Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (1)

This is the 2nd blog in this series which began with Journey into the Unknown:  Science and Religion.    In this blog I will look at Denis Alexander’s book CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE?    which I had previously commented on back in March 2009 in my blog  Creation vs. Evolution: The Imaginary Divide.

Rather than simply write a review of Alexander’s book or to evaluate his theory on how science and Christianity can not only co-exist but co-operate with one another, I want to look in the next couple of blogs about some of the assumptions Alexander makes in concluding that we need not choose between creation and science (a conclusion with which I agree).   Some of the issues raised – those related to the Jewish rejection of Babylonian mythological creation stories –  I mentioned in a previous blog The Literal Value of Genesis.  I am going to look more at the theology he presents than the science, but his arguments rely a great deal on scientific fact to support his contentions.

One of the key factors which shapes the science vs. religion debate is the effect of the Enlightenment on how we understand truth.  (I’ve written about this in several past blogs, one of the longer pieces being:  Christianity and Science).  Alexander writes:

“Western readers, in particular, are not very practiced at reading ancient literature and have a tendency to interpret with a wooden literalism.  This is because scientific literature has become so dominant in our culture, influencing the way in which we instinctively read even those texts that come from a pre-scientific age.”

In other words, part of the fundamentalist debate against science and evolution is based in the fact that these Christians insist the bible must be read literally and as if it is science to be true.   The literalists are allowing science to define truth and arguing on scientific terms.  The Bible however was written in the pre-scientific age and while speaking of eternal truths is couched in the language, assumptions, knowledge and perspectives of the people inspired to write God’s revelation to humanity.   This is part of what inspiration means – God works in, through and with the humans He has chosen to reveal His plan and will. 

One interesting point Alexander (pp 154-155) makes about the Genesis creation story is that Genesis 1:2 says the earth was “formless and void”.    In this first chapter of Genesis this is where God’s creative process begins for the very thing God is going to do is to impose order on the chaos and to fill the emptiness with life.    As Alexander notes about the days of creation the formlessness is given order:  on day 1 – God separates light and dark, on  day 2 – God separates waters of the sea from waters of the sky, and on day 3 – God separates the sea from dry land which allows for the creation of plants.    On the world now formed and ordered, God fills the emptiness:  on day 4 – lights are made to rule day and night, on day 5 – birds and fishes are created to fill the sky and seas,  and on day 6 –  God creates animals and humans to fill the land .       Later in the book (p 263) Alexander mentions the Prophet  Jeremiah lamenting a reversal of the process of God filling the emptiness due to human sin.  The “Disobedience of God’s people is unraveling the beauty of the created order.”  Alexander sees this as the Biblical meta-story – the Bible was never intended to be a science text book, but by placing this world in the eternal plan of God gives all things on earth including life, death and evolution meaning.

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void (same words as Genesis 1:2);

and to the heavens, and they had no light.

 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD,

 before his fierce anger.   (Jeremiah 4:23-26, NRSV)

The creation story of Genesis is placing before us the story of humanity and the world in God’s terms.  It is not giving us an exact scientific framework for understanding creation.  If we miss that point, we misunderstand a great deal about the Scriptures of God.

One of the difficulties Christians face in reading the scriptures and accepting the scientific account of the world’s history is why there is death in the world.  Christians in the Patristic age concluded death was the result of human sin, and thus God is not to blame for the mortality of His favored creatures.  It was not God’s plan for humans to die, but human choice inflicted death not only on humanity but also on all creation.  Many of these ideas are gleaned from St. Paul’s reading of Genesis, for the Old Testament itself makes virtually no reference to the effects of the fall of Adam and Eve on humanity (2 Esdras 3 does).  Alexander however notes:  “Nowhere in the Old Testament is there the slightest suggestion that the physical death of either animals or humans, after a reasonable span of years, is anything other than the normal pattern ordained by God for this earth.”   This is true of the current Jewish and Protestant scriptures.  However, the early Christians relied on the Septuagint version of the Jewish scriptures and in Wisdom 1:12-16 it is made clear that God did not make death and that it is the unrighteous who have summoned death into being.   The notion that humans would have lived eternally if there had been no sin is not spelled out in Genesis or in the Jewish canonical Scriptures.   In general the notion of the immortality of the soul is a more Hellenic idea than biblical one.  Certainly even in the New Testament the resurrection of Christ is nowhere connected with the immortality of the soul but rather with the resurrection of the body.  Alexander’s reading of the Scriptures brings him to this conclusion: “It is clear from these contexts that it is not death per se which is caused by sin, but rather premature death which is seen as specific punishment for specific sins.”

