Back in 1968 as the sexual revolution was raging, Pope Paul VI wrote a profoundly counter-cultural encyclical called Humanae Vitae. One of the things that made it so profound (and something completely missed by the Evangelical leaders of the day) was its appeal to natural law, or telos in nature. If you are not familiar with the word telos, in Greek it means purpose, and it was used as an important means of understanding the world for the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle. Evolution News recently had a piece that connected the Pope’s arguments of telos in nature, and Intelligent Design (ID). The latter is a very simple, biblical, assertion that there is evidence of design in nature, and thus a designer. I know, shocking! I’ll explain why ID, and thus telos, is so “controversial” in a moment, but Paul tells us in Romans 1 that God, thus design, thus telos is obvious from his creation:
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
In the war that secularists have declared on theism in general, and Christianity in particular, the denial of telos in nature, thus design, thus God, is the cornerstone or keystone of their worldview; you take away one piece, telos, and the whole thing falls apart. So most secularists don’t argue against God directly, but indirectly through the denial of telos or purpose in nature. If they allow that there is purpose in nature that would be delegitimize the plausibility of their secular worldview. Why would this be?
Secularism as currently understood depends for what credibility it thinks it has on neo-Darwinian evolution, which in turn depends on the assumption (we could call it faith) of naturalism, or materialism, and thus the material being is all there is. The mechanisms of evolution, random mutation and natural selection, are by definition non-teleological. You can tell how important this denial of telos is to the Darwinian secularists because of the vehemence with which they deny it, and the derision they heap on those who disagree with them. If you’re not familiar with the debates surrounding ID, you can quickly surmise what’s at stake in the idea of telos in nature when evolutionists refer to anyone who disagrees with them, sneeringly, as “creationists.” You’re supposed to read into that, those troglodyte Bible-thumper science deniers!
Why such strong denial of something that is common sense to most normal people? In fact if you ask most non-ideological people if the human hand, for example, was designed for a purpose, they would think that’s a stupid question. Of course! Hands are meant to pick up things! That is their telos or end. How about the intricacy of the ear? Or the eye? Or taste buds? It’s ridiculous to deny these parts of the human anatomy were with some purpose in mind. Do you think it’s a coincidence that tree leaves produce oxygen and need carbon dioxide, and human beings need oxygen and product carbon dioxide? That this was not done on purpose by a creator? To tell you how ridiculous, and futile, this is, atheist Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Blind Watchmaker.
Notice the subtitle. How does he know this, that the universe is “without design”? Of course he doesn’t at all. He has to assume it, or God will get his foot in the door, and he can’t have that. But here are a couple quotes from the book:
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
And
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
Talk about pretzel logic! It only appears like things are designed? He admits because he has no choice that life is “complicated,” but he assures us that any designs or plans or purpose are just illusions. It’s really almost comical, if it wasn’t so sad. But the atheist/naturalist/materialist/secularist has no choice; if anything in nature has purpose, God exists. Their worldview depends on the denial of purpose in nature because wherever you allow purpose, you have to have someone, a person, who intended purpose. Ergo God.
The Apostle Paul tells us that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” If you read the Bible from beginning to end, you’ll notice the centrality of God as Creator of all things. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that Satan would utilize someone like a Charles Darwin and his acolytes to do everything in their power to deny that the universe had a creator. Telos, especially as scientific knowledge increases, makes this endeavor increasingly futile.
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