LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 217

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

claims, insurance companies hire forensic scientists, and they may sometimes
find that there are clear signs of intentional action making design a better
explanation than chance or necessity. Similarly, when they discover unusual
complex objects, archaeologists use tests to distinguish between the product
of natural causes (e.g., a wind sculpture) and the product of design (an artifact
such as an arrow head or a tablet inscribed with language). In cryptography,
algorithms are applied to a complex signal to see if it is simply meaningless
“noise” (a natural product) or if it contains a coherent, coded message (the
result of intelligent design). Workers in artificial intelligence (AI) attempt to
devise tests to distinguish between intelligent and unintelligent behavior and
scientists in the SETI project consider which signals from outer space should
convince us that there are other intelligent creatures in the cosmos.
Examples of the second kind include study of the “fine-tuning” of the
laws of nature for intelligent life,208 study of the origin of the information
found in all life, and the investigation of miracle claims. In cosmology, scientists have discovered evidence that the particular values of the variables in
the fundamental laws of nature are finely tuned to permit intelligent life and
even to make effective scientific discovery of those laws possible.209 In origin
of life studies, the natural causes of chance and necessity have proven wholly
inadequate to account for the large amount of complex specified information
found in all life.210 And the sheer number of well-attested miracle claims from
around the world and throughout the centuries makes it hard to maintain that
all of them are based on illusions or fraud.211
It is worth pointing out that in neither kind of case is the argument a
“gap” argument in the objectionable sense of an argument from ignorance.
When scientists infer human (or machine, or alien) intelligence, they do not
argue that we do not know what caused some event, therefore an intelligent
human (machine, or alien) did it. Scientists do not argue from what we as
humans do not know, but from what we do know. We do know that natural
causes generally do not produce the evidential traces surrounding some
fires, or produce tablets of writing, or messages from space. We do know that
intelligent causes (humans, etc.) often produce effects like these. So it is more
208
Defenders of the fine-tuning argument claim that the specific constants governing gravitation, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces fall within a very narrow (and
hence improbable) range that permits complex, intelligent life to exist. Thus, it is argued, the
values of these constants are “fine-tuned” to enable a specific goal (complex, intelligent life)
and this provides evidence that our cosmos is designed to host such life.
209
See Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet. See also Eric Metaxas,
“Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25:2014, online at http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-forgod-1419544568.
210

See Meyer, Signature in the Cell.

reasonable to think an intelligent cause was responsible than that the effects
are just the freak result of undirected causes. The arguments from fine-tuning,
the information in life and apparent miracles proceed in just the same way,
except that it seems no ordinary agent like a human (or even an alien) could
account for the phenomena.
It is indeed open to the naturalist to say that we may find some purely
natural cause, but it is an inference to the best explanation that allows for this.
It says that intelligence may be the best current explanation, given the presently available evidence and the present range of competing explanations.
This allows that new evidence or a better theory might come along and cause
us to revise our opinion of the best explanation. This shows, however, that
the findings of science are fallible and revisable, so it is certainly possible that
a design explanation is unseated by new discoveries. But it does not follow
that design cannot be the best available explanation given what we currently
know.
To be sure, some cautions are in order. Inferring the existence of a superhuman, intelligent cause is not the same as inferring that this cause is God.
Proponents of Intelligent Design emphasize that further philosophical and
theological assumptions are typically required to draw these conclusions. For
example, in his book, The Edge of Evolution, Behe notes that inferring design
from the biological evidence does not by itself license identification of the
designer, or imply that the designer is supernatural.
Like it or not, a raft of important distinctions intervene between
a conclusion of design and identification of a designer. The
designer need not even be a truly ‘supernatural’ being.212
Likewise, Stephen Meyer argues that a scientific design inference does
not establish that the designer is supernatural because it goes beyond what
we can claim to know on the basis of our actual experience of finite designers.
The theory of intelligent design does not claim to detect a supernatural intelligence possessing unlimited powers …. Because
the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience
of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine
whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible
for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience.
Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether
the intelligent agent responsible for information in life acted
from the natural or the ‘supernatural’ realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of
some intelligent cause …. The theory of intelligent design does
not claim to be able to determine the identity or any other attributes of that intelligence, even if philosophical deliberation or

211
For the most thorough study to date, see Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New
Testament Accounts, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). Despite the subtitle, the book
not only reviews the direct evidence for New Testament miracles, but also includes more recent
reports from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and many contemporary examples from the West.

212
Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free
Press, 2007), 228.

