Thomas Jefferson on ID
| March 11, 2008 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Jefferson to John Adams on April 11, 1823:
I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripedal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.
We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.
42 Responses to Thomas Jefferson on ID
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Leo Stotch: after rereading my notes, I find that I did jump to conclusions by attributing to you something someone else wrote. Further, I added insult to injury by piling on your justified response. For both correspondences and for the confusion that followed, I apologize.
Fascinating! Yesterday in researching for a paper on the virgin birth I came across this very letter from Thomas Jefferson—it was on the Gould site. I’d thought to bring up Jefferson’s pro-ID words to y’all and then this morning Barry A already had!
And there are those who don’t believe in coincidence.
But hey—what is this? Are there still Christians who, if they could, would burn dissenters at the stake? Is it safe to confess that I’m unitarian (with a small u), a Global Warming and Virgin Birth denier?
But I think that Intelligent Design is the greatest thing to come down the pike in my lifetime—is the Big Tent big enough for Christian heretics?
Is it possible to believe in truth and still disagree amiably on the details? Why is it so difficult to see that if there is no Design then all the Abrahamic faiths fail, and that therefore ID is more important than the doctrines that divide those faiths? Dennett was right—Darwinism is a “universal acid” that, left unchecked, eats through absolutely everything—science included (which Dennett of course doesn’t see).
Then there is this notion that unless ID somehow benefits us materially (medicine, technology) it fails. Why then has Darwin thrived in spite of 150 years of contributing NOTHING but trivialities? It’s the philosophy, sir! Darwin is defended with fire-breathing vehemence because of its philosophical implications.
If Darwin has been the universal acid that silences all else, what should Darwin’s demise denote? A similar silencing of dissent? or that everything is finally on the table for discussion?
Good point Rude. Lets not confuse unitarians and unitariansm with the ‘unitarian-universalists’.
By the way, it’s nice to see you commenting here again. Hope your studies are going well.
“But I think that Intelligent Design is the greatest thing to come down the pike in my lifetime—is the Big Tent big enough for Christian heretics?”
YES!! There is room for everyone who believes there is a purpose to the universe. I think.
There are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Bahai, Platonist, Deist, Stoic, Freemasons, Unitarians..
I’m sure even if someone was a practioner of Thelema or Jungian astrology it would be cool.
H’mm:
Can I beg to remind us on what was actually said in the Thomas Jefferson letter?
In short, TJ was a design thinker, as was Plato before him, as was Cicero before him, and as was Paul of Tarsus before him [cf Rom 1:19 - 20 etc], as well as the vast majority of thinkers up to recent years.
In that design thought, he appealed to the full spectrum of empirical evidence from the atom [which means that he took one side of a serious scientific debate at the time] to the cosmos, advocated a Creator as the preferred option to a self-existent universe.
It is this worldview that one will find in the US Declaration of Independence of 1776, and it is a point where American [as opposed to Continental] Deist, creationist, hebraically influenced thought and More fully Judaeo Christian thought overlapped and agreed.
For instance, here is Paul:
And Cicero:
Now, of course after generations of being indoctrinated into the evolutionary materialist view, many profess to “know” — on scientific grounds — that the appearance of design in the universe and in life etc is misleading. However, there are serious grounds for doubting the intellectual soundness of such a worldview:
So, there is much more to the story than at first meets the eye.
GEM of TKI
PS: maybe i was a bit obscure. One of the implications of rejecting self-evident truth is that one winds up in absurdity.
So, we should reflect on what Jefferson meant when he stated “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created . . .”
Judge Jones probably had Thomas Jefferson in mind when he gave his infamous commencement speech at Dickinson College. Jones showed extreme prejudice against ID and the Dover defendants — regardless of whether or not ID is a religious concept — by saying that his Dover decision was based on his notion that the Founders based the establishment clause upon a belief that organized religions are not “true” religions. Jones said,
Ironically, Jones gave the speech while standing behind the Dickinson College seal, which was designed by USA founders Benjamin Rush and John Dickinson and which has a picture of an open bible and the college motto “religion and learning, the bulwark of liberty” in Latin.
To me, the most irritating thing about Judge Jones is that he has gotten a lot less hell than he should have gotten for the things that he has said and done.
Originalism sucks. As a result of originalism, the Founders have been portrayed as everything from a bunch of bible-burning blasphemous atheists to a bunch of bible-pounding holy-rolling fundies.
Aye Larry and further, with no guarantee that the truth is even in the middle!
kairosfocus I think there are serious intellectual and logical grounds for rejecting the suggestion that the capitalization of Agent means anything like the hidden assumption that you have smuggled into your account that Jefferson therefore meant a Person.
The straw…materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature.
Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of chance.
