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Natural God: Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design
Positioning contemporary Deism as the Golden Mean between atheist-materialist Darwinism and religious fundamentalism, Beth Houston convincingly argues that exquisitely designed Creation categorically necessitates a transcending Intelligent Designer that is immanently engaged in the perpetual process of creating novelty sustained within the secure margins of natural laws. To clear the way for new Deism, Houston’s explication, sprinkled with satire, demystifies Charles Darwin and deconstructs Darwinism/neo-Darwinism on the one hand, and on the other continues her demolition of biblical literalism with an incisive critique of the modern quest for the historical Jesus. To stress her point that embracing truth is imperative for our survival, Houston delineates dangers of both Darwinian and fundamentalist myths and superstitions, exposing how separately and together they perpetuate dangerous elitist agendas that range from exploitation and war instigated by corporate oligarchs to misogynist/homophobic gang rape and other expressions of bigotry. As a counterpoint to her analysis of brute selfishness, Houston affirms Nature’s practical and spiritual benefits and challenges us to protect our life, liberty, happiness, and truth by contributing to authentic democracy, environmental stewardship, and nurturance of our creative, spiritual, and ethical sensibilities. Houston represents a version of Deism rooted in common sense, which she defines as the consensus of all our faculties, including reason, conscience, intuition, experience, volition, and the aesthetic. Unlike some Deists writing today, Houston affirms aspects of religion untainted by greed and hubris that express humanity’s natural desire for God, truth, and the Good. Deism reveres the Creator of Nature, the Natural God, whose truth and spiritual Presence, independent of priestly mediation, are democratically available to all.
491 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 15, 2013
10 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Beth Houston
14 books8 followersBeth Houston, MA, MFA, has taught creative writing, literature, and composition at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida and has worked as a writer and editor. Her publications include poetry, fiction, and nonfiction books, and over two-hundred works in literary journals. She is still delighted to have been the first featured poet at Able Muse Review.
Beth’s provocative books on Deism challenge prescribed beliefs with new thoughts about God, religion, spirituality, science, politics, and creativity. Her mystery/thriller novel pivots around murder and sex trafficking. (Or does it...?) In a past life Beth worked for the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women and was a sheriff's 9-1-1 dispatcher and police property evidence custodian. Family members have been FBI agents and Assistant Inspector General. Beth loves catching the bad guys, if only in her books.
Beth edits the Rhizome Press extreme formal poetry anthologies, including Extreme Sonnets and Extreme Formal Poems. Extreme Sonnets II is in the works.
Be sure to check out the updated editions of her books Blood Moon Burning and Born-Again Deist, as well as Natural God: Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design.
See more at Beth Houston’s website and at her Amazon Author's page.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 18, 2013
The final two chapters of this book are inspiring. But since most readers will slog through the first 400 pages to reach those chapters, I’d better review the initial pages as well. So bear with me, here, until we get to the good stuff.
I opened Beth Houston’s new book to find a heated attack on Darwinism on the very first page. Surely, in this age of genetics and evolutionary biology, she’s not going to base her Deism on Creationism is she?
Nope. “Genesism,” says Houston, is just as far off the mark as evolution, and the Truth hides somewhere between what fundamentalists and Darwinists believe. Both, in Houston’s opinion, are too dependent upon their “religion.” She settles for her own brand of Intelligent Design, attacking both sides of the creation/evolution debate with equal gusto, forming an uneasy alliance along the way with a few fringe scientists on the Christian side of the ledger (Discovery Institute folks and other apologists). Ain’t no way Houston’s daddy was an ape and her granddaddy a worm.
Houston leans on arguments for the irreducible complexity of such body members as the eye and the bacterial flagellum, arguments which are no longer convincing to mainstream biological science. She battles Darwin’s assumption of smooth evolutionary transition between species, a theory that was disbanded years ago in favor of “jumpy” transition. She insists that “no transitional fossils exist” between species, even while she points out a couple of great examples transitioning from fish to tetrapod: the Panderichthys and the Tiktaalik.
Houston attacks Darwin on a personal level, seeking to discredit him, often reducing his teachings on natural selection to a form of “kill or be killed.” This idea, she claims, has been refuted biologically: God’s creation was designed to advance through cooperation. An interesting direction, I must admit.
I think Houston considers a large part of the creation process to be God fiddling with DNA during the Cambridge Explosion. No life, she explains, has evolved beyond the boundaries of it species since that time. No macro evolution. Presumably humans, too, have been around for 500 million years? I’m not real clear on exactly how and when God made mankind in Houston’s opinion.
Then, she mutters her oft-repeated mantra that what differentiates Deism from the rest is a reliance upon Truth. Truth is the most important thing. Sigh.
When the rant against evolution ends, Houston starts in on Jesus. “Scholars searching for proof of the historical Jesus have groped as futilely as Darwinians scouring fossil beds for missing links.” As a historical Jesus scholar who also has studied evolution, I couldn’t count the number of statements Houston makes that I deem direct falsehoods, so I struggled with much of the book.
