Intelligent Design and the Failure of Theological Objections
June 24th, 2006 by 
Mike Gene
In his article, Evolutionary Theory And Continuous Creation, Keith B. Miller explains his theological objections to Intelligent Design. Miller argues, “Creation was not merely a past accomplished act, but rather is a present and continuing reality. The best term for this view of God’s creative activity is “continuous creation.” He later adds, “God’s creative activity is clearly identified in the Bible as including natural processes, including what we call chance or random events. According to scripture, God is providentially active in all natural processes, and all of creation declares the glory of God. The evidence for God’s presence in creation, for the existence of a creator God, is declared to be precisely those everyday “natural events” experienced by us all.”
Miller’s theology is both respectable and widely-shared. It is also used to argue against the hypothesis that Life itself was designed (one expression of ID). As Miller notes, “I would argue that an interventionist view of God is much closer to deism than my view. It implies that God is somehow withdrawn, or at least uninvolved in creation, except during special exceptional events. As others have noted, a doctrine of God’s occasional intervention is really a doctrine of God’s usual absence.” Thus, a denial that geochemical processes spawned the first cells would be to deny “continuous creation” and move closer toward deism.
This basic theological objection is not new. For example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) once noted, “Life and organization are products of nature, and at the same time results of the powers conferred upon nature by the Supreme Author of all things and of the laws by which she herself is constituted: this can no longer be called into question. Life and organization are thus purely natural phenomena…” Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) extended the implications of such a view:
If we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, then at this one point of the history of development we must have recourse to the miracle of a super-natural creation. The Creator must have created the first organism, or a few organisms, from which all others are derived, and as such he must have created the simplest Monera, or primeval cytods, and given them the capability of developing further in a mechanical way. I leave it to each one of my readers to choose between this idea and the hypothesis of spontaneous generation. To me the idea that the Creator should have in this one point arbitrarily interfered with the regular process of development of matter, which in all other cases proceeds entirely without his interposition, seems to be just as unsatisfactory to a believing mind as to a scientific mind.
Yet it would seem to me that these theological objections to the Design of Life fail.
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