06.25.08
Insoluble mystery
Scientific thinking can underlie intelligent design
Columnist Peter McKnight was right to pour scorn on ignorant and dogmatic anti-evolutionists (No intelligence allowed in Stein’s film, June 21), but he needs to discriminate between the intelligent design movement, which he sees as “the latest form of creationism,” and the scientific promotion of intelligent design theory.
The latter, he ought to know, has a distinguished history stretching back to natural theology, which accompanied much modern natural history, however misguided the theorists may now seem.
They were most active in the years after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and John Tyndall’s famous dismissal of theology in 1874 (the so-called Belfast Address). Christian thinkers and scientific theorists like Charles Hodge, James McCosh and Robert Watts of Princeton admired facts and empirical observations and, in fact, seized on what they saw as the logical gap between Darwin’s data and facts and his inferences and hypothesis of natural selection.
Moreover, the great Tyndall himself (like T.H. Huxley, one of Darwin’s “bulldogs”) concluded that “it is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life on earth is evolved, species differentiated, and mind unfolded from their prepotent elements in the immeasurable past.”