Stephen Meyer Proposes God as a Conclusion of Science
By Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism.
Stephen Meyer, Director of the Center for Science, and a leading proponent of intelligent design spoke at the Heritage Foundation with Jay W. Richards, Director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family on August 10. He explained why intelligent design should be regarded as science, and the implications the recognition of a universal designer has for law and politics.
Richards said that America’s “founding consensus” involved belief in God, and his role as creator and source of the natural laws of physical science and the natural law of humanity (or moral law governing human nature). Natural law was held to ground positive (or human) law. This was the “background culture that was embedded with particular assumptions.” This was “not just a sectarian belief, but a public truth.” This reality remains American history, but from the late nineteenth century on it was incrementally repudiated by intellectuals and opinion leaders, until by the late twentieth century, it was generally repudiated by America’s leadership class.
But “the natural world … has continued to testify to something else … In the last few decades, a group of scholars, philosophers, natural scientists, lawyers … have been very interested in this question of public evidence … for existence of design generally, and for the existence of a creator in particular.”
Meyer has advanced intelligent design as essential for life for many years. His most recent book Return of the God Hypothesis develops “a more explicitly theological argument” concerning the design of life than he has previously.
Richards asked Meyer to define intelligent design. Meyer said that “intelligent design is the idea that there are certain features of life and the universe that are best explained by the action or activity of a designing intelligence or agent rather than as the result of an undirected material process, such as for example natural selection, or random mutations in the biological realm.” Importantly, “the activity of the designing agency is detectable by certain features that we see in nature.”
This is not “per se” an argument for the existence of God, but “an argument for the existence of a mind of some kind.” The question remains, however, whether or not the intelligence is “immanent,” (i.e., exists within the universe), or transcendent (beyond physical reality). The “panspermia” hypothesis holds that the source of design in biological reality is immanent to our universe.
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