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This will not be a pro-Intelligent Design post, nor will it even be a comparison. I was raised to reject evolution wholesale, but that’s not what I’m going to write about, either.

In the past few years, as Intelligent Design has moved more into the mainstream, consistently I see articles devoted to the viewpoint that ID is not only wrong, but not even worthy of being considered science.

What I’m wondering, is: what would the scientific community actually consider a “real” scientific argument in favor of creation? What would such a thing look like? I’m not trying to formulate such an argument, just trying to envision what the scientific community, in general, would see as a “reasonable” attempt to argue in favor of a universe created by God? That is, if ID is unreasonable, well, what would a reasonable argument look like?

In other words, let’s suppose — just for the sake of argument — that God created the universe. Should we be able to detect this from simply studying observable phenomena empirically? Should we be expecting to find a “signature” at all? What sort of signature (for lack of a better word) could we expect to find which would cause us to come to the conclusion that the universe was designed, rather than the aggregate result of countless random events?

Interestingly, two viewpoints are portrayed in the books I recently completed, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Mind you, this is fiction — but as near as I can tell, Stephenson faithfully portrays some of the ideas of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton and Leibniz were both brilliant, and both held that the universe was created by God; they differed in opinion as to how this actually worked out. In simplistic terms, it would seem that Newton held that God was intimately involved in the events and laws of the universe as they unfold — that is, God is right now causing gravity to work, he is holding the universe in its course, and it’s His continuous influence which makes the whole system continue to move. Leibniz, on the other hand, held that God created the universe in such a way that no further divine influence was necessary; once put in motion, it would simply continue as He had designed it without His intervention in its operation.

Interestingly, both also seem to have held that we have free will, another problematic philosophical labyrinth which I won’t even touch on here.

I would expect that any argument supporting the creation of the universe by God would lean towards either Newton’s or Leibniz’ general schemes. I’ll leave it to the reader to decided which sort of viewpoint, if either, seems most reasonable.

So here is what I’m trying to figure out: if I did not believe that we lived in a universe created, on purpose, by God — what could I possibly observe in nature which would cause me to consider that such a thing could be a real explanation for existence?

For me, the only things that stand out are the really interesting unanswered questions of physics. One is an old chestnut: the “Prime Mover” argument. Old argument or not, if we suppose a universe where every object is in motion because it was pushed into motion by some force — what was the first “push”? Also, given the inexorable trend of the universe toward entropy, how strong must this force have been to still be influencing objects today? How long will it last? Will the universe and everything in it eventually just… stop? I will freely admit that I am not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but this is still a very interesting line of questioning to me, one which is still unanswered, as far as I know.

A second line of thinking that is interesting concerns gravitation. Since Newton, we’ve come a long way in understanding how gravity affects objects; Einstein went even further in explaining some observations which couldn’t be accounted for with pure Newtonian physics. However, the actual cause of gravitation is still open to speculation, to the best of my knowledge. That is, we can explain and predict how objects will act in relation to one another with incredible accuracy — we’ve become expert at describing gravitation. But why does it happen?

Thinking along these lines, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that someone would conclude that God is somehow involved in this process. But the vastness of the amount we still don’t know about why the universe works the way it does, or how it all began, would seem to me to allow room for both God and empirical science to co-exist.