Continuing my thoughts from my previous post, what would happen if the intelligent design advocates "won"? Imagine over 90% of biologists despaired of enough intermediate forms ever being found in the fossil record, and also concluded many protein pathways really are irreducibly complex. Let's go further, and imagine over 90% of biologists also became professed theists. What would happen next? They'd go looking for other theories to describe the origins of life, and the successful theories would be just as naturalistic as the theory of evolution. The God-in-the-gaps people would eventually wind up just as alienated from science as before.

Among the more (but not the most) tragic characters in this scene is the man who thinks he needs intelligent design to keep his faith. Such a man is missing the fact that if humans were designed, then our specs include a yearning to explain what we observe. On a subconscious level, I'm predisposed to look for patterns simply because I'm human. On a higher level, I believe God did not create the universe with caprice, and he did not create it to be inscrutable. Moreover, I believe he wants us to understand ever more of it, and I interpret Genesis 1:28 as further evidence of this.