[Written in response to a sermon on October 2nd, 2005 by Susan B. Curtis of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church]

Dear Sukie,

Thank you for your thoughtful sermon of October 2nd on the science and theology of the Intelligent Design ideas. Thank you also for taking the time to type it up and give us copies. (I realize this is what you usually do, but nonetheless I want to acknowledge and appreciate it.)

Your sermon gave me a great deal to think about, both during the service and afterward. The search for God's presence in the world around us is of great interest to me, both personally and in the context of my work on the Paradise Lost musical. (Incidentally, I've included some recordings of the workshop we did in New York, if you'd care to listen.) The purpose of my letter today is to suggest a different perspective on Intelligent Design that I didn't see present in your sermon.

Certainly it is the case that many who subscribe to this theory (scientific or otherwise) are, as you say, "hiding biblical 'creationism' under the cloak of Intelligent Design". I imagine the argument from that angle is that if you can convince a person that God had a hand in the design of the world around us, it would be much easier then to swallow the notion that He 'designed' the whole thing just six thousand years ago (and put dinosaur bones in the earth... to trick us? I've never been clear on that point.) In the so-called 'culture wars' of our time, it would be easy - and seductive - to see Intelligent Design as merely one cannon in the battery of Christians who embrace only a narrow interpretation of the bible's message.

However: I propose that there is potentially more opportunity for us as progressive (or, if you prefer, 'broadly-interperative') Christians in the notion of Intelligent Design than you acknowledged in your sermon. Is it bad science? Why yes, yes it is. Is it bad theology? Maybe, or maybe not.

Intelligent Design, at its heart, needs only say that God had a hand in designing the world. It does not by itself require that we say "God made Adam and Eve six thousand years ago." It could, for instance, be spoken in such a way that we acknowledge the very real facts of evolution (and of natural selection) without insisting that the currently theorized key to the whole puzzle - random mutation - must wholly explain how evolution operates. Why, for instance, must God and chance be separate entities? If, as we believe, God is and always has been truly present in every part of the world around us, why would He be absent from the great moments of change when genetic mutation occurs? When the fish that would become reptiles flopped up onto the land to escape their predatory cousins, why must God not have been with them, in them - and at the cause of that great evolutionary step? And in the moment of 'random' mutation that caused some to have extra-strong fins - was God absent?

Consider that we live in a world and universe of truly staggering diversity, beauty and grace. In looking at this masterful creation - and in the very notion that we can see and appreciate its beauty, and find inspiration in it - could it not be that our own evolutionary history has been and is as God intends it? If not, what purpose does our sense of aesthetics serve? Could art, science and love only be side effects of the expansion of our brain to better dominate our natural competitors? If so, what does that say about our religious inclinations? If God is truly absent from the mechanics of our evolution, then we must consider the possibility that the invention of religious devotion is just another side effect of that oversized brain.

But I propose an alternative perspective, though I don't presume to call it an answer. The theory of Intelligent Design offers an opportunity to reconcile our own religious faith and experience with the obvious evidence so carefully compiled by generations of scientists.

God loves us, his creation - of this I have no doubt. We need not look further than our experience of joy and sorrow - in any place we might find it - to be sure of this. Suppose then that God created a universe for us (in the very widest sense of 'us') to inhabit. Imagine also that God is so far beyond our own being that it is useless to try to apply our own perceptions of time and space to Him. (Paradoxically, this isn't hard to imagine at all.) Is it so hard, then, to think that God has created His universe so that, in all its many dimensions, it appears just as He wants it? Might it not be a wonderful, expansive, gloriously detailed story, already told in the act of creation? If God is not bound by the human experience of time - and how could He be? - then must His act of creation not be present in every moment?

Remember that I have proposed that God loves us, and all his creation. God, I suggest, is in the moments of random mutation that drive evolution. We have large brains that have learned to love and create - God gave them to us, not by shaping dust, but by shaping the infuriatingly random movement of atoms within molecules within genes within cells within our distant primate ancestors.

Since we also have large brains that can commit genocide and create atomic weapons, I must now address the question that you asked several paragraphs ago - "But Ben, you're stomping all over free will and the question of the presence of evil." Well, yes - but bear with me. As someone who has made the telling of stories his first priority in life, allow me to offer up the perspective of a storyteller.

When I create a story - and I have created several now - it is my experience that in the very best stories I love my characters and the world they live in. Certainly I don't have to do this to tell a story, but the best ones always have this property. The heroes, the villains, the extras, and even the people who aren't even in the story but who you know are out there somewhere beyond the backdrop - you must love all of these, and the world itself. I'll happily run my stories through hell and back - not because I'm feeling capricious that day, but because that is part of the telling. Perhaps the characters grow from it, or perhaps not, or perhaps the story doesn't even end well and they're all dead - but the creation of their own special world and experience is an act of love.

Might God not feel the same way? Might He not be an infinitely more potent and able and loving storyteller than even the greatest human? Could all of our struggles and travails and evolutionary mutations not be in service to God's great story - a four-dimensional painting on his Godly wall, perhaps? God clearly at least lets us think we have free will - and does it really matter if we do or don't? Too much philosophical effort has been wasted on this question, and from where we stand it doesn't make a shred of difference. We must either trust God's story or not.

(Incidentally, I can hardly claim to have invented the core idea here, as you undoubtedly know. That the presence of suffering in the world serves to enrich and color our experience of life is deeply present in modern Jewish theology. Furthermore, religious thinkers from Plato to the 18th century Deists have searched fervently for God in the machinery of the natural world.)

Now let us return to the bogeyman of Intelligent Design. Christians on "the right" argue for it - why not also on "the left"? Could this not be an opportunity for both sides of this perennial (and tiresome) debate to find an uplifting common ground? Creationists hope to use it to subvert science classrooms, and scientists are right to try to keep it out - but at the same time, we who embrace both facts and faith can also speak through it to broaden the faith of our more conservative brethren. The dialog can go both ways; you can convince a Darwinist to accept creationism through Intelligent Design, or you can convince a creationist to embrace the facts of evolution without feeling threatened in his faith!

Given the controversy surrounding the ordination of Bishop Robinson, we in the Episcopal Church should be especially eager to find common ground between conservative and liberal. On this point, at least, there is an opportunity for reconciliation. Intelligent Design is ultimately a theology, not a scientific theory, and the theory of evolution hardly aspires to make any statements about God. We can never prove with scientific certainty that there is a God in the machine - but that need not prevent us from seeing Him there.

With great respect,

Ben Birney