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Christoph Shonberg has written an Op-Ed in today's New York Times. It's not often so clearly displayed what it is that bothers religious people about scientific explanations for nature: it converts supernatural explanations, including and especially gods, into unnecessary hypotheses. Gods were never a sufficient answer since they offer no explanatory power at all, but the correct "I don't know" is hard for people to accept, so they resort to magical thinking. Such is the desire for explanations the even when no proper one exists, people invent them out of whole cloth to still the hunger.
The fallacy of attributing the unexplained to deities is so common that it got its own name: the divine fallacy. However, when people have a good explanation in hand, they are less likely to believe a supernatural answer on top of the already sufficient answer -- hence the term "unnecessary hypothesis." The flip side of this effect is the god of the gaps phenomenon, where the domain of gods has been ever shrinking as people pragmatically drop the unnecessary. This offends those who have been making a good living off of the people's divine fallacy, and they put up a valiant but fruitless fight every time the fallacy's constituency is shrunk.
This taking of offense at being made redundant is sharply highlighted by the "Intellegent Design" movement's chosen angle: evolution is "not enough" to explain us. Sure, evolution happened, but it couldn't have done it by itself, because of [irreducible
complexityentropystatisticsetc].
Note the explicit recreation of the gap for god to fill, to revert the relegation to unnecessary.
Embryology once had a bitter and acrimonious debate about whether an embryo is preformed or whether form emerges during development. Aristotle started the preformation/epigenesis debate, and it raged for 2000 years. Needless to say, the epigenesists were correct, and, once solved, the fuss faded from memory (quick, what's a homunculus?). Still, it's a wonderful example of how religion gets evicted from a field of explanation. To those who know the history of science, evolution is just another embyology or heliocentricity debate, albeit an especially bitter one because the subject of its extraordinary explanatory power is one religion is even less pleased to relinquish: us.
From The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert (pgs. 126-
127):
"Preformation was based on the concept of the first embryo containing all future embryos. There were grave doubts as to whether epigenesis was possible, and it also seemed to undermine God's powers. Could it really be possible for the marvellous development of embryos to be explained by mechanisms based on scientific principles such as physical forces?Christoph Schonborn is a preformationist out of time, fighting against the retreating tide of the divine fallacy. No, evolution does not disprove anything supernatural, but never mind, the Pope's edifice is not built on proofs but on people. The people who, when they realize evolution is correct, let slide a bit more religiosity. Correctly pointing out that evolution does not preclude God does nothing to fill the emptying pews. Christoph, the Pope, the chareidi gedolim and other proponents of fundamentalist religion are not in this for the proofs, they're in it for the people they call followers -- pragmatism, not theology.
[...]
The rise of preformationist theories may have been a response to a series of philosophical problems. If matter could form organized beings, little role was left for Divine Creator. Moreover, physical mechanisms for development, as suggested by Descartes, semmed impossible, for the mechanisms as exemplified by the laws of motion were blind, in that they were without direction. How could such forces generate the perfection of an organism?"
If history is any indication, their "Intelligent Designer" will soon be as relevant, widespread and accepted an explanation as homunculi.
