John Derbyshire has a piece in the Spectator on Intelligent Design. It is part of “face-off” segment with someone named Stephen Meyer. He argues for Intelligent Design, while Derbyshire takes the science side. The first page has the intelligent design argument and then mid-way through the second page Derbyshire begins his dismantling of it. Meyer has been peddling intelligent design for a long time and his arguments are well known, so Derbyshire has the advantage of knowing the other side’s best moves.
John has been driven near mad by ID’ers over the years. He finds their circularly reasoning terribly frustrating. The thing with believers is you have to understand how they play the game. They make their assertions against reality and then demand you prove reality exists. Gay marriage is a great example. Confronted by skeptics they will demand you explain why your oppose it. In other words, they use rhetorical trickery to make their position the default and the status quo the radical alternative.
Derbyshire makes an error when he claims that Jews and Christians embrace occasionalism. This is the claim that God is unknowable and unpredictable. He can rearrange his creations anyway he likes, including the laws of science. That is not the Christian view of God. Some pseudo-Christian cults in America like Mormons and Evangelicals may have may have gone down this road, but that’s not standard Christian dogma. Jews embraced the Greek view of God’s creation, so they reject occasionalism
Islam, on the other hand, is a different thing entirely. For them, God is unknowable. You can follow God’s commands, but you can never know God and you can never know if you will be rewarded if you do follow his commands. The God of Islam is not a God making covenants with man and he may not be rational. He could suspend gravity tomorrow or change the speed of light. Nothing we do will impact the will of God nor is it possible understand the will of God.
It is one reason science came to a grinding halt where Islam took root. What’s the point of learning the laws of nature, if God can change them tomorrow? It’s not the only reason why Islam has stagnated. Invasion killed off a big slice of the Muslim intellectual elite, thus closing the golden age of Islam. Internal fights within Islam also cut off Islam from the world, especially Europe, just when the West was beginning to flourish. Still, the role of occasionalism is a big reason Islam remains doggedly anti-science.
Now, these intelligent design people may be embracing occasionalism in order to justify their theories about evolution. Again though, they are going against Christian tradition by doing it. Granted, the “real Christianity” is in bad shape and these new bespoke Christians may be the future, but they are still outside the Christian tradition. Given the inherent dishonestly of the intelligent design people, it is not a great leap to think they are perverting Christianity in order to con people into believing their nutty theories.
