Joe brings up an argument against Darwinism made by David Stove. I don’t really understand the argument as presented. In the first place, no one denies, as far as I know, that genetic mutations and natural selection still take place in human beings. That is one way that human beings develop immunity to diseases. Many Africans have certain genes that protect them against malaria, for example, presumably because that conferred a selective advantage in a region where malaria is common. I don’t think that most anti-Darwinists deny that natural selection goes on in humans.
Second, I don’t think the basic idea of Darwinism requires that every animal breed at every opportunity or absolutely maximize the number of offspring it generates. From a purely game-theoretic point of view, that may not be the best strategy for securing the presence of one’s genes in future generations. For example, a female animal might forego mating with a weak male so as to keep open the possibility of mating with a stronger male later. (I think that may even happen with people sometimes.) Third, I don’t think that Darwinism claims that selective pressures are always equally strong or that “there is always pressure on the supply of food.” There may be times when the food is plentiful. Most importantly, I don’t see why humans being exceptional in some respects falsifies the basic idea of Darwinian evolution.
I certainly agree that human beings are exceptional. As a Catholic, I believe we have spiritual souls that are conferred upon us by God and are not the product of any physical or biological process. As a consequence, we have reason and free will. This means that we can and do behave in ways that are not completely accounted for by Darwinism. Does that mean that Darwinism is wrong? No. It just means that it is not the whole story, at least when it comes to human beings. If Darwinism is defined to include the statement that Darwinian mechanisms explain everything about human nature, then of course an orthodox Christian cannot accept it.
It becomes a question of how one defines the word “Darwinism.” That is a very important question. Some people would like to define it to include very sweeping metaphysical claims and very reductive views of human nature. Atheists would like to define it that way. For reasons that I cannot fathom, and that are never explained, some Christians would also like to define it that way. I think there are many reasons not to do so. For one thing, it makes discussion very difficult. For if the word “Darwinism” is to be used for the atheistic brand of it championed by the likes of Dawkins, then what word should we use to describe the purely scientific and metaphysically quite harmless idea that plants and animals and (physically speaking) human beings developed through an evolutionary process driven by natural selection?
June 3rd, 2009 | 7:02 pm
“if the word “Darwinism” is to be used for the atheistic brand of it championed by the likes of Dawkins, then what word should we use to describe the purely scientific and metaphysically quite harmless idea that plants and animals and (physically speaking) human beings developed through an evolutionary process driven by natural selection?”
Well, how about “Darwinism?” It seems to me that the claim that natural selection is purely scientific and metaphysically quite harmless begs the very [heatedly disputed] question.
Sarah
June 3rd, 2009 | 8:51 pm
If they do not, it would be due to the lack of understanding of the implications of natural selection. Natural selection necessarily implies that God is not active in evolution. The evidence clearly does not bear this out. As a Catholic you should recognize that God does not sit on the side-lines of human history. Darwinism explicitly implies that nature is the author of man, which flies in the face of the Church’s understanding of our relationship with God.
June 3rd, 2009 | 9:45 pm
The lack of a standard vocabulary is a major hindrance to discussions in this area. Even the word “evolution” means so many different things to so many different people that it’s necessary to sit down and define terms at the beginning of debate very precisely.
I’ve noticed some convention among those engaged in the evolution/faith interface towards using “Darwinism” to indicate the philosophical worldview, “Darwinian evolution” to indicate specifically Darwin’s mechanisms, and just “evolution” to convey the general idea of descent with modification, by various methods. But every author uses these terms differently, so one must be careful.
June 3rd, 2009 | 10:33 pm
“Natural selection necessarily implies that God is not active in evolution.”
No, it doesn’t — that’s the unwarranted philosophical conclusion atheists want you to draw from it. Natural selection is just a description of allele frequencies changing due to selective pressure. It doesn’t necessarily deny God any more than any other secondary cause, like propitious weather being caused by atmospheric conditions.
June 4th, 2009 | 12:20 am
No, it isn’t – that’s what the atheists want you gloss over the philosophical implications with. Natural selection attributes selective pressure to random causes in nature. The only possible methodology for evolution is directed selection… that is, if evolution really is the mechanism of our creation.
June 4th, 2009 | 5:12 am
“Many Africans have certain genes that protect them against malaria, for example,”
They are mutations: eg Thallesaemia;
Two copies of the gene kill you.
Darwnism is rubbish. The quicker this is realised the better
Natural selection weeds out gross genetic defects. It does not create anything.
God created everything.
June 4th, 2009 | 10:40 am
“I certainly agree that human beings are exceptional…. This means that we can and do behave in ways that are not completely accounted for by Darwinism. Does that mean that Darwinism is wrong? No. It just means that it is not the whole story, at least when it comes to human beings.”
Doesn’t the fact that humans have traits that cannot be accounted for by Darwinism falsify the theory, or at least seriously undermine it? I believe the theory does say that any trait that actually exists in the human animal is the result of the same process that accounts for all evolutionary changes. A Darwinist would say (I think) that there are no human traits that cannot be accounted for by natural selection. In other words, there is no room for human exceptionalism within the theory. So, to the extent that humans really are exceptional, to that extent the theory is wrong. By the terms of Darwinism itself, it is not coherent to say that Darwinism is not the whole story. We can say that certain mechanisms within Darwinism, such as natural selection, are true but not sufficient to explain humans as we find them today, but we can’t say the same about Darwinism. By definition, the theory purports to tell the “whole story.” As with any scientific theory that purports to tell the whole story about a specific aspect of our universe, the inability to account for the whole story falsifies that theory.
