Is it just too mysterious. God is unknowable mystery and the problematic aspects of any focus on God. And Bob Brinsmead commented over the past few years about living as though there were no God. The study of mankind is man. This raises something that a lot of people wrestle with and I see this as deriving in part from the widespread influence of naturalism (the ideology, not the more scientific practice). It permeates all public thought, mostly in the Western world and apparently secular Europe in particular.

This problem, has been stated in terms of laws that appear to have some reality on their own. Hence, why any reference to God? My first thought was how can we know if we never had any alternative? What if some other universe and some other set of laws were possible and could also function to provide life? We don’t know because we’ve never had the chance to experience it. We have become conscious in this world and conclude from its particular way of functioning that it’s the only possible one. But what about all those other dimensions? Anyway, maybe not making sense of it rationally has to do with the fact that our rationality has been shaped by the naturalism of this world.

And maybe irrationality is more rational because it thinks outside the rationality of naturalism which is quite restricting and may not capture all that nature is in this world (Dembski’s suggestion).

In another of Dembski's books (Intelligent Design) he tries to set forth how we think about nature. And I am not trying to become an apologist for Dembski but I think he raises interesting issues. In a chapter on Naturalism and its Cure he defines nature in terms of a variety of definitions- the material or physical world, the biophysical universe, the natural order, the realm of space, time and energy, the part of reality described by natural laws, and so on. In all these definitions, he says, there is no instance of nature as creation. Creation is a divine act whereas nature is a self-contained entity, independent of God. Nature treats the world as self-sufficient and not in need of a Creator. Creation requires a Creator. Nature is what the world would be if there were no God.

The success of modern science, he notes, leads to pragmatism. The scientist wants to study the order that God has placed in the world but does not want to study God’s relation to the world. The scientist therefore ignores questions about God and looks at the world in and for itself, independently of God. In our day this seems perfectly reasonable.

There are aspects of the created order (I am quoting Dembski without using quotation marks because I am also paraphrasing along the way) that it seems we can understand perfectly well without invoking God. There are areas of human inquiry where we don’t need to explicitly invoke God. In everyday life we get along quite nicely without invoking God at every stroke.

He says this reasoning misses a key point. No one is asking that God be invoked artificially or arbitrarily. The problem with conceiving of the world as nature is this: For nature to be an object of inquiry for the scientist, nature must have an order which the scientist can grasp. If nature were without form or order there would be no science. Everything would be chaos. Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. It is not a confusing chaos but an orderly place which our minds seem ideally suited to understand.

So why is the world ordered and whence cometh this order, he asks? There are but two options- either the world derives its order from a source outside itself (creation) or it possesses the order it has intrinsically, that is, without the order being imparted from outside. But so long as the order is coming from outside, we are dealing with a creation. If not, then we are dealing with nature. He believes the question of whence cometh the order of the world is one of the most important questions that we can ever ask. And most of us will ask it at some point in our lives.

He then proceeds to explain that in Scripture this is the fundamental divide between people- those who discern God’s action in the world and those who deny it. And here he does a traditional Christian thing in rehashing the issue of severing the world from God and issues of knowing God. I am not with him here entirely though I understand the issues he raises. He believes the essence of severing the world from God is the fall of humanity.

He goes on that without needing to invoke God at every turn we end up with a world that is best understood without God. He feels it is impossible to be neutral about God’s relation to the world. There are ethical consequences to denying any presence of God. And I don’t know that I am entirely at odds with him here. Where we can sin against God we cannot sin against nature and such.

So whence cometh the order of the world is a question that admits two answers: creation or nature. Either God imparts order to the world or the order in the world is intrinsic to it. Science can not demonstrate that the order of the world is intrinsic to it. This is not a scientific question but a metaphysical or religious one. He then does a section on Hindu pantheism and then says, “In our Western society we are much more accustomed to dealing with what is called scientific naturalism. Ironically, scientific naturalism is just as religious as the overtly religious naturalism of Hinduism. Only with scientific naturalism there is the pretense that science has finally established naturalism once and for all. In fact, science provides no evidence for naturalism one way or the other, though the assumption of naturalism profoundly affects how we do science. Naturalism is always a deep philosophical and religious commitment, as much as any commitment to divine creation”. This I agree entirely with and I believe the IDers have made this case well.

Hence, I tend to view questions about natural laws not needing a designer to be in part due to the influence of naturalist dogma which provides a very constrained way of viewing nature.

I won’t continue with Dembski’s reasoning which gets into biblical issues and God’s relation to creation and that it is empirically detectable. And all the ancient theologians and the points they made. And that the wrong contrast is that between science studying natural causes and to introduce God is to invoke supernatural causes. Again he goes to his point that natural causes can do nothing but produce chaos while intelligence is necessary to produce order. Any meaningful arrangement in nature requires an intelligent cause.

Without accepting all his theology, I think Dembski outlines some of the issues fairly intelligently. But then he is an intelligent designer isn’t he?