To my surprise (and to their credit) the Washington Post has given a platform to John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, to discuss why “Darwin’s theory poses such a challenge to faith“:
The real sticking point is Darwin’s claim that all of life—human beings included—developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
There are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism’s undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.
The first idea to go is the belief that God directed the development of life toward specific ends. According to biologist Kenneth Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of “theistic” evolution, God did not plan the specific outcomes of evolution—including the development of human beings. Miller describes humans as “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.” While God knew that undirected evolution was so wonderful it would create some kind of creature capable of praising Him, that creature could have been “a big-brained dinosaur” or “a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities” rather than us.
Seeking to lessen the discomfort such arguments pose for most religious believers, Francis Collins suggests that God “could” have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand even though He made evolution appear “a random and undirected process.” In other words, God is a cosmic trickster who misleads people into thinking that nature is blind and purposeless, even though it isn’t.
One need not be a religious fundamentalist to find such arguments less than satisfying. Indeed, one need not be religious at all. Media coverage notwithstanding, theistic evolution has been shunned by leading evolutionary biologists, 87 percent of whom deny the existence of God and 90 percent of whom reject the idea that evolution is directed toward an “ultimate purpose” according to a 2003 survey.
West raises some interesting points about the “new theistic evolutionists” that make you wonder why they are given such deference in debates on this issue. Their position appears to be rejected by almost everyone: evolutionary biologists, Christian theists, French deists.
Since Miller’s view is obviously incompatible with a strong view of God’s omniscience, it’s not surprising that many Christians (particularly those of us of the Calvinist variety) reject it outright. What is less often recognized is that it would also have been rejected by most thinkers during the Enlightenment. Voltaire, for instance, claimed “We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.”
“This argument is old,” adds Voltaire, “and none the worse for that.”
In contrast, Miller’s view is, historically speaking, rather novel—and not entirely coherent. If God did not have a plan for the specific outcome of evolution, as Miller contends, then he must have at least had a general plan for the process to create some form of creature with “exceptional mental capabilities.” But then the process would no longer be undirected, which means that it is not compatible with the Darwinian view of evolution.
Ironically, the view held by Collins and Miller shares much in common with the position of creationists. If evolution is random and undirected then the probability of a “creature capable of praising Him” (i.e., a being similar to humans) coming into existence is extremely low. God would likely need to run the experiment a number of times to get the desired outcome and then select that instantiation (maybe that’s why we have the multiverse). This special selection of results, however, is not so different than creationist’s view of special creation—in each God simply chooses the outcome he desires. Also, Collins’ view of God making evolution appear undirected is similar to the idea that he planted dinosaur fossils and created geological strata to fool us into thinking the earth has been around more than 6,000 years. Creationists have to interpret the evidence to fit their theological preconceptions; Collins has to interpret the evidence to fit his theoretical preconceptions.
The debate over God’s role in evolution is often portrayed as pitting proponents of theistic evolution (Miller, Collins) against advocates of intelligent design (The Discovery Institute, Voltaire). But a more accurate distinction would be between those who believe that evolution is intelligently directed and those who think the process was “random and undirected” but overseen and/or set in motion by an intelligent agent. This latter view appears to be incompatible with both orthodox Christianity and orthodox Darwinism. So why is it considered an intellectually respectable option for believers?
(Via: Gene Veith)
June 11th, 2009 | 2:51 pm
How about evolution, instead of being intelligently directed, being an intelligently designed process that would not only provide for a variety of species but also provide for an advanced hominid into which He would (according to his intent and will) infuse a living soul?
Of course, “chance” is built into evolution, but I believe Stephen Barr wrote about the different ways to look at “chance” for First Things, and Cardinal Schonborn (spelling?), I believe, also expounded on similar thoughts in his book.
June 11th, 2009 | 3:34 pm
How about evolution, instead of being intelligently directed, being an intelligently designed process that would not only provide for a variety of species but also provide for an advanced hominid into which He would (according to his intent and will) infuse a living soul?
I should have clarified it better, but that is part of what I was thinking would be included under the rubric “intelligently directed.” What couldn’t be included—I don’t believe—is an intelligently designed process that is undirected and yet leads to the intended results. If its undirected, then it cannot lead to a specific end.
