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Friends
have recently forwarded to me various materials -- including a
very professional DVD -- advocating "Intelligent Design" as a
substitute for evolution.
Don't be taken in.
Intelligent Design claims that cellular structures cannot have evolved,
because they are too complex, and require simultaneous mutations.
This claim is specious. There are two fundamental problems. First, it's
bad science; and second, if the logic presented is followed through on,
it inevitably leads to a compound god (incompatible with the Unique God
of the Ten Commandments). Opponents of Intelligent Design claim it is a
stand-in for either "creationism" or "alien" design.
With regard to the appearance of impossible simultaneous coordinated developments -- sadly, the cell biologists and
bio-chemists have not kept up with developments in physics and math.
Only a few years ago, mathematicians thought it was impossible to
produce Penrose tilings, because they required simultaneous coordinated
developments. It was thought that there was no possible way for
different parts of a developing crystal, for example, to coordinate
with other parts, so that the overall structure would be complete
without fissures, defects, and faults.
As it turned out, even after the
mathematicians had
cautioned that these patterns could not occur in nature, they were
discovered in nature. And no "intelligent designer" was required. The
Penrose tilings are naturally adjacent in a higher dimension -- which
is apparently where they organize. So the impossible became possible.*
Magicians make use of this all the time. They lead us to believe that
all of the possible explanations have been blocked, and that what we
see must be magic. But it is never the case. All that the magician has
done is come up with something that we haven't foreseen. The argument for "Intelligent Design" is thus
actually the argument of theorists who, not knowing their own limits,
believe that if they can't
figure it out, it must be magic.
The "intelligence" of Intelligent Design is intended to be confabulated
with "information". This is what leads to the necessity -- consistent
with this theory -- of an embodiment of an intelligent multi-talented
(compound) god. Intelligence is the result of the use of information,
but it's not the same thing as information.
Information is the fuel of intelligence. It's not the engine, it's not
the car, and it doesn't tell the car when and where to go and stop.
Physicist Roger Penrose, writing in his Pulitzer-prize winning "The
Emperor's New Mind", tells us that plant life gets the information it
needs to organize itself as a living thing from the difference in
information carried by the collimated photons the plant absorbs from
the sun, and the diffuse and dispersed photons that the planet radiates
back to the sky. The plants stand in a negentropic (meaning "makes
order") information gradient, extending from the sun to the shield of
the sky.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Chassidism, writes
in "Shaar Hayichud Vaehemunah" ("Gate of Unity and Faith" (Tanya),
first published in 1796) that "Hashem/Elokim is a Sun and a Shield",
and then goes on to use language that parallels the language Roger
Penrose uses 200 years later.
In Jewish tradition, Hashem/Elokim ("Lord God") is undifferentiated and
utterly Singular. This is the proclamation of the Sh'ma: "Hear, O
Israel, Hashem is our God, Hashem is One". (Hashem="The Name"=Lord;
Elokim=Elo-him="God"). This ideal "Echad" ("One"; singular, unique
Unity) tolerates no differentiation ("a jealous God"), and no qualities
knowable to us (beyond Singular All-Inclusiveness).
In Torah
tradition, the information gradient that
leads the natural world to the evolution of life (and us) derives
directly from the fact that Hashem/Elokim is undifferentiated. If there
were any differentiation, then the negentropic information gradient
would be degraded, and we wouldn't have "All-there Is". There would be
gaps in reality, and gaps in nature. It is only because Hashem/Elokim
is utterly Singular and Unique that the universe can contain the full
span of diversity. (What I mean by this is that there is a
complementary transform relationship between the singularity and the
spectrum.**)
Intelligent Design requires god to apply a structured logic to the
world, in order to force evolution. This structured logic, which is
claimed to lead to the logic of DNA, must come from a structured logic.
Logic has components, or it's either trivial or not logical. The
proponents of Intelligent Design are thus attempting to walk us down a
garden path to an embodied (compound) god.
God is the
source of information -- and this
information*** is the fuel of intelligence.
Bible tradition -- monotheism -- requires a Singular and unembodied
(non-compound) God.
I think it's important to discuss the implications of Intelligent
Design, because Intelligent Design is now being promoted by the
President of the United States. Science classrooms all over the country
are being assaulted with what amounts to a teaching that claims that
one belief system is scientifically true, and the public -- almost all
non-scientists -- is buying it.
This is an assault on science, which means it's also an assault on the
future of our society -- and on the true roots of our traditions of
faith. The fact is, when all is said and done, Intelligent Design
"damns by faint praise."
Stan Tenen
Sharon, MA
October 2005
* See page 4 of physicist Lisa
Randall's new book, "Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the
Universe's Hidden Dimensions". (500 pp. Ecco Press, 2005). For a review
of this book in the Nov./Dec. 2005 issue of "American Scientist", see
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/dimensions-demystified
**See
my essay, "The God of
Abraham: A Mathematician's View", at
http://www.meru.org/Noetic/GdofAbrhm.html.
See also the graphic on the Delta Transform at
http://www.meru.org/Posters/DeltaFunction.html
***(Often
via the "unseen
hand" of geometric boundaries)