I recently completed reading A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt. Each of the authors possesses a specific expertise; one is an intellectual historian and the other a historian of science. This is an important work from two well known exponents of the Intelligent Design movement and it has been making waves in the circles interested in such questions. Although there have been many books that argue that the level of irreducible complexity that man encounters in biological and physical spheres is evidence of design, this book, for the first time, to my knowledge, attempts to consistently go beyond the standard argument from complexity. It succeeds in bringing important issues to the fore but it fails in being unable to focus solely and unrelentlessly on this new area of intelligent design research - complexity of human aesthetic, intellectual and religious accomplishments.
To simplify the argument: human aptitude for pursuits that are far beyond what is necessary for simple physical survival are an evidence of man's Divine origin. "Human evolution should have stopped at the point that man is better equipped than his competitors in obtaining food, shelter and reproductive advantage", the argument should go. Why then do we see meta-physical potential of humanity expressed in art, music, architecture and a myriad of other impractical fields that are pursued solely for beauty? Why should human beings be drawn to the "useless" arts and sciences; from where comes genius, Shakespeare, Milton or Mozart? Does this phenomena not reveal that something beyond selective pressure impacts on human origins?
These questions are very important. Evolutionary biology attempts to counter them with two maneuvers. First, evolutionary biologists try to reduce the distance between humans and animals by finding rudimentary aesthetic, intellectual and altruistic elements in animal life. Having isolated some such examples, they attempt to bridge the divide between these and the fully developed examples of human creativity and to argue that the latter is simply a quantitatively greater form of the former. Secondly, they posit putative evolutionary advantages to perceptual factors, such as ability tor recognize patterns, or the reproductive advantage of altruism, and then by claiming that human creativity is a byproduct or an unintended consequence of those other selective advantages.
The questions remain better than the answers. This is a point that deserved a book of its own, a work that would relentlessly bear down on this argument and build over it a persuasive structure of examples and analogies. Unfortunately, this book fails to do so.
Don't misunderstand me - it is a very good work! It is written in flowing magnificent prose and covers many important points. Unfortunately, it continuously derails into related subjects, such as attacking the famous proposition that given enough time a million monkeys aimlessly banging typing keyboards can produce the complete works of Shakespeare. It also spend much of its second half in rehashing well known evidence for design from chemistry, biology, astronomy, physics and other branches of knowledge. More accurately, it reviews this evidence in relation to human ability to understand how the world works and how this ability itself argues for intelligent design. Fundamentally, however, human ability to figure out the world is a different argument than humanity's aesthetic, religious and musical inclinations. Instead of clarifying the argument, these side forays appear designed to merely pad the book and to allow one of the coauthor's to display his scientific proficiency. Still, this book is packed with useful arguments, intelligent analogies and a great deal of factual data. It is a good support for received faith and if you read just one book on intelligent design, this might as well be it.
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