landscape. Beholding the scene, it's hard to resist thinking that such beauty must have been created for humans to take pleasure in. Think of little kids squealing with delight as they go down a slide. Could it be only happenstance that a playground's potential so perfectly coincides with a child's sense of fun?<br>
> Now consider a more problematic example, say, a cancer ward in a children's hospital.<br>
> If the world is the product of a blueprint, then it must have contained the specs for suffering no less than it did pleasure.<br>
> In at least 21 states, legislators and school board members have demanded that Intelligent Design have a place in the science curriculum. Before a judge nixed the project, a suburban-Atlanta board of education required biology textbooks to have a sticker affixed, cautioning:<br>
> &quot;This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.&quot;<br>
> Disclaimer on Sunday<br>
> Yet if the same cosmic plan produced not just joy but pain, shouldn't Sunday school books carry a disclaimer: &quot;Caution, studying Intelligent Design can lead to moral relativism.&quot;<br>
> Intelligent Design's sponsors are careful not to spell out exactly who or what it might be. They know that if their pet theory were overtly associated with the biblical God, the constitutional provision for separation of church and state would deny their ideas access to public schools.<br>
> For rhetorical simplicity, let's here dub the cosmic planner the &quot;Designer&quot; and assign heshe/it the pronoun "he."
> <br> If the Designer created not just sunsets but also infants starving in Sudan, what kind of example is he to hold up to schoolchildren?
> <br> Thinking about the horrors the Designer committed, impressionable young people might conclude that they are similarly unbound by any ethical limits.
> <br> In fact, that's a vexing question for all streams of religious thought, but especially for monotheistic ones. Polytheistic systems can slide by the problem.
> <br> The ancient Greek pantheon had lots of gods, depicted by Homer as a divine and dysfunctional family. Some of the Olympians favor one group of humans, the Greeks, while other gods side with the Trojans.
> <br> So the escalation of earthly disputes into war, and the suffering it brings even to non-combatants, is hardly surprising. It goes with the territory of being human.
> <br> Dual gods duel
> <br> The ancient Persians confronted the problem of evil head-on. They posited the existence of two gods. One is a god of good, the other is a god of evil. The world is a kind of playing field where the two gods struggle for supremacy, the battle now going one way, then the other.
> <br> Humans are caught in the middle, which is why our lives are a mixture of pleasure and pain.
> <br> That Persian dualism so neatly corresponds to experience that the Romans almost adopted it when they went shopping for a faith to replace the polytheism they'd inherited from the Greeks. But in the end, the Romans converted to Christianity, a monotheism with the built-in problems of a one-god universe.
> <br> Preachers of monotheistic faiths sometimes explain evil's existence by shifting the burden to mankind. Their arguments are usually variations on a theme: We each create our own hell. Roughly, the thesis is that God created a good universe, but humans muck it up with their misdeeds.
> <br> Now, I am willing to accept my share of the blame, according to that formula.
> <br> I suspect others can too.
> <br> Many adults recognize how often they have screwed up, and thus we could understand evil that befalls us as being the product of our own shortcomings.
> <br> But come back to the example of infants with terminal diseases.
> <br> What possible misdeeds could they have committed in their foreshortened lives to warrant such painful punishments?
> <br> French writer Albert Camus posed that question in his novel "The Plague."
> <br> It is the story of a town subject to a devastating epidemic, a kind of rerun of the Black Death of earlier times. At first, the local priest explains the experience as divine retribution for sin. But after witnessing a child's death, Father Paneloux can't hold on to that easy argument.
> <br> "No, we should go forward, groping our way through the darkness, stumbling perhaps at times, and try to do what good lays in our power," he says in a revised sermon. Beyond that, he can only urge that Christians must trust that, in some mysterious way, a benevolent God hovers over the universe where they suffer.
> <br> Intelligent Design, though, takes away that option.
> <br> In an attempt to rid the universe of Darwinian accident, it winds up ridding it, as well, of divine mystery. Its very logic leaves no metaphysical wiggle room--ironically, since its sponsors are otherwise highly vocal Christians.
> <br> Jehovah is jealous
> <br> They honor the Old Testament, whose creator is far from a coolly detached Designer.
> <br> Jehovah makes no secret of his personality traits.
> <br> "For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God," he says. The Old Testament creator knows that his awesome power can paralyze humans with fear. After destroying his first creation with a flood, he put rainbows in the sky, so Noah's heirs wouldn't cringe with every raindrop.
> <br> Those nuances have made the Bible a perennial best seller, an ethical chapbook upon which generations of children have been raised.
> <br> But this newfangled notion of a Designer who lays it out, once and forever, with no possible revisions, who utters not one word of explanation, who drafted a blueprint, and by his silence says: Take it or leave it?
> <br> That's not the kind of creator I want my children and now my grandchildren to learn about.
> <br> When it comes to taking religion out of the public schools, it could make the ACLU seem like pikers.
> <br>

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