Next:  Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (2)

Journey into the Unknown: Science and Religion

Physicist and author Brian Greene wrote an article in the May 2009 magazine WIRED entitled, “Journey into the Unknown: It’s the Questions, not the answers, that make science the ultimate adventure.”   In that article he captures what seems to me to be the very essence of science:  it is about exploring mystery without which science would come to an end.  He says science is not memorizing  facts, charts and equations, rather “science is the journey.”  His definition of science is how I normally conceive science, and not only science but theology as well.  Greene writes:

Science is about immersing ourselves in piercing uncertainty while struggling with the deepest of mysteries. It is the ultimate adventure. Against staggering odds, a species that has walked upright for only a few million years is trying to unravel puzzles that are billions of years in the making. How did the universe begin? How was life initiated? How did consciousness emerge? Einstein captured it best when he wrote, “the years of anxious searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express.” That’s what science is about.

For me it is also what theology is about for not only do we exist in a universe which we can explore and endeavor to discover its hidden truths, the universe also exists in God who has chosen to reveal Himself in and through the universe which He made.  Science and religion are both quests – science into the macro-cosmos and the microcosmic universe, and theology into the depths of the soul of humans as well as into the eternal life of the Triune God.  Greene says,

Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.

The wrestling with mystery, not the ascension to resolution, defines who we are.

We all are in search of understanding what it means to be human, whether we consider the human to be created by the Divine or a purely material product of random natural forces.   Theology too is about trying to move us from what is known (the physical, material universe) into the unknown (the mysteries of God).   For many religion is nothing more than repeating ancient formuli:  “God said it. I believe it.  That settles it.”  I on the other hand along with so many others have experienced in theology a great sojourn often taking the answers to discover what is the right question?

Because I conceive science and theology the way that I do, I look to both science and theology to enrich my understanding of what it is to be human.  I see no need for the two to be in opposition to each other -  if they are seeking to find answers to the universal questions of humanity, they are going about it in different ways and making very different assumptions.  I don’t see any basic reason for science and religion to be in opposition to each other for they are both different ways of knowing the universe AND what they conceive of as ultimate reality are totally distinct.  In science ultimate reality is the material universe while in religion ultimate reality lies in God the creator of the material universe and who is not coterminous with this universe.  Our ability to know God may in some way be limited by our being part of the material universe, but we humans also have the roots of our being in God.

Taking these things into consideration I do not feel the threat or pressure from the arguments conducted between some scientists and some religious people who see God and science as being in opposition over such issues as evolution or the age of the universe.  While I have been interested in the writings of Intelligent Design folk in trying to bridge the gap between science and religion, I have not become convinced that have found the way to build the bridge.

I read two books earlier this year  which explore the relationship between science and religion on the issues of creation and evolution which I will comment on is this series of blogs.  The books are Denis Alexander’s CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE?  and Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett’s EVOLUTION FROM CREATION TO NEW CREATION: CONFLICT, CONVERSATION, AND CONVERGENCE.   Both books do a good job of using scientific fact and information and Christian theology to look at science, intelligent design and theology.  They propose slightly different solutions for how to hold science and religion together but both believe they are compatible.   The effort to insist that science and religion are in fact compatible is one that appeals to my own interests.  I have read at times Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution is True and note his frequent criticisms of religious people who attack science and also his well expressed doubt that religious efforts (such as intelligent design) to find compatibility with science do so only by co-opting science and requiring that science abandon its own principles and logic. 

Next:  Creation or Evolution: Do We have to Choose?

Creation vs. Evolution: The Imaginary Divide

The one who first states a case seems right,

until the other comes and cross-examines.

(Proverbs 18:17)

I don’t know how often it happens that a person reads something which actually changes their mind on an issue, but I will say that reading CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE? clarified enough issues in my mind regarding creation and evolution to put me more firmly in one camp in this debate.

