I participate in an email list concerning intelligent design, on which there’s been an interesting discussion about whether ID presupposes a positivist epistemology. I think that it often does.
By “positivism” I mean a philosophical / epistemological position according to which knowledge is authentic only if it is measurable and empirically verifiable — i.e., only if it is derived from the scientific method. See a Wiki here. It seems to me that ID often accepts this assumption by proposing, at least implicitly, that the doctrine of creation is in some sense measurable and emprically verifiable. The presense of specified complex information, for example, is supposed to be a filter through which we can empirically verify the activity of a creator. If not for some concession to positivism, however, why would we even need such an empirical filter?
The Bible says “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19), which I take to mean that all of creation reflects God’s glory. God is revealed in all of creation, apart from any specific scientific test we might propose for deducing his activity in some aspect of creation. Indeed, the pursuit of such a particular scientific test is misguided. The test is simply everything that exists.
I think this is different than the question of evidential apologetics. I would disagree with many opponents of ID who suggest that the creation we observe is as compatible with atheism as it is with theism. I think this stance is correct only if we’re back to presupposing a postivitist epistemology. If we presuppose positivism, then I think its correct that the existence of God can’t be “proven” one way or the other. But if the sense of wonder, longing and awe we feel when we reflect on the creation around us is more than some kind of reductionist biological / evolutionary impulse — if, as C.S. Lewis might put it, our experience of the numinous points to a reality outside our ordinary perception — then the positivistic atheist is merely dulling his senses when he denies the creator. As Romans 1 puts it, “their thinking [becomes] futile and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” concerning the knowledge of God.
Therefore, to a mind not entirely bound by a presupposition against the knowledge of God, the “ordinary” processes of creation seem reducible to physical laws and chance. It is only as grace begins to melt that futility and darkness that the evidences we can provide in support of the faith start to make sense. (Unlike very strict Calvinist presuppositionalists, I believe common grace plays an important role here and that glimpses of the numinous aren’t limited to the elect.) But it seems to me that the sorts of evidences we can provide are not taken from the positivist’s toolbox in the form of particular mathematical filters and proofs. They are rather the witness of all of creation, seen through the spectacles of faith. (For a good essay exploring some of these themes, see Michael Hanby, Reclaiming Creation in a Darwinian World, Theology Today 62(2006): 476-83).
