If you listen to the scientific materialists in the science establishment, who are training their big guns on a little documentary film called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, you would think that “science” was a static practice that is certain of which presuppositions and procedures it includes and excludes. The way these scientific materialists have it, by definition, doing science must exclude any reference to God, or any supernatural element, when discussing the origin of our material world. Following in the footsteps of the late Carl Sagan, they confidently proclaim: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”
Problems arise for the science establishment when everyday people recognize that when scientists make such statements they suddenly cease to be scientists, and instead are acting as philosophers and theologians. The ability to expose the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the scientific establishment is just one of the reasons why Expelled may be the most important film released this year. But if you want to see it, you’d better hurry.
Expelled is drawing fire not only from the science establishment, but also from anyone else who can be recruited to shut the film down, including the creators of an animated cell sequence who are crying plagiarism, and even Yoko Ono (remember her?) who complains that the film incorporates, without permission, a few lines from her late husband’s song, “Imagine.”
So why are all of these folks so bent on silencing this little documentary? I would argue that it is because scientific materialists are eager to maintain their lock on what counts as science in the publicly-funded institutions of higher education over which they currently reign. To continue to do so, they have to enforce belief in a uniform story, while hoping to avoid public recognition of some of the nastier implications that result if their tale were true. Most importantly, they have to keep tapping down the insistent nagging thought that plagues the “less enlightened:” that there is more to the universe than merely what we perceive with our senses.
Tell Me a Story
Most scientists would admit and agree that they are in the rhetoric business. (I am currently working with a brilliant graduate student, Perry Otto, who is completing a compelling dissertation that looks at the relationship between science and rhetoric, and to whom I am indebted for bringing to my attention many of the technical arguments that follow.) One of the key purposes of publishing peer-reviewed scientific papers is to persuade colleagues that the author’s version of the world is the accurate one. To do so requires scientists to make verbal arguments bolstered by evidence and then to draw conclusions. That is what rhetoric does. It puts forward claims in such a way as to convince others of their acceptability. Collectively, the claims of scientific materialists form a worldview: a way of making sense of the world around us.
Macro-evolution as an explanation for biogenesis (the beginning of life) is not a scientific theory so much as it is a story. And like any culturally relevant story, it is competing with other stories for cultural ascendancy. What scientific materialists (who represent not a scientific, but a philosophical, position), such as scientists Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers (who appear in the film), would have you believe is that the story they tell about the beginnings of life directly correlates with reality. Their story is that life began on earth, billions of years ago, as a result of a combination of time, plus chance, plus matter. As a result, humans, like other life forms on this planet, are nothing more than chemically-determined accidents, traipsing through a universe devoid of free will or purpose (in any meaningful sense of the word). End of story.
What other scientists, such as those chronicled in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, want you to believe is that the story being told by the scientific materialists is not only untrue, but that if it is really believed and acted upon, it has devastating cultural consequences (more on that below). Most importantly, these other scientists want you to know that a better, alternative story is achieving increased acceptance. Their story is that life on earth has the appearance of being designed. They infer from that evidence that there must be a designer. Life, therefore, is infused with real purpose and actual meaning. If we are made, it is reasonable to conclude that we were made for a reason.
Whichever story our culture ultimately embraces will have significant implications for public policy, and the way we perceive morality.
If it’s Just a Story, What’s the Big Deal?
Many people proclaim that they are what they eat. That is not really true, unless you are a scientific materialist. If all you are is matter and nothing else, then you literally are — to the extent that your current cells are made up from the things that you consume — what you eat. Humor aside, I would contend, instead, that you are what you think.
How we act depends upon the presuppositions we hold. When you come into a darkened room, you flip on a switch, presupposing that this action will cause the lights to go on. It is a pretty good bet – it has happened many times before. Presuppositions apply to moral choices as well. Regardless of how angry we get with other people, if we presuppose that human life has value, then we will not try to kill them. If we believe in our hearts that dealing fairly with others is the right thing to do, then we will not cheat. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, describes this kind of universal morality as “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
Detractors of Expelled chafe at the idea, presented in the film, that belief in Darwinism is linked to the rise of Nazism in the past, and has given birth to eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia – all of which continue to haunt our present. To argue that eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia existed long before Darwin published The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man does not change the fact that the presuppositions that flow from these works provide philosophical cover for such policies. If scientific materialists are telling a true story, and the material world is the extent of our existence, then questions concerning free will, morality, or transcendent purpose are all moot. And you can forget about justice in the hereafter. If there is no God, then there is no Judgment. God, free will, and moral codes are nothing more than illusions that scientific materialists seek to unveil.