A dozen years or so ago I began teaching an Introduction to Religion course at the University of Dayton which had as one of its required readings Genesis 1-3.  The students in my class held to a wide range of views on the issues related to creation versus evolution, and their questions and attitudes caused me to constantly reflect on my own beliefs regarding these issues.  I previously wrote about my own evolution in thinking on these issues in my blog Christianity and Science.

I held some vague ideas that Genesis 1-3 was true, and that evolution was true, and that these two sets of truth were somehow compatible, though I hadn’t thought out clearly what that meant or even if that was possible.  Years of teaching the Introduction to Religion course forced me to investigate more about the claims of evolution, of creationists, of intelligent design advocates, and of what truth meant when applied to Genesis 1-3.   I read books defending evolution and others advocating intelligent design.  I read more into how the Church has understood and used Genesis 1-3 in its own theology, Christology and soteriology.  The reading in Genesis, theology and hermeneutics caused me to realize Genesis 1-3 was not written to be science but was really geared to speak to the question, “For a theist, what does it mean to be human?”   Doing a detailed study of the text showed me that reading it absolutely literally was not the best way to understand the text (see my book QUESTIONING GOD). 

While I became more informed on the issues, the polemics and the polarization which pervade the creation versus evolution topic, I was willing to live with the ambiguities of how to live with the contradictions which the various points of view represented.  The contradictions did not seem to have any real resolution since each author would dismiss the claims of his or her antagonists and no one seemed capable of considering the merits of other points of view.

In CREATION OR EVOLUTION: DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE, Denis Alexander does a wonderful job of looking at the issues of evolution and creation both from the point of view of science and that of Christianity.   Alexander is unabashedly Christian and unapologetically a scientist.  He does in his book what I had looked for the longest time to find: he considers both issues, evolution and creation from the two different perspectives of science and Christianity.  I found his writings balanced, informative and illuminating.  His book is endorsed by the Evangelical great J.I. Packer and by Dr. Francis Collins, Head of the Human Genome Project, USA.  He lays out the argument for evolution, and explains the theology of creation and Genesis, and makes an effort to weave the two together.  He points the serious scientific shortcomings of intelligent design and shows it to be more a culture war proposition than a scientific one.  The evidence for evolution is there, and Alexander makes a strong case for why evolution is not and need not be opposed to Christian thinking on creation, despite the attempts of a few atheists and creation scientists to declare them as incompatible.  For me the book removed from my mind notions that there is of necessity an incompatibility between evolution and Christianity.  The issues no longer seem ambiguous to me, nor do I feel ambivalent toward them.   Truth is truth – scientific truth reveals to us what God is doing just as much as biblical truth does.  The antagonism between Christianity and evolution does not need to be there and Denis Alexander shows us why.

The Tree of Life: Darwin vs. Genesis

Any magazine whose cover story proclaims that Darwin was wrong is sure to attract some attention from biologists, evolutionary theorists, intelligent design adherents and creationists.   But when the magazine is devoted to the study of science rather than defending a religious belief, it surely will draw the attention of those who have engaged in the evolution vs creation, faith vs. Reason, science  vs. Religion debates.    Such is the cover of the 21 January 2009 issue of NewScientist.  In that issues Graham Lawton reasons Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life .

The issue and the debate are interesting.  Lawton begins the article by stating:

The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin’s thinking, equal in importance to natural selection, according to biologist W. Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened. The tree also helped carry the day for evolution. Darwin argued successfully that the tree of life was a fact of nature, plain for all to see though in need of explanation. The explanation he came up with was evolution by natural selection.

So often the anti-evolutionary forces line up to say if Darwin was wrong in any one point of his theory than his entire theory is wrong.  But when science is true to its own method, it acknowledges that any theory is the best approximation of reality based on the known data.  New data will mean that the theory will be subject to change.  However, because scientists are human, change does not come easy.  Such is the case with Darwin’s notion of the tree of life – which is not totally supported by discoveries in DNA and RNA.  Nevertheless some scientists have tried to hold on and defend the notion of the tree of life despite the evidence against it.

“The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that,” he says. “What’s less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.” Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.

If he is right, the tree concept could become biology’s equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. “The tree of life was useful,” says Bapteste. “It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it’s time to move on.”