June 4th, 2009 | 12:18 pm
1. “God does not sit on the side-lines of human history.”
Perhaps not, but this does not require demoting God to “just another efficient cause” pushing dead matter toward bipedalism, hairlessness, or a brain sufficiently complex to be informed by human soul.
2. Stove. He supported his critique with citations from Darwin, Dawkins, and others. An on-line precis can be found here, specifically items 7., 8., and 10.:
http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=26
June 4th, 2009 | 1:19 pm
Obviously you didn’t understand what I was implying. I was not demoting God to “just another efficient cause”, but rather promoting God to be the “only sufficient cause” of selective pressure should evolution be the true mechanism of our creation. The strongest evidence of God’s full involvement in the creative process was his shining example of giving us his only begotten Son.
If there were a discussion occurring as to whether a piece of art (for example a painting by Michelangelo) just happened to look one way because the artist intended or not, would you say of the person that said it was intentional that he were demoting Michelangelo to just another efficient cause?
June 4th, 2009 | 1:37 pm
Evolution by natural selection is a useful “tool” in understanding many aspects of many life sciences; the controversy over it seems to stem from two extreme sets of “workmen”:
1. Those who then toss out every other tool in their “understanding the universe” toolbox. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and therefore anything that cannot be nailed down by this tool (free will, altruism, etc.) is either explained away, explained out of existence, or accounted for by ludicrous and logically faulty scenarios.
2. Those who not are content to merely reject this wrongheaded overemphasis-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else approach, but insist on rejecting the tool itself. In doing so, when confronted by evidence of evolution by natural selection, they tend to produce some rather specious explanations and scenarios themselves.
I hope the thoughtful and educated commenters in this thread will forgive me, but I really cannot adhere to either of these approaches, as I really don’t see how evolution by natural selection should threaten any thoughtful Catholic. Even if you grant the status of truth to each and every tenet of Darwinism (the science of evolution by natural selection, excluding the theologically immature claims attached to it by many of its adherents and even its formulator), one still has not moved one micron toward dispensing with God as creator and designer of the universe, nor has one remotely accounted for all the traits of the strange creature known as man.
I suppose it most accurate for me to describe my impression of God as a “hell of an engineer”. To illustrate what I mean, I propose a question: Which of the following is a more impressive figure?
A. an engineer who makes a structure
B. an engineer who designs elements that can assemble themselves into a structure, with him having to intervene occasionally or even somewhat regularly
C. an engineer who can design even simpler elements in such a way that they can assemble themselves into more complex elements (based on environment and need), which in turn can assemble themselves into more complex elements (based on environment and need), and so on and so on until you reach a diversity of advanced species resembling life on earth.
I would say ‘C’, and the farther back you trace the evidence of the universe and the forces that shape it, the more impressive this Engineer becomes. In this way, I think God had set creation into motion long before the first measureable entity came into being, by his design (and willing) of forces that we are just beginning to understand and many which we may never understand. This ‘design’ was genius enough that the “nitty-gritty” engine and elements of creation could pick up the ball and run with it from there.
This is not to take the Deist view that God merely set the whole thing in motion and walked away. No – as He is reality itself, He kept it in being, and furthermore was very active in the lives of each of His creatures – mainly, loving them, guiding them (in His infinitely subtle way), and sharing in their woes and joys. And whether or not He may of intervened in His creation along the way – in His unbelievably subtle or unsubtle (think ‘miracles’) manner – is not something science has the capacity to speculate about.
When it comes to man, what is the problem with believing that this process culminated in a particularly advanced line of hominids, a pair of whom God chose to, as He had planned to all along, “breathe” living souls into, a state (ensoulment) that God contracted Himself into providing for all of their descendants? Geneticists will counter that humanity as we know it could not come from only one set of parents; OK, who’s to say the first descendants of this first couple did not reproduce with biologically identical – though unensouled – hominids, and these offspring (by virtue of at least one ensouled parent) were also granted ensoulment by God? After all, in this primitive state, I imagine it would have been somewhat difficult to tell the difference, and God, in shepherding His people toward righteousness, permitted things in the Old Testament that He (as articulated by His Son) condemned in the New Testament; therefore, God would have allowed the mating with the nonensouled as necessary for the time being. Eventually, as humans came to grasp their difference from unensouled hominids, they would have only mated with each other. The hominids, having gone as far as they could go in the evolutionary process, would be separated from the human population, which was not only a result of evolution, but the revolution of becoming a living soul.
The above account is useful to me, as it does not dispense with the evidence of evolution by natural selection, which has greatly aided man’s understanding, but neither does it try to make evolution by natural selection account for absolutely everything, a corner atheistic champions of Darwin are ever-eager to paint themselves into. Though I’m sure those more theologically and/or scientifically advanced than I could challenge parts or all of it, it is by no means the end of my journey in understanding God and His creation.
Of course, I would happily trade a complete understanding of the Mind of God for an even partial understanding of the mind of a woman.
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