Of course, “chance” is built into evolution, but I believe Stephen Barr wrote about the different ways to look at “chance” for First Things,…
That is true. As Barr says, neo-Darwinism, properly understood, “need not require a process that is ‘unguided’ or ‘unplanned’ since the word “random” as used in science does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means uncorrelated.” But as Fr. Neuhaus pointed out, “The problem is not that Barr is wrong about the appropriate meaning of ‘random,’ but that mainstream Darwinists do not accept his point.” I would include Barr in the “intelligently directed” camp.
June 11th, 2009 | 4:08 pm
Science didn’t create evolution, merely observed and learned of a process already in existence. Because God created the Universe, therefore God created evolution, and the Universe itself is the prima facie evidence. So if you do not accept evolution, then you do not accept God on God’s terms.
It’s the equivalent of saying to God, “I find repugnant your creation, and my inability to understand it means that I will ignore it for more palatable version of my own design.”
June 11th, 2009 | 4:23 pm
Science didn’t create evolution, merely observed and learned of a process already in existence.
The disagreement isn’t over whether evolution occurs (almost everyone agrees, to some extent, on that point) but whether it is directed or undirected. That isn’t a matter of science but of philosophical presuppositions.
June 11th, 2009 | 4:39 pm
And what does the evidence from God’s Universe reveal? Randomness.
If you want to make a scientific argument about directed randomness, that you can say that quantum fluctuations and vacuum energy are the means by which God physically interacts with the natural world. That’s a very different notion of directed evolution a.k.a. Intelligent Design.
The real problem with your argument is that you do not take it to it’s logical conclusion. Why would an all knowing, all powerful God create a Universe when he already knew exactly what would happen — God does not need us to live in order for him to determine our fate. So why not cut to the chase and create a heaven with only those souls who would have honored him in life? Why create billions of souls and submit them to eternal damnation when they never needed to have existed?
An very suggestive clue is found in the vastness of the Universe. Why would God create such an enormous waste of billions of galaxies with billions of planets just to provide Man a home on Earth? Either God is the worst engineer imaginable, or he has other children on other planets. It’s highly improbable that they physically resemble us, but they would be our spiritual brothers and sisters.
Evolution isn’t for Man, it’s for God to create Life.
June 11th, 2009 | 7:08 pm
Does evolution need to have a specific end? I see no reason why it ought to end up with us rather than some other creature. Speaking of us purely as animals for a moment, there’s no reason why the human form is any better or worse than any other. Indeed the question doesn’t make sense: Evolution does not recognize better or worse, only survival to produce offspring and failure. The only reason this makes us uncomfortable is that it appears to imply that humans are not exceptional.
What I suspect, rather, is that humans are exceptional because (and only because) God chooses to give us souls. This is what really differentiates us from animals; everything else we have in common. Of course, a side effect is that we become responsible for doing right rather than wrong, and that leads us to the need for salvation. From this perspective, it’s utterly irrelevant whether God directed our evolution or not; and so I don’t have any problem believing both that the evolution of the physical form of humans was random (in the sense of being undirected and unsupervised) and that humans are nonetheless special children of God.
June 11th, 2009 | 7:51 pm
[...] 11, 2009 by Lee At the First Things blog, Joe Carter has a post challenging the coherence of “theistic evolution.” This view, held by people like Kenneth Miller, accepts the [...]
June 12th, 2009 | 12:25 am
Well natural selection means that there is a selection criteria. So what is the criteria? It’s certainly not a blind force like “survival” since the more advanced an organism is, the less it survives (i.e. bacteria survive and reproduce better than mice which do so better than humans). So if all there was “natural selection” as Collins claims, it’s likely that that selection criteria would be something counterintuitive like “capable of creating a creature able to praise”. This would *not* be God playing the trickster since we ourselves are not gods so we don’t know everything. The analogy would be more like “it’s obvious that the earth is the center of the universe and that things fall to their natural places as Aristotle claimed” — it’s obvious until you actually learn a bit more.
That being said, it’s all moot. Any God that is capable of creating miracle (in programming terminology, “debugging the universe”) is able to tweak the probabilities or cause “just the right” mutations to direct evolution wherever He wanted, slowly tweaking the canvas of the world’s DNA until the lilies had just the right colour, and the cats had just the right fur softness, and the monkeys had just the right curiosity, and humans had just the right character.
June 12th, 2009 | 11:18 am
[...] think both John West and Joe Carter are trapped in a false dilemma, namely the choice between believing that certain processes are [...]
June 12th, 2009 | 10:36 pm
The Christian God is defined as being outside Time (which He created) just as He is outside Space (which He created).