The story of Darwin’s Tree of Life idea shows that science is capable of change if hard scientific evidence is presented.  The change does not come easy especially when ideas are deeply rooted in the underlying assumptions of evolution.    As Thomas Kuhn argued change in paradigm doesn’t really occur because of the evidence offered, but rather occurs only as adherents to the old way die off or disappear. 

Darwin’s Tree of Life also becomes a paradigm for those who hope to discredit the randomness of evolutionary theory displacing it with the more teleological views of intelligent design.  The bottom line is do the science – you may never change the minds of the staunchest supporters of evolution, but if your ideas are true and worthy of scientific merit and can withstand the test of the scientific method, the adherents of atheistic evolution will disappear.  However if evolution has convincing arguments, sound logic and compelling evidence, it will continue to hold the loyalty of scientists who rely on the scientific method to support their beliefs.

Small Potatoes: The Purpose Driven Life

I remember reading many years ago a wisdom story about greed.  The gist of the story was that in one village the people were always greedy and always did what was immediately gratifying.    Each harvest they ate the biggest potatoes and kept the smallest potatoes for seed.  And of course, every succeeding year the size of all potatoes kept shrinking.  Not until the villagers began saving the largest potatoes for seed and eating the small potatoes did their potatoes grow in size.  Lesson learned in genetics and in gratification.

Robert Roy Britt has written about a similar situation which is occurring throughout the world among animals that humans prey upon.   In Super-Predators:  Humans Force Rapid Evolution of Animals  he notes studies which show  the effects of human hunting and fishing on animals is that many species are now smaller than they were 20 years ago.  Additionally animals which are over hunted and fished tend to produce offspring at younger ages.   This is the end result of hunting and fishing policies which require that only the largest animals be harvested while allowing the smaller animals in a species to go free.

While some scientists believe these changes are evolutionary other “biologists consider them phenotypic and, without evidence of genetic shifts, would not call them evolution.”

Such changes in species whether phenotypic or true genetic shifts raise for me a question about evolutionary theory.   Atheistic biologists would insist that all changes in species are explained by Natural Selection – a cause and effect relationship with every effect having a cause and thus all biology can be accounted for by looking to the past.  Teleological development is discounted completely.   My question is this:  are not the changes which occur in a species in response to changes in the environment in fact  future oriented?   Species are trying to survive into the unknown future and so in fact are future or teleologically oriented.    Their past may have shaped this trait, but the survival of species is about the future – a future which the species cannot know exists.  They are moving toward some unknown future by attempting survival in the present.   This seems to me to be purpose driven and not random.  The species which cannot adapt at all or adapt rapidly enough, become extinct.  Those which adapt for the unknown and unpredictable future survive.   Reproduction and species survival seem to be two of the best indicators that there is purposefulness in nature and that all life is future oriented not simply driven by its past.

The Singularity and the Acceleration of Evolution

I have been reading inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: WHEN HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY.   Kurzweil is discussing a merging which will take place between human intelligence and computer artificial intelligence in the near future and what a total change this will be for all humanity.   It is a fascinating read even when the science is beyond my comprehension.  Kurzweiler predicts that in 2045, “The nonbiological intelligence created … will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”  He predicts this based upon how information, inventiveness and artificial intelligence are already increasing, but the rate of increase is growing ever faster.   For example compared to where we are today in using computers and the Internet, consider this 1949 prediction in the magazine POPULAR MECHANINCS:  “Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.”  Imagine that, laptops and blackberries weighing less than 2 tons!  Unthinkable 60 years ago, it represents how fast information is changing, and the rate of change according to Kurzweiler is still accelerating. 

Kurzweil comments on a number of issues related to my recent series of blogs on science, evolution, intelligent design and post-modernism.  I list the comments that caught my attention (I am only on page 200 of a 600 page book, and haven’t gotten to the sections of the book which were why my son suggested I read it in the first place).  

