“Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution” something Richard Dawkins emphasises in The God Delusion (p. 31). So, should there be a God, he would have had to have been the end product of the chain of evolution. He would have had to have evolved through the material process, and so be physically identifiable and therefore verifiable. From what I read the materialist presumption is that everything in the universe is material or physical. It allows for nothing outside of that presumption.
So inanimate material, at some stage in the history of our world, miraculously produced life (a miracle that wasn’t observed and has never been repeated). That primitive life developed in upward chain to the most complex life form, human beings - human beings with consciousness, mind and intelligence. Whether we believe it or not, the materialist believes it - that somehow, inanimate material spawned life that eventually developed consciousness and intelligence. I don’t know what the difference is between the materialist belief and the Christian belief, that it was God who created life, but the materialist believes it was not intelligence that produced material but the reverse, it was inanimate material that produced intelligence. No one witnessed this and there is no evidence in human history that this took place - it is what materialist scientists believe took place. It has never happened in human experience - despite attempts to produce life in the laboratory. AiG gives a lengthy comprehensive account of the Miller-Urey experiment. But notice in this article the attempt in the optimistic vocabulary that is used to view the experiment as a success: that ‘it may have’, ‘now believed’, ‘the findings suggest’, ‘perhaps’, ‘could have been’. But, had the experiment materialised, it would have been the scientists who brought the already existing elements together and created the right conditions to bring life into being. Had scientists achieved that in the laboratory it seems to me that would have been in favour of Intelligent Design rather than Darwinism. Keeping in mind that Darwinism is to be taught in schools, from primary upward, will it be made clear that both Darwinism and Christianity are belief systems; Darwinism, a belief that inanimate material created life, consciousness and intelligence: Christianity, a belief that both matter and life were created by intelligence: Darwinism V God.
It reminds me of the story of a collection of scientists at a Science Convention who selected a delegation of scientists to go and speak to God, - that’s for the next post.
