Kevin Rudd advocates Intelligent Design

by Sylvano Lucchetti

Kevin Rudd believes in Intelligent Design and may well be a creationist to boot, which kind of disappoints me.

Greg Cary of Radio 4BC scored a philo-politico scoop when he asked our PM to provide an argument for the existence of God (Interview, 29^th Aug 2009).

"Well as you know, I am a believer," Kevin explains, "I have never pretended not to be, and I respect those who have no religious belief. It is a free country, freedom to believe, freedom not to believe."

"For me, it is ultimately the order of the cosmos, or what I would describe as the creation. You can't simply have, this is my own judgement, creation as simply being a random event, because it is so inherently ordered."

"And the fact that the natural environment has been ordered in a way where it can properly coexist over time."

"If you were simply reducing that to mathematical probabilities, you've got to say, it probably wouldn't have happened. So I think there is an intelligent mind at work. And so that is not a unique view in my part, that has been the view of theologians for about 2000 years." - Interview with Greg Cary, Radio 4BC, Brisbane, 29^th Aug 2009.

The condescension that is typical of a God Botherer when they solemnly express that they "respect those who have no religious belief," is striking because it is they that have raised the drawbridge on curiousity, disengaged the power of the intellect and disguise a prejudice by vilifying the infidel, however subtle. And Kevin ain't a low IQ kind of guy.

And the one point that seems to both disturb him but also be his evidence for the existence of God is that the cosmos just can't have randomly appeared.

And why not?

Now, if you have the stomach for it - and like me - you have some vague memory of high school physics, then you will at the least be able appreciate if not quite understand the technical complexity - again, like me - of the kind of work being done in the field of quantum cosmology. It investigates this very question.

Or you could try something a little more accessible, but still hard work to penetrate, from the likes of the American philospoher, Quentin Smith, who really likes studying the start of the universe and the existence of God.

For example, he wrote a paper Can Everything Come to Be Without a Cause? (1994), where he argues "that it is possible that the universe came to be causelessly," and outlines "an argument that it is necessary that the universe began with a big-bang singularity if it began causelessly." More recently he has written a piece, A Cosmological Argument for a Self-Caused Universe (2008).

From only these three links you can find other key words, you can pump them into a search engine and you can continue an amazing journey of intellectual exploration into the whole question of the nature of the cosmos, how it may have started and whether it will ever end.

Or you could just be lazy and say you believe in God.