 ”A key question concerning the information content of biological systems is how it is possible for the genome, which contains comparatively little information, to produce a system such as a human, which is vastly more complex than the genetic information that describes it.”  Purely from the point of view of complexity in this example of DNA producing a human being, we do see a relatively less complex system producing a system of much greater complexity.   Kurzweil continues, “There are only eight hundred million bytes of information in the entire human genome…  this is about one hundred million times les information than is represented by all of the interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentration patterns in a fully formed human brain.”    This certainly would challenge the ID’s notion of irreducible complexity as being proof of a “designer” other than evolution.   All of the parts of a brain do not have to function to make the genetic code work.

Kurzweil has no problem using the term “design” with biology.   He  thinks the human brain is “the best example we can get our hands on of an intelligent process” and he feels in understanding the human brain we will master “the software for intelligence.”  But interesting he refers to evolution as the “original ‘designer’” of the human brain.  Maybe expanding the sense of intelligent design to include evolution as a possible designer might overcome the impasse which exists between scientists and the ID folk.  Kurzweil writes that it took several billion years for evolution to design the brain.

As proof the ever accelerating process of evolution and intelligence, Kurzweil writes, “The evolution of life-forms required billions of years for its first steps (primitive cells, DNA), and then progress accelerated.  During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years.  Later, humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.”  He goes on to argue that the pace of evolution in intelligence is now being quickened ever faster not by nature but by “human-created technology.”    One other issue that he raises is that nothing says that evolution has had to proceed at a constant pace – in fact it is quite possible based on his observations that evolution can at times suddenly accelerate even exponentially, which might explain some of the variation we see in the charts of evolution and some of the periods of “explosion” we can observe in the development of life.

Further, Kurzweil notes how intelligence has changed through the long history of evolution, “Single-cell animals could remember events for seconds, based on chemical reactions.  Animals with brains could remember events for days.  Primates with culture could pass down information through several generations.  Early human civilizations with oral histories were able to preserve stories for hundreds of years.  With the advent of written language the permanence extended to thousands of years.”   This whole pattern will be even more radically changed by computers.  For as Kurzweil notes, one human studies and learns a new language, but his learning is limited to himself as all other humans must go through the same process of learning the new language themselves.  Not so with computers.  Once a computer learns a new language (or any new information) it can instantaneously download what it has just learned to all other computers.  The rate of learning (transferring information) is going to increase exponentially!

The Politics of Science

This is the 4th in a Series:  Part 1 -  Post-modernism: A Challenge to Science? ; Part 2 – The Limits of Scientific Positivism; Part 3 -  Scientific Theory and Intelligent Design

Currently Intelligent Design (ID) is challenging the hegemony science claims to have on truth.   ID is in some ways accepting the post-modern claim that science is in fact an ethnocentric view – based in modernism and the European Enlightenment- but not in fact “objective” and unbiased.  Intelligent Design questions whether the basic assumptions of Darwinism are based in “scientific facts” which can be tested by the scientific method, or whether Darwinism is based in the philosophical assumptions of materialism and atheism rather than in science and is thus promoting a non-scientific agenda.

The ID movement is attempting to challenge the politics, power and construal of science and positivism.  It is attempting to do this by showing that its “design” assumptions are a fair and reasonable reading of the scientific data we have about the universe.   ID bases its claim to rationality in a mathematical assumption about probability – what is the likeliness that “design” could appear in nature as a result of random cause and effect events?   They see the orderliness in the universe as the proof that something other than random events is affecting the unfolding of the universe.   They have come to the same conclusion that countless believers have – the orderliness found in nature speaks of purpose which hints at meaningfulness.  It doesn’t prove intelligent design exists but it suggests believing in a designer is rational and based in the facts we can observe.

 Unfortunately ID has a logical flaw and limit similar to Darwinian science which means ID can also only ever be a theory, which is what ID criticizes evolution for being.   But in their own literature, ID admits to being a theory:  

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. … Is intelligent design a scientific theory?   Yes.

ID is trying to establish itself as legitimate science even if it is not based in positivism and accepts teleology.    Its criticism of Darwinism focuses purely on the notion of whether or not design exists in the universe that cannot be accounted for by cause and effect.  Recent ID claims especially through the Discovery Institute focus much more on the notion that Darwinism is about political achievement and power not about objective science.  ID does not claim that its science will make for a better universe or find new discoveries that will benefit humankind.   None seem to be claiming that ID would make any difference in the practice of medicine or engineering.   The issue is one of a political power struggle.  Can there be even an agreement on what constitutes “science”?  Is the study of science limited to cause and effect observations, or has quantum mechanics revealed that such thinking is inadequate to the understanding of nature?    If subatomic particles seem to “anticipate” certain actions, is teleology back on the scientific table?    Is science interested in objective truth or does it have some political need to reject “design”?  Can ID challenge the assumptions of Darwinism enough to make science skeptical of its certitude?  Will the rise of post-modernity truly cause all human endeavors, even science, to admit a whole new paradigm is needed to study the universe?