Did I finally learn what a Deist believes in today’s world? Well, eventually, but for hundreds of pages I held a pretty negative view. A Deist apparently disbelieves in both evolution and the divine intervention necessary to bypass evolution. (Miracles, in that they violate natural law, contradict the God of nature.) A Deist touts the humanitarian teachings of Jesus, while shrugging off the possibility that Jesus was a real person. A Deist is a bit of a conspiracy theorist, ranting against evil on every side, from republicans to Richard Dawkins to whole wheat bread. And don’t get a Deist started on the topic of gender inequality!
Finally, I arrived at the last two chapters, which are both spiritual and practical. Houston’s philosophy, if only it could be divorced from fringe science, is attractive. Deism is about love, respect, and growth. It is about appreciating the beauty and creativity of God’s work. It reaches a crescendo in the final ten pages with that most wonderful of words: hope. It turns out Deism is a narrow version of my own Liberal Christianity.
There is one major selling point: as frustrated as I felt with the book’s meandering direction, its saving grace is that it’s just so darn fun to read. Houston is an engaging writer. It reads like a coffee-house conversation with an eloquent, opinionated aunt, whose caustic put-downs of everything you hold sacred are so creative that you can’t help sniggering. So, for me, the book earns a compromising three-star rating … one star for the first 400 pages, five stars for the last 75, and a plug for all the chuckles.
I opened Beth Houston’s new book to find a heated attack on Darwinism on the very first page. Surely, in this age of genetics and evolutionary biology, she’s not going to base her Deism on Creationism is she?
Nope. “Genesism,” says Houston, is just as far off the mark as evolution, and the Truth hides somewhere between what fundamentalists and Darwinists believe. Both, in Houston’s opinion, are too dependent upon their “religion.” She settles for her own brand of Intelligent Design, attacking both sides of the creation/evolution debate with equal gusto, forming an uneasy alliance along the way with a few fringe scientists on the Christian side of the ledger (Discovery Institute folks and other apologists). Ain’t no way Houston’s daddy was an ape and her granddaddy a worm.
Houston leans on arguments for the irreducible complexity of such body members as the eye and the bacterial flagellum, arguments which are no longer convincing to mainstream biological science. She battles Darwin’s assumption of smooth evolutionary transition between species, a theory that was disbanded years ago in favor of “jumpy” transition. She insists that “no transitional fossils exist” between species, even while she points out a couple of great examples transitioning from fish to tetrapod: the Panderichthys and the Tiktaalik.
Houston attacks Darwin on a personal level, seeking to discredit him, often reducing his teachings on natural selection to a form of “kill or be killed.” This idea, she claims, has been refuted biologically: God’s creation was designed to advance through cooperation. An interesting direction, I must admit.
I think Houston considers a large part of the creation process to be God fiddling with DNA during the Cambridge Explosion. No life, she explains, has evolved beyond the boundaries of it species since that time. No macro evolution. Presumably humans, too, have been around for 500 million years? I’m not real clear on exactly how and when God made mankind in Houston’s opinion.
Then, she mutters her oft-repeated mantra that what differentiates Deism from the rest is a reliance upon Truth. Truth is the most important thing. Sigh.
When the rant against evolution ends, Houston starts in on Jesus. “Scholars searching for proof of the historical Jesus have groped as futilely as Darwinians scouring fossil beds for missing links.” As a historical Jesus scholar who also has studied evolution, I couldn’t count the number of statements Houston makes that I deem direct falsehoods, so I struggled with much of the book.
Did I finally learn what a Deist believes in today’s world? Well, eventually, but for hundreds of pages I held a pretty negative view. A Deist apparently disbelieves in both evolution and the divine intervention necessary to bypass evolution. (Miracles, in that they violate natural law, contradict the God of nature.) A Deist touts the humanitarian teachings of Jesus, while shrugging off the possibility that Jesus was a real person. A Deist is a bit of a conspiracy theorist, ranting against evil on every side, from republicans to Richard Dawkins to whole wheat bread. And don’t get a Deist started on the topic of gender inequality!
Finally, I arrived at the last two chapters, which are both spiritual and practical. Houston’s philosophy, if only it could be divorced from fringe science, is attractive. Deism is about love, respect, and growth. It is about appreciating the beauty and creativity of God’s work. It reaches a crescendo in the final ten pages with that most wonderful of words: hope. It turns out Deism is a narrow version of my own Liberal Christianity.
There is one major selling point: as frustrated as I felt with the book’s meandering direction, its saving grace is that it’s just so darn fun to read. Houston is an engaging writer. It reads like a coffee-house conversation with an eloquent, opinionated aunt, whose caustic put-downs of everything you hold sacred are so creative that you can’t help sniggering. So, for me, the book earns a compromising three-star rating … one star for the first 400 pages, five stars for the last 75, and a plug for all the chuckles.
August 10, 2019
A disappointment
I wrote a largely favorable review of Houston previous book, “Born-Again Deist” and looked forward to reading this book. However when I turned to Chapter 4 and her views on Darwin and biological evolution I was shocked. It was as though Houston had declared that she believed the earth was flat.
