Turner on Intelligent Design

RMC chappie Frederick Turner wades into the Intelligent Design debate and finds
both sides wanting (here).

The argument over evolution, Turner says, is important because of the way that it affects the
argument over the moral law, the foundation for the government’s law.

Does the theory of evolution make God unnecessary to the very existence
of the world? If there is no God, what authority, if any, guarantees the moral law of
humankind? These questions are crucial in the current controversies that are dividing the
nation. For just as our laws must be not for religious believers alone,
they must also be not for unbelievers alone either.

Although Turner accuses both sides, evolutionists and creationists, of intellectual dishonesty, the argument
is better understood as a case of trying too hard. Creationists are trying too hard to prove that
God exists, and evolutionists are trying too hard to prove that He doesn’t exist.

But the truth is—and it has been established for several hundred years now—that you can’t prove that
God exists. Nor can you prove that God doesn’t exist. This means that you cannot prove the need for a
divine moral law. Nor can you prove that law is whatever the secular elite says it is.

But when you
have chased religion out of the public square, what are you left with? Here Turner hits the crucial question:

If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people,
then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state’s
well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions.

What you get when God is dead is liberals legislating morality by calling it “health.”
What you are left with is a secular elite in love with its goodness and its power.

Even as we plumb deeper and deeper the depths of the atom and the universe we are still left with the eternal question:
what is the nature of the universe and what is its meaning, if any? Pending the definitive resolution
of these questions, we are left with faith.