Intelligent design: A psychological interpretation

I have a confession to make: I used to be an intelligent design supporter. This was a few years back. For about six months to a year, I was convinced by Michael Behe and William Dembski. I found the notion of irreducible complexity persuasive. I considered the molecular level, the flagellum, blood clotting, the cell, and saw the fingerprints of God.

But I came to my senses. I am now, as any regular reader of this blog knows, a trinitarian evolutionist.

Saying that I felt ashamed is to put it too strongly, but I was slightly embarrassed by my intelligent design phase for a long time. I started out as a straight up 6-days, 6000-years creationist. But that wasn't my fault. My dad was and is a fan and subscriber of Institute for Creation Research publications. Acts and Facts issues are still lying around my parent's house. I grew up in this environment and, as any child will do, accepted what I was being told. My intelligent design phase occurred in my teens and came about completely from my own efforts.

These efforts were partly the result of a natural growing up of my personal faith. You reach a certain age, 12-14 or so, when you want to start owning your faith, so to speak. It's been handed to you, but as you grow up you start appropriating the faith for yourself. Completely natural. So I started reading my dad's books and magazines for myself.

But as I started looking in to things myself, a suspicion formed and lingered. A silently nagging doubt that wouldn't go away.  Why are the majority of scientists evolutionists? If creationism really has science on its side, why aren't more scientists convinced? At first, the massive Satanic conspiracy explanation. But no. Then a weaker and nicer form of the same explanation: Secular scientists don't have the eyes to see, devoted as they are to materialism. But no, neither. And so on.

Looking back, this was the beginning of the slippery slope in to full blown acceptance of evolution. It was somewhat difficult. I was treading ground forbidden and forbidden by my father, my hero (still is, by the way!). My acceptance of evolution first started as thought experiments. "What if God did it this way and not that?" But I grew bolder as I matured and my knowledge and insight deepened. In the end, evolution it was.

But first, there had to be intelligent design.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think my intelligent design phase was a psychological state necessary for me to gradually let go of the anxiety I had in regards to evolution. Intelligent design allowed me to accept some evolution, while still retaining the creationist conception of divine creative action. I could accept the general evolutionary picture with its billion of years, common descent, random mutation, natural selection and so on, while still making room for the good old tinkering finger of God. But with time I grew comfortable with the whole of the natural, empirical and evolved world as being, somehow, God's handiwork. I'm still fleshing out the details, but I'm confident that the path I'm on now is the right one.

Maybe this is hubris, but I suspect that my path is similar to the one that many other Evangelical Christians go through. I also suspect that it's the path that Evangelical Christianity as a whole will go through. It might be ironic to project like this in a blog post about psychology, but I can't see how people can go on much longer denying the facts of science. There's an honourable, though sometimes (grossly) overstated commitment to truth in Evangelical Christianity. And there is, though misguided for many, a love of science too. I think the suspicions and doubt nag many. Is this story really plausible? There's a desire to know truth and to take science seriously and the old interpretations are growing more and more uncomfortable. One day, I think, they will finally be thrown off. It's a psychological process we must go through, and it's a difficult one. There are many voices and bodies in the way. But truth, I am confident, will triumph in the end.