Ms. Houston writes well, which is not a surprise since she has taught creative writing and literature at a number of institutions of higher learning. But by imagining that the notorious (and discredited) creationist biologist Michael J. Behe has refuted biological evolution or that somehow Charles Darwin needs a scientific dressing down reveals a clear lack of scientific understanding on Houston’s part.
Houston’s position can be summed up by this statement from page 115: “It is common sense that if the simplest organism is far more complex than a watch (it is), an intelligent Creator must have created life.” Apart from the fact that the “then” doesn’t necessarily follow from the “if,” there is the rather mundane fact that “common sense” doesn’t always reveal scientific truth or even come close to it.
Actually Houston goes a bit farther than this. She writes (still on page 115): “The intricate mechanism that allows any version of evolution to work—the laws of nature—must have been designed in order to consistently exist at all, not to mention as an elegant, rational entity. Existence itself, and the continued existence of existence, must have been designed.”
Since Houston has no ability (nor has anyone else) to prove that “design” exists she asserts it! Consequently this book is a work of religion and philosophy and should be appreciated (or not!) as such.
I was also taken back at the rather acerbic and ad hominem way she writes about Darwin. I’ll quote a bit from pages 109 to give you an idea:
“Given his early religious convictions, we might well believe Darwin’s claim that he was a humane boy. Yet he admits, ‘I owed this entirely to the instruction and example of my sisters. I doubt indeed whether humanity is a natural or innate quality.’ He substantiates this startling claim with personal anecdote: ‘I was very fond of collecting eggs, but I never took more than a single egg out of a bird’s nest, except on one single occasion, when I took all, not for their value, but from a sort of bravado.’”...
“It’s fair to ask the future Father of Evolution how he decided which single egg to choose. Was his selection the not-fittest and therefore the one targeted for non-survival? Did that make him the pawn of the demigod, natural selection?...”
It would appear that Houston’s critique of Darwinism amounts to a personal and moralistic attack on Darwin himself more than anything else. But readers might want to judge for themselves. As for me, I couldn’t read any further.
By the way, the subtitle of the book, referring to the present as “the Age of Intelligent Design” is a bit of a howler scientifically speaking since relative few educated people anywhere in the world believe in Intelligent Design in biology. On the other hand, this might be a true but sad expression of the zeitgeist of our time since uneducated people everywhere overwhelmingly believe in something similar.
I give Houston three stars for effort. She certainly put a lot of work into this book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
I wrote a largely favorable review of Houston previous book, “Born-Again Deist” and looked forward to reading this book. However when I turned to Chapter 4 and her views on Darwin and biological evolution I was shocked. It was as though Houston had declared that she believed the earth was flat.
Ms. Houston writes well, which is not a surprise since she has taught creative writing and literature at a number of institutions of higher learning. But by imagining that the notorious (and discredited) creationist biologist Michael J. Behe has refuted biological evolution or that somehow Charles Darwin needs a scientific dressing down reveals a clear lack of scientific understanding on Houston’s part.
Houston’s position can be summed up by this statement from page 115: “It is common sense that if the simplest organism is far more complex than a watch (it is), an intelligent Creator must have created life.” Apart from the fact that the “then” doesn’t necessarily follow from the “if,” there is the rather mundane fact that “common sense” doesn’t always reveal scientific truth or even come close to it.
Actually Houston goes a bit farther than this. She writes (still on page 115): “The intricate mechanism that allows any version of evolution to work—the laws of nature—must have been designed in order to consistently exist at all, not to mention as an elegant, rational entity. Existence itself, and the continued existence of existence, must have been designed.”
Since Houston has no ability (nor has anyone else) to prove that “design” exists she asserts it! Consequently this book is a work of religion and philosophy and should be appreciated (or not!) as such.
I was also taken back at the rather acerbic and ad hominem way she writes about Darwin. I’ll quote a bit from pages 109 to give you an idea:
“Given his early religious convictions, we might well believe Darwin’s claim that he was a humane boy. Yet he admits, ‘I owed this entirely to the instruction and example of my sisters. I doubt indeed whether humanity is a natural or innate quality.’ He substantiates this startling claim with personal anecdote: ‘I was very fond of collecting eggs, but I never took more than a single egg out of a bird’s nest, except on one single occasion, when I took all, not for their value, but from a sort of bravado.’”...
“It’s fair to ask the future Father of Evolution how he decided which single egg to choose. Was his selection the not-fittest and therefore the one targeted for non-survival? Did that make him the pawn of the demigod, natural selection?...”
It would appear that Houston’s critique of Darwinism amounts to a personal and moralistic attack on Darwin himself more than anything else. But readers might want to judge for themselves. As for me, I couldn’t read any further.
By the way, the subtitle of the book, referring to the present as “the Age of Intelligent Design” is a bit of a howler scientifically speaking since relative few educated people anywhere in the world believe in Intelligent Design in biology. On the other hand, this might be a true but sad expression of the zeitgeist of our time since uneducated people everywhere overwhelmingly believe in something similar.
I give Houston three stars for effort. She certainly put a lot of work into this book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
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