Now, arguing that the latter follows from the former is simply dishonest. I did what I will demonstrate that you did, but this time there is good reason to suspect that my argument is strong on merit and not simply on form.
Defeating a mereological nihilism, with your appeals to the justified absurdity of considering ‘thoughts’ to be mere electrochemical events in the brain, sounds great and we can all get behind the notion that this is ridiculous. Even the materialists that you ascribe this position to.
Further I am afraid that your position ultimately damages the warrant for faith at all.
Thus, what we subjectively experience as “thoughts” and “conclusions” can only be understood materialistically
I am always skeptical when someone simply asserts their argument as the only way to interpret the evidence, for often this has been a mistaken view in the history of the world.
Faith is a subjective decision to believe, and no amount of information can change this. Induction and all that stuff that you already know. At some point, one must choose to impose an arbitrary decision making level. Suggesting that there is a confidence level that validates such decisions is cheapening to that faith and also inconsistent with the assumptions of such statistical models.
Therefore, if materialism is true, the “thoughts” we have and the “conclusions” we reach, without residue, are produced and controlled by forces that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, or validity. Of course, the conclusions of such arguments may still happen to be true, by lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” them.
of course purpose, truth and validity may have their own meanings at one’s whim. for many, the definitions are predicated upon the hypothetical existence of an ultimate frame of reference. Yet another hidden assumption that carries with it the stench of the predestination determinism that is the watermark of fascism.
My friend, I do not understand why we do not retire this point as an argument? Believers take solace in their belief that there is an external frame of reference, and this belief is validated by their decision of affirmation. Unbelievers possess the most parsimonious argument, but they can find none of the comfort that is the fruit of communion and not deduction.
the silliness that is piggybacked onto the ‘multiple universe’ foolishnesses is debilitating to clear thinking about the fundamental issues. it is as foolish to speak about multiple master reference frames as it is to speak about one. But between brothers and sisters in christ it becomes another issue altogether. But this argument cannot work against one who has not already been persuaded to believe on their own accord.
Irreducible Complacency:
I don’t know how Jefferson could have been any more precise in his expression. He approaches the subject with four different nuances all pointing to the same theme. Not only does he speak of a “superintending agent, a “fabricator,” and a “powerful agency,” he also dramatizes the point by indicating that this same agent is a “sustaining” force. These are all objectively oriented terms that point to a designer, or, to put it in ID terms, an agent. Now whether that designer is a “person” or not depends on your definition of same.
Indeed, “person” is a subjective formulation that can mean almost anything to anyone. You will notice that YOU smuggled in the subjective formulation of “person” into the discussion about an objective reality and then held kairosfocus accountable for the smuggling. The issue here is “creator” vs. “non-creator” not “agent” vs. “person.” No one here is talking about persons other than you, so if you will drop the term, coherency will be restored and all will be well.
Further, you seem to have some difficulty accepting the notion that materialism cannot account for the phenomenon of rationality. To understand the nature of rationality is to understand that it cannot arise from a matter to mind scenario. Only one account hangs together: The designer created [A] a rational universe, [B] rational minds to comprehend it, and [C] a correspondence between the two. Take away even one of these three pieces of the puzzle, and the entire rational enterprise collapses.
In other words, rationality can exist only if the interplay between [A] and [B] was set up and coordinated by a thoughtful agent in advance. Only theistic dualism can account for such a phenomenon. Materialism/monism accounts for only one realm, compacting [A] and [B] into a single indeterminate substance, which eliminates any possibility of an interplay between two realms, which is the necessary condition for rationality in the first place. You can have materialism or you can have rationality, but you cannot have both.
Pannenberg Omega, thanks for the thumbs up. I also agree with those who suggest that the Founders may not have been so easily duped by Darwin. Sometimes fools rule, but it seems that in the era of America’s founding they did not.
Larry Fafarman, you speak wisely, but then how can you criticize originalism? If one doesn’t mean what he originally said, how can his interpreter be taken seriously in what he originally said? Do judges who are postmodernly free to read anything into a text extend us the same license to read whatever we want into their pronouncements?
If we have a “living constitution” which can be made to mean whatever the mood of the mob mandates, why do we need legislators? Why not just trust a professional elite to judge after the fact according to how they feel and not worry about what some musty old law stipulated beforehand?
Interesting how the founders believed in reason (they weren’t postmodernists), yet they didn’t trust the reasoning of magistrates. They also understood the rule of law—of a constitution decided and agreed upon beforehand.
Just as an aside there’s an HBO mini-series that just debuted titled “John Adams” that chronicles, in dramatized reenactment, the events surrounding the U.S. declaration of independence and the revolutinary war. Prominent roles are people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams (the central role), and Benjamin Franklin. The meetings of the continental congress are a particular focus so far. It’s quite good. I’m hooked after seeing the first two one-hour episodes.
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