Since the Christian God is outside Time, He is free to perceive all times as Now. Put another way, if God is omnipresent in space, and space is unified with time as “space-time,” then God is omnipresent in time, also. He is simultaneously observing the formation of the earth, the death of the sun…and my birth, my third birthday party, and my death. These are all “now” to God.
And of course the Christian God has (by definition) complete control over the creation of the universe in its first moment…or else He is not what Christians call “God.”
The implication of these Christian truisms is that if God wished to produce an exact outcome in the universe at the present day, He needed only to establish, at the Big Bang, the correct physical laws and “starting state” of the universe which would produce that outcome.
Moreover, even the non-deterministic nature of physical laws would not prevent this: If a particular starting state and set of laws happened, through the randomness of quantum events, to not produce exactly the intended outcome, He could “adjust” the starting state and physical laws “until” it did so…while observing (in perfect ease) all the successive moments which represented the outcome of each “experimental” combination of starting state and laws. He could in fact keep “tweaking” the start of the universe “until” He “got it the way He liked it”; that is, until all successive events in the history of our universe looked the way He liked them to look.
There is in fact no reason at all why every Christian miracle could not be historical fact — no reason not to say that God is entirely, providentially, sovereign in the universe — EVEN IF He never intervened in the universe at any point later than the Big Bang. Grant Him “artistic control” over that one starting event, and utter sovereignty over every other event necessarily follows.
There is a sole exception: He could voluntarily choose to delegate authority to free-willed souls. To whatever extent that God has granted temporary stewardship over physical bodies to souls with actual liberty (or, as Christians say, persons made in His image), that grant of stewardship places limits on His providence. But they are very limited limits, voluntarily embraced by Him, and not incompatible with divine omnipotence as Christians understand it.
Anyway, the logical consequence of the Christian idea of God is that “artistic control” over the Big Bang is all it takes.
As a result, it’s nonsense to believe in a “watchmaker” god after the Deist model, presuppose that “watchmaker” to be an omnipotent creator, and call the result a more rational alternative to the Christian God. For a “watchmaker” god forced to create the universe in a particular way is not omnipotent, and must in fact be himself derivative (not a creator but a creature). But a “watchmaker” god with authority to create the universe any way He pleases is simply God: He offers no defense against miracles or divine providence: None at all.
It seems to me that some of the arguments over Theistic evolution and Design neglect the above. I don’t know why this is. To call it lack of “doing one’s homework” seems churlish: These are very bright people. More likely it is mere neglect of pursuing a particular idea to its necessary, but unexpected, consequence.
June 13th, 2009 | 1:20 am
Except for one thing… the begetting of Jesus. There’s a hole in your argument.
June 13th, 2009 | 1:46 pm
R. Hampton said:
“Why would God create such an enormous waste of billions of galaxies with billions of planets just to provide Man a home on Earth? Either God is the worst engineer imaginable, or he has other children on other planets.”
This is a false dilemma. (1) “Waste” only makes sense if one is bound by scarcity, i.e., limited resources. No theist thinks God was using pre-existing stuff to create the universe, so “waste” simply doesn’t apply to his creation of the universe. He wasn’t at risk of running out of protons.
(2) Proliferation of life is only one among countless possible reasons God could have for creating a large universe. E.g., maybe he wanted us to be in awe of its magnitude or to be able to detect the redshift of distance galaxies and thereby infer that the universe had a beginning. Or maybe he likes pretty galaxies. Or maybe he wanted life to be uncommon relative to the size of the universe for millions of unknown reasons. Or ……..
On related by different point. Making inferences about our significance and God’s purposes from the size of the universe is usually quite shaky. Our smallness relative to the universe as a whole is, by itself, of no more significant than our hugeness relative to protons.
June 13th, 2009 | 10:57 pm
smmtheory:
In response to my statement “Anyway, the logical consequence of the Christian idea of God is that artistic control over the Big Bang is all it takes,” you say:
“Except for one thing… the begetting of Jesus.”
To this, my response is, “Oh? Why?”
To clarify: There’s nothing particularly more miraculous (on the physical level) about the begetting of Jesus than about, say, earlier resurrections (e.g. of the son of the widow at Zarephath) or the vanishing of Enoch or Elijah into heaven.
The materialist thinks that the very patterns of thoughts in our brains are no more than firing neurons entirely attributable to physical causes, themselves caused by earlier causes, standing at the near end of a chain of physical cause-and-effect started at the Big Bang.
But “thermodynamic miracles” (what a choice of terms!) are accepted by science: For a “particle” to, on very rare occasions, interact with others in an unusual way is predicted by the standard model.
