NPR commentator “Daniel Schorr had a thought-provoking piece tonight on the cultural and religious implications of the debate about injecting non-scientific intelligent design into U.S. education”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4826756.
Framing the “will of a designer” in the context of huge natural disasters, Mr. Schorr hits on an important philosphical question that you must face when you decide that a greater intelligence is responsible for the complexity of Nature. Such a designer is, by definition, “interfering”. But who are we to tell the designer to stop interfering at the level of motor protiens? Why can’t the designer willy-nilly choose to eradicate an entire city (witness Sodom and Gamorrah)?
That’s the problem with injecting metaphysics into science. You run the risk of aligning yourself with a religious viewpoint that then has implications for some apparent “will of the designer”. I have never believed in a vengeful God, if there is a God at all, and I have always taken to heart the “Father God” of the New Testament. But where does the interference stop, once you posit an interferer?
Tough issue. But this is just the kind of chaotic thought that will enter U.S. science should “intelligent design”, or “teach the controversy”, is forced on educators and students. Certainly anybody who believes that only a designer could have interfered to create complexity in nature must admit this is a supernatural creature, capable of great and terrible things. It seems that this designer has a lot to answer for in this world, if this is how they interfere, and Katrina is only the latest case where this would be true.
That’s why I choose to put my efforts into understanding the rational world, a world where terrible things can happen as a natural consequence of the wonderful and complex structures in Nature. At least there is sanity, and a freedom from paranoia, in such thought. I don’t believe anybody did any punishing to New Orleans; I believe she was the victim of many things, not the least of which was the regular cycle of hurricanes and inevitable bad luck.
