Intelligent Design is Not Good For Religion
ID is not helped by the fact that it is perceived to be part of a wider socio-political agenda being pushed by certain groups in the USA, and unfortunately ID has become rather encumbered by its association with the aims of the Right in US politics. As a result, those who reject the policies of the Right often reject ID and also Christianity as being a part of the same package. This is a rather irritating and entirely unnecessary mess caused by the fact that ID (and some other more overt forms of Creationism) is often made the keystone which upholds the entire structure of Christianity. Not only is this nonsense, but it simply turns Christianity into a house of cards which collapses at the mere mention of the term ‘fossil record’.
As George Monbiot notes in this recent essay in The Guardian, advocates of ID (in this case G T Sharp of the Creation Truth Foundation) stake the entire validity of Christianity and the Bible on a literal reading reading of Genesis 1-3 that seeks to turn the text into a literal scientific and historical account of how the world began. "If ID falls, then so does Christianity" they say, and indeed it does – and the only thing rising from its ashes is Atheism. ID tries to make itself too much an accepted theory in the realm of science, and its rebuttal leads to wholesale and outright rejection of Christianity altogether.
Yet all of this is so needless. Christianity is not a theory about how biological life began. God did not give us Genesis with the sole purpose of using it as a story to refute worldviews that would arise 3,500 years after the text was written, and those who make Genesis – or rather, their particular theological slant on Genesis – the foundation of Christian faith are undermining Christianity, not strengthening it. The foundation of Christianity is not ID, creationism or even (yes) the Bible – Jesus is the foundation and needs to be the point from which all our critique of science and our doctrine of creation proceeds.
