God's Pen is Nature

God's architectural technique was natural.

God's pen is natural law, and it is an automatic writer.

Suppose I made the bizarre claim that the words on this essay were written by God. Instantly your mind would start sounding "red alerts." You would know there was a better explanation of authorship, because God's signature is not in evidence here. At the same time, though, you would not lose faith in God because of my wild claim.

The extreme example above was intended to give you a sense for how scientists would react to the idea that God or some higher intelligence individually created each form of life. They would produce the same cringe as you did. God explains everything, but should not be associated with our ignorance. Scientists want details. They want to know how life got started and how it changed over billions of years.

Natural explanation, contrary to the views of some (like Richard Dawkins), does NOT displace God. Many modern theologies, for example, embrace religious naturalism – the view that religion is capable of accepting nature as it presents itself. Rev. Michael Dowd is a Christian evangelist who discovered evolution to be religiously inspiring in his book Thank God for Evolution. Rabbi Natan Slifkin is an evolutionist, an Orthodox Jew, and author of The Challenge of Creation: Judaism's Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution. Both of these theists argue that basic Darwinism need not be in conflict with basic religion.

Religious naturalism fully embraces physical nature. Nature in all its glorious (and often not so glorious) lawful details (as revealed by science) is simply how the universe works. Life is intimately tied to that nature. In my opinion, religion missteps when it makes any propositions that violate natural law.

There are a few leaders of the Intelligent Design movement who do not appreciate my arguments above. They insist that nature cannot account for the origins and evolution of life. One of the leaders of the movement is Cambridge trained philosopher of science Dr. Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. He wonders why we cannot find an intelligent creator in life, even though we readily recognize rational agents behind the Rosetta Stone or behind cryptographic codes. Why does DNA not qualify? (I will eventually answer this last question).

William Paley in his 1802 Natural Theology argued that if a watch was found on the ground, we would realize immediately that it had a watchmaker. To Paley, God is the watchmaker of nature and of life. Such an argument from design is fraught with problems, and the best grade we could give to such a view in these scientific times is that it is an extraordinarily inadequate and incomplete answer. Most scientists would correctly argue that such a grade would be generous.

Suppose we found an 18th century British watch, maybe even one owned by Paley. We could examine it and determine its maker, and we might even suspect that Paley once owned it. Explaining the watch with the watchmaker and its original owner would bring the question of origin to a reasonable stop. With proper detective work, we would understand the provenance of the watch. We could then auction the watch and probably make a significant profit.

But notice something: explaining the watchmaker (or even Paley) with God as the Maker does not end the questioning. The questions only begin. Why, how, where, and when did God make people? Who created God? Who created God's God? And, the questions could go on forever.

Science is the process of narrowing and refining the questions of origin. "God" as explanation opens all lines of questions, narrowing nothing. The use of "God" as explanation merely postpones and defers the subsequent necessity for natural explanation.

Why do creationist-motivated thinkers describe God as operating like a "human" agent?" Why would God engineer living entities like humans would engineer non-living entities? The Intelligent Design movement surely seems to believe in a God that cannot make efficient use of nature. Why would God not use nature, strictly?

Science does not like to explain nature using the unexplained. There is an important scientific attitude, adopted by the majority of scientists, known as methodological naturalism. Scientists operate as if all events in the universe have natural causes. Science is the process of seeking natural cause. "God" as a concept is inadequate as explanation because God supersedes nature and is unexplained.

Objects in nature, like DNA, may superficially look supernatural. But, claims of the supernatural have a bad reputation for not holding up to rational scrutiny. So, again, why cannot scientists look at DNA and detect a creating intelligence? DNA is like a chalkboard full of writing. Half of the writing would be extraordinarily beautiful with occasional errors, but half the writing also would be nonfunctioning nonsense -- junk. Much of the chalkboard would have partially erased messages. Some of the authorship would come from viruses.

If God directly wrote DNA, the work was imperfect. Scientists look at the nucleotide sequences in DNA and are amazed that a living organism can be the result. DNA has no engineering polish. Instead, DNA is a mish mash from eons of natural tinkering. DNA sequences looks just like they would be expected to look like, if natural selection had operated on them. If the pen of life had a brand, its name would be evolution.

We can be utterly amazed because God's pen of life needs no one to hold it – but the pen is still God's.

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