I am not arguing that scientific materialists cannot be good parents, love their children, obey the laws of the land, and be gracious neighbors. Of course they can. They simply have no philosophical or theological rationale for either doing so, or, if they currently are, to continue to do so. One can always appeal to threat of force, of course. But that would mean that if a person was rich enough, or powerful enough, to get away with any action – regardless of how monstrous such a deed would appear to most people – it still wouldn’t be wrong, because right and wrong are moral categories that depend upon a transcendent reality in order to have meaning. And scientific materialism will not abide the existence of the transcendent supernatural. The most that could be said of atrocities, or any other heinous actions, under such a presupposition, is that they are “inconvenient.” (If you would like to read a good tale about what happens when the abstract philosophical theories of scientific materialism meet with someone willing to act upon them, have a look at Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People.”) Scientific materialism, if true, forecloses on the idea of any meaningful debate about the existence of God, or the importance of morality. In their view, why waste time debating that which does not exist?
While the Intelligent Design Movement, covered in Expelled, does not explicitly identify the designer it has in mind, it does allow that door to remain open, and for moral and theological claims to be seriously debated. In fact, if the object of academia is the pursuit of truth — in order to communicate to others an accurate rendition of the story of our world — then scientific materialists have handcuffed themselves.
The Tool Determines the Use
It has been said that if the only tool a person has is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. In other words, the tools people have at their disposal limit the kinds of things they can do. Science, properly understood, uses its tools to observe, record, experiment upon, and draw conclusions about the physical universe. When the object of the inquiry is the material world, these tools work very well. But if you try to take these tools, which work so well in the natural world, and try to apply them to the supernatural world, they will not function. However, scientific materialists are so enamored of their tools that they have concluded that if the scientific tools do not reveal the supernatural world, then the problem is not with the tools, it is with the very existence of the supernatural world. They have committed the fallacy that C.S. Lewis exposes in his book, Miracles: “If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”
Scientific materialists have defined “truth” about the material world in such a way as to completely exclude the possibility of God. If there is a reality beyond material existence, scientific materialists lack the philosophical presuppositions, or the scientific tools, to discover it. So if it is true that our universe is a product of some sort of divine intervention, then science, as currently constructed, cannot reveal it. It cannot even acknowledge the lingering traces of design that many see in, for example, the coding that makes up our DNA.
If we were to find a sequence of pulses, similar to the genetic code, captured by the arrays of telescopes that make up the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), we would conclude that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. SETI’s funding would go through the roof. Perhaps our problem is that we are searching the heavens, when the proof we seek is contained right here in our own cells.
Expelled contains an incredible animated sequence of the internal workings of a cell. In Darwin’s time, the cell was considered to be a fairly simple part of biological life. Even today, many of us learned in elementary school about the parts of a cell: the membrane, cytoplasm, and the nucleus. The animation in Expelled reveals the cell as an amazingly complex, highly organized machine. Watching the parts at work, it is impossible to conclude that such a wondrous self-healing, self-replicating, information-rich part of the human body arose purely by chance, unless you exclude the possibility of Intelligent Design at the outset.
The Ring of Truth
Communication scholar Walter Fisher once noted that in order for stories to find acceptance, they have to be viewed by their hearers as containing coherence and fidelity. Coherence meant that the story would have to be free from internal inconsistencies. Fidelity meant that the story would have to have the “ring of truth.” In other words, it would have to be consistent with the other truths held by the hearers.
One of the reasons that macro-evolution — the belief that all life began spontaneously from inorganic material and then, over time, subdivided into all of the life forms we see today — has a hard time gaining acceptance is that it is hard to believe. The story is filled with plot problems, the most significant of which is “From where did all of the material which makes up the universe originate?” The macro-evolutionary story told by scientific materialists requires us to deny the existence of many things that intuitively we know to be real: free will, moral accountability, purposeful existence, and a sense of transcendent justice.
One wonders if the real agenda behind those who oppose Intelligent Design is a desire to avoid having to wrestle with the idea of the reality of a transcendent God who will not submit to examination by His creatures, but who, instead, will sit in judgment over their actions. This debate is nothing new. It is as old as human history. A brief look through the Bible reveals people who would mock God, suppress knowledge of His existence, and encourage others to do the same. The obligation of those who reject a scientific materialist view of the world is to continue to advance counter arguments, to insist that real knowledge exists, and can be accessed, even outside the realm of scientific inquiry, and to avoid developing the stance of the wounded. It is those with the scientific materialist presuppositions who are victims of their own worldviews. They should not be objects of our scorn, or recipients of hate, but instead they should be respectfully opposed, and held up in our prayers that they might come to know the One who made them.