So what (on, again, the physical level) is required to produce a virgin birth? The sudden creation of a trillion quanta-worth of atoms in the correct patterns to produce the other half of the DNA needed to make an egg fertilized, right? God can “start” the Big Bang in just such a way as to cause the particles in Mary’s womb to produce this effect, and the thing is done.
Or one can go non-deterministic and call every miracle, the physical part of the Incarnation included, an instance of “quantum weirdness” producing interactions that normally don’t occur.
Or one can go trans-dimensional and attribute the “lightning-like” appearances of angelic beings to their intersection with our plane of existence (with a nod to Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland”).
Or all three. Whatever you do, God has authority over the current physical state of the universe, including the ability to affect angelic visitations, multiplied loaves, and the Incarnation, without any need to violate anything science has shown to be true. The thing which makes Christianity anathema to materialist scientists, then, is not that it contradicts what they know of science — far from it! No, it’s only that it contradicts the materialist philosophy that they’ve adopted on faith.
The lesson here is a general one: Materialists are enamored of the scientific method, in which we conduct experiments on the physical world while holding the working assumption that nothing but physical causes will contribute to the outcome. But they’re so enamored of it that they “take their work home with them”; that is, they transform their working assumption into a universal axiom, held by faith.
The working assumption, after all, is fit for the lab only because of probabilities (how likely is it, given the rarity of spectacular miracles, that your experiment will be altered by one?) and because of God’s character (why would He choose to interrupt your experiment, anyway?), and because of the scientific culture of repeatable testing (should God choose to interrupt your experiment, He presumably will leave alone your colleagues’ repetitions of it, and your bad results will be written off as experimental error).
But in materialist philosophy, the starting assumption all events in the history of space-time are physically caused, not caused by mind (God’s, or anyone else’s). This axiom is untestable, unprovable, and unfounded, but it is adopted because they like it and it produces a lazily dog-like mind inured to the notion of meaning or intent behind the physical cosmos.
What they miss, however, is that their assertion that all events have physical causes does not preclude all physical causes from being ultimately intended by God.
They assume an entirely physical universe in an attempt to preclude God, and end, not in precluding God, but in the validity of their own thinking, including the thinking by which they came to those conclusions. God, meanwhile, retains an untouched sovereignty even in their redesigned universe.
In the end, the only way they can reject God is by looking for another cause for the Big Bang, in a larger multiverse (“the loaf,” as some theorists like to call it). But, amusingly, this is just an “anything-but-God-of-the-gaps:” They can’t exclude God from the Big Bang onward, so they say that whatever triggered the Big Bang was “anything but God.” So they postulate physical causes (colliding universes and so on). But this fails because if those physical causes themselves existed in anything like a time-continuum, then they themselves must have been caused, and the problem remains: What caused THEM? But if they are outside anything like Time, they are therefore causeless, eternal.
Which is a problem because an uncaused eternal first cause sounds very like God. At this point the materialist has nothing with which to reject God other than the assertion that, whatever else this uncaused eternal first cause might be, “it isn’t a Person.” When a Theist answers, “Why not?” the only honest answer a materialist could give would be, “Because that would make Him God, and I don’t like the implications of that.”
You’ll notice that in all of the above, I focus purely on the physical attributes of the miraculous. Of course I don’t think the Incarnation was NOTHING BUT the unexpected creation of some DNA in Mary’s womb. But that is what the materialist cares about: He rejects the notion of God mucking about with the physical chain of cause-and-effect in the universe. Obviously Jesus was (is!) far more than an unexpected body!
June 15th, 2009 | 3:36 am
Jay Richards,
The waste comes not from scarcity or the use of resources, but creating more than is necessary – much, much, more. God could have created a universe containing only this solar system – that would have been efficient. That the universe extends beyond our light-cone, thus beyond our detection, means that God did not create the Universe for Man, but for his Children. Ergo,
Man is not God’s only child.
June 15th, 2009 | 12:16 pm
Begetting implies involvement. Sorry, but the Christian definition of Jesus as God’s only begotten son kind of precludes a scientific definition of artistic control of only one moment in time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that you are implying that God has not/does not involve himself in the history of Humanity. But stretching the “thermodynamic miracles” to cover over the long range the act of begetting is a bit over ambitious I think.
June 19th, 2009 | 11:38 am
[...] by Discovery Institute fellow John West on the “new theistic evolutionists.” (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part [...]
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