More Thoughts on Intelligent Design and Theodicy

Deus absconditus (the hidden God) is not clearly and widely manifest in the world, but here and there, like touches of dappled sunlight, divine action seems to break through. The rest, though, is darkness of human sin and the inescapable unpleasantness of physical existence.

The most obvious challenge to "Intelligent Design" is that it is merely a form of "God of the Gaps" theology, in which God is invoked to explain things that are currently beyond either our theories or our imagination. Natural selection is perfectly adequate to explain (say) mammalian morphology, but when it comes to (say) the mechanism of ciliary action, we don't have surviving instances of any intermediate stages, and we can't imagine what they might have been, so the propenents of ID usher in God as the explanation. This seems both unscientific and intellectually feeble.

Might it be reasonable to expect God's action in creation to be similar to his apparent mode of action in the here-and-now universe? Most of the time it is a chaotic maelstrom of mere material cause and effect, on which the mischoices of the human will are superimposed; but where an opening exists, God is able to act. Where a human soul opens itself in prayer, there is an option for the divine. The problem with applying this to the non-human world is that it requires some kind of vitalist theory of the universe: the heterodox notion that something analogous to free will is possessed by elements within inanimate nature. Without this, there is no logic to the occasions on which God acts: why should he so beautifully design the biochemistry of the cell, and then sit back while parasitic insects chew their way through the larvae of other species? I am not convinced.

Is Nature immoral? or Should pet cats be banned?

We found a baby mouse on the path. I guess it was dropped there by the neighbour's cat. I looked up "rearing orphan mice" on the Web, and decided that I was not going to be a workable substitute for a mummy mouse, given the immense labor involved in attempting to feed the thing, keep it warm, and possibly (according to one site) help it do its own poo.

(Boy, it would be good if baby humans only evacuated in response to parental stimulation, though! A whole swathe of problems would vanish in an instant!)

So poor baby mouse was gently abandoned in the hedgerow across the road. The Gospels assure us that God sees a sparrow fall, but they don't say that he actually does anything about it: which is why many people of a religious disposition find themselves unable to take traditional Christian doctrine at face value, and move towards deism (there is a God but he's not bothered), pantheism (God and the world are aspects of the same thing), or various nuanced forms of non-theistic faith.

Pet cats are a moral conundrum rather like holiday flights: dispassionately considered, they do such evil to the environment, and yet in human terms they have such apparent benefits in terms of well-being and fulfilment that it seems hard to campaign wholeheartedly against them.