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additional evidence from other disciplines may provide reasons
to consider, for example, a specifically theistic design hypothesis.213

The same dialectic is operative where the intelligent cause operates
wholly within nature. Thus naturalistic philosophers have attempted to argue
that human intelligence can itself be accounted for by purely natural causes,
in either a reductive or non-reductive scheme. But there is an increasing
number of sophisticated arguments to show that this project is not feasible.
Intelligent agents are characterized by such remarkable features as consciousness, intentionality, and rationality, and philosophers have provided rigorous
arguments that appear to demonstrate that none of these features can be
explained naturalistically.218

So, while the design inference could be supplemented with other considerations (further data and background philosophical and theological
arguments and theories) to produce an argument for a supernatural deity, this
would go beyond the modest contribution of the design inference to science.
This caution is borne out by the unsurprising fact that naturalistic scientists and philosophers and their critics disagree about the proper explanation
of apparent design in nature. In the case of apparently transcendent design
(such as fine-tuning, the origin of the information in life, and miracles), naturalists attempt to show that the appearance of design is an illusion, while their
opponents argue that the design is real.214 Thus, for example, the claim that
physical constants are finely-tuned to permit intelligent life is countered with
the suggestion that ours is but one of many universes in a multiverse, and if
there are enough universes, it is not so surprising that at least some support
intelligent life. In response, defenders of fine-tuning point out that these other
universes are necessarily unobservable and appear to violate Occam’s razor215
(a single creator is a simpler hypothesis).
The claim that the information in life is a signature of intelligence has
been countered by the proposal that natural properties are capable of spontaneously self-organizing into systems of greater and greater complexity,
eventually resulting in life. In response, defenders of design have pointed
out that known cases of self-organization produce repeating (periodic) structures, like crystals, but the assembly instructions for molecular machines and
organs require highly aperiodic information.
Miracle claims are usually countered by some version of Hume’s two
classic arguments: either we can never, even in principle, have good reason
to accept a miracle claim, or in fact there are no credible miracle claims. In
response, defenders of miracles have argued that Hume’s in-principle argument makes serious errors in logic,216 and as Keener has shown, his in-fact
argument is simply mistaken.217
213

Meyer, Signature in the Cell, 428–429.

214
See for example the exchange between philosopher of physics Robin Collins, who defends
the fine-tuning design argument, and atheist physicist Victor Stenger who attempts to debunk
the argument in J. P. Moreland, Chad Meister, and Khaldoun Sweis, eds., Debating Christian
Theism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
215

See chapter 1, p. 39.

216
See John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000). Earman shows that Hume’s argument confuses the inductive probability appropriate for establishing laws of nature with the kind of probability relevant to establishing singular historical events.

The important point is that these controversies about the proper interpretation of the data do nothing to show that inferring an intelligent cause
is unscientific. On a given occasion, such an inference may be mistaken, or
it may be shown to be mistaken later, but the same is true of scientific inferences in general. Many naturalistic inferences have been discredited (e.g., the
claim that comets are atmospheric phenomena, that planetary orbits are the
result of compound circular motion, that marsh gas causes malaria, that electromagnetic radiation is propagated by an invisible ether, etc.), but that does
not mean they were unscientific. Further, while a design inference alone does
not show that an intelligent cause is a supernatural being like God, and while
such arguments that typically rely on additional theological and philosophical assumptions, it is not clear that there are no cases in which a sufficient
range of scientific facts is best explained by a supernatural cause. Both the
origin of the universe and the fine-tuning of the laws of nature seem poorly
explained by any cause (intelligent or otherwise) within nature, since these
signs of design pervade all of nature. And some remarkable, well-attested
phenomena recorded in miracle claims also seem to require a supernatural
explanation. So, methodological naturalism does not seem defensible as a
universal requirement for every domain of science.
As many philosophers have argued, dogmatic adherence to methodological naturalism appears both to be “question-begging”219 and to risk
delinking science from its primary function of finding the truth about the
natural world.220 The underlying principle of methodological naturalism begs
the question because if we assert that science should only ever infer natural
causes, then we have already assumed that there can be no scientific evidence
of supernatural causes. While there are many cases where it is reasonable only

218
See, for example, Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), and J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei.
219
See Robert Larmer, “Is Methodological Naturalism Question-Begging?” Philosophia Christi
5 (2003), 113–130.

Keener, Miracles, focuses chapters 5 and 6 on explicitly responding to Hume, but the whole
work provides extensive historical and contemporary evidence of reliably attested miracles.

220
See Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Boulder, CO: Broadview Press, 2009); Steve Dilley, “Philosophical Naturalism and Methodological
Naturalism: Strange Bedfellows?” Philosophia Christi 12 (2010), 118–141; Angus Menuge,
“Against Methodological Materialism,” in Bealer and Koons, eds.,The Waning of Materialism,
375–394.

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2016 Convention Workbook