Another (brief) example of what troubles me about some ID opponents

A reader writes (in the combox)

It seems that ID is a "Truth" in search of proof. Obviously, to the Christian, we are designed (made in the image and likeness)

And another reader chimes in:

Personally, I find it a little absurd to think that by this, God meant: "and thou shalt have a gastrulated gut with a mouth on one end and fundament on the other, just like I." I rather think it makes more sense to think of God's hand as being the spiritual formation of man, not a particular godly hangup with one physical form over another. That just seems so petty and pedestrian. Why would an all powerful fundamental undergird of all existence need, for instance, hands? Or eyes? All such things seem ridiculously terrestrial and just fine to leave to evolutionary happenstance. You don't need God to have intended or formed your physical frame in order to know that he formed YOU.

I reply:

Thanks for that hardy exposition of Manichaean theology. For Christians, however, the body is not simply a Tupperware container for "the real me" (i.e., the spiritual, non-material soul). "I" am both body and soul. I would not be me in the body of an aardvark or even in the body of another human being. It's this kind of theological sloppiness on the part of evolution defenders that bothers me.

That is not to say that I "disbelieve evolution" (as the curiously theological phrase goes). People need to understand: I'm a guy who was suckled on the milk of dinosaurs. The first books I ever read were dinosaur books and the basic evolutionary scenario of life as a branching tree proceeding from simple celled organism to all its permutations in various complex critters all descending down to today by slight modifications due to natural selection is a picture that is in my blood. The basic common sense of the thing has always been obvious to me. Look at a fossil record from a billion years ago and you don't find fish, dinosaurs, mammals or human beings. Look at progressively more recent rocks and you find progressively more complicated critters, first in the water, then living amphibiously, then able to live on land, then sprouting feathers and fur, then adopting a basic hominid body plan, then going through various branches and modifications till we arrive at a critter that looks like us. Evolutionary theories have a lot of intuitive explanatory power and I've never denied that. I think attempts to say the earth is 6000 years old, or to posit humans and dinosaurs as co-existent, are silly.

At the same time, however, I think that there is a tendency in the modern mind to adopt an attitude toward the explanatory power of evolutionary theory that basically consists of making an aesthetic judgment into a sort of philosophical dogma.

Let me explaint. But first, though, let me offer a caveat. Some people claim that the ID are arguing that God more or less lets nature take its course, and then sticks his finger in at various moments to specially create various changes in organism and so get new species (or organ systems or whatever) off to a start. I'm skeptical that they really argue this, but for the sake of argumentation, I will grant the charge. In response to this notion of a God who is constantly tweaking bits of his creation, Br. Guy (who graciously responded in my comboxes) says:

Now, if you insist that the human eye (to take one favorite example) was too complicated to be made in the normal course of physics, so that at this point the Omnipotent had to pull some strings, then you are implying that His original design was flawed.

The problem with this analysis is nicely handled by Tom from Disputations:

No. You may rather be implying that the current model of the "normal course of physics" is flawed, or even that the whole concept of a "normal course of physics" is flawed. To insist on the conclusion that God is "an inept, or at least not-very-intelligent, designer" is to insist that we know better than God how He intended to design creation.

As you say, Br. Guy, "Science starts with the assumption that this 'how' can be expressed in rational, testable, repeatable steps." But it doesn't follow that if the assumption is wrong, God made a mistake.

It's that last paragraph that has me thinking. Because if Christianity is true at all, it is certainly true that we live in a universe governed by a God of order who has given us a creation that is intelligible. So, as Br. Guy says, the scientific enterprise is well worth while and the very powerful game of "connect the dots" that basic evolutionary theory plays is not, I think, just an optical illusion.

But at the same time, if Christianity is true, it is also the case that we live in a universe where, for all we know, God *might* choose to stick his finger in here and there and commit the (to our taste) gross aesthetic sin of monkeying around with his creatures in acts of special creation. If, for instance, the miracle of the Incarnation itself, or the birth of Isaac, or the miracle of the loaves and fishes, or the raising of Lazarus are any indication, God does not seem to feel himself constrained by the demands of modern science to only allow nature to proceed in a way that is rational, testable, and repeatable.

More later. I'm still wrapping my head around this stuff. It's a bit like juggling refrigerator containers.