These are questions that swirl in the world of ideas.   Science which has felt itself almost unassailable by the ebb and flow of philosophical debates finds its thinking  changed by the discoveries of quantum mechanics at the very time that post-modernism is challenging the way in which humans construe the universe on every other level.

Francis Bacon in the early 17^th Century, according to Stephen McKnight’s THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF FRANCIS BACON’S THOUGHT, felt that humankind “has deluded itself into thinking that the limited knowledge it does possess exhausts the mind’s capacities.”   Has science, which Bacon so promoted, also deluded itself into thinking it alone possesses the fullness of the truth and therefore has nothing to learn from ID or any other thought which challenges its assumptions?    If Darwinism is being driven by its philosophical presuppositions rather than by application of its ideas, Bacon would say it is doomed.  For he argued that discovery should always lead to new applications, while mere philosophy does nothing more than to preserve what has already been accomplished.

Scientific Theory and Intelligent Design

This is the 3^rd in a Series:  Part 1 -  Post-modernism: A Challenge to Science? ; Part 2 – The Limits of Scientific Positivism

Certainly on one level, Darwinist and Intelligent Design advocates are going to have a hard time coming to some kind of agreement about what constitutes science.  Science is based in positivism and so axiomatically excludes teleology; in other words science assumes all things can be accounted for by cause and effect with the past explaining the present, rather than by any idea that things are moving toward some future goal.  Whether the rejection of teleology is science – can teleology be disproven by the scientific method? – or is really is an issue of politics/power/religion is another question.  On the other hand, Intelligent Design wants teleology kept in the scientific equation, at least as a possibility – to see if in fact intentional design exists in the empirical universe.  ID wants science to admit the existence of certain factors (design, teleology) that science by definition says cannot be part of its study.  Intelligent Design accepts a notion that the purpose of something that exists may lie in the future and cannot be fully explained or understood by limiting oneself to studying the past and the cause -effect pattern.   ID assumes there is some purpose to what is unfolding which will be revealed in the future, science says the explanation for what exists can be found only in the past.

Whereas science assumes there is a natural cause for each effect we can observe and that the study of the universe must follow the unfolding of natural cause and effect, Intelligent Design assumes that complex functionality (as can be observed say in DNA or at the microbiological level) is a sign of purposeful design built into the empirical world;  ”design” in ID thinking is outside the limits of the natural cause and effect unfolding of time and space as it is not explainable by what naturally preceded it (its cause) but is understood only in what comes after its appearance.   In other words in Intelligent Design encountering “design” in the universe (what they call “complex and specified information”) means there is no natural cause for the observed effect of design.  Encountering natural “design” means that “cause and effect” could not have caused the design – thus the assumption that a “designer” must exist (ID claims the “designer” does not mean de facto “God” but could be some unidentifiable power or even function in nature).    An observed design in nature for ID proves something more than natural chance would had to have caused the design.  “Design” is thus not mere effect, but involves intentional planning and purposeful function.  Darwinism is not willing to admit that irreducible complexity in nature proves design – all it proves is that our understanding of how nature works is incomplete.

To some extent Intelligent Design seems limited by the scientific positivism it wants to reject:  namely, it assumes that there is no true knowledge that cannot be observed.  Thus because they cannot observe or imagine how design came into being they assume it cannot have a natural cause.  That assumption is science in a positivistic sense.  It fails however to allow for unobservable patterns and developments in the same way that atheistic science does.  It is possible that we simply have not been able to observe or imagine the causes of “designs” in nature in the same way that we have not been able to prove teleological patterns in nature.  Both the theory of evolution and Intelligent Design have a similar flaw to them: they assume that explanations must be found in observation and that an effect must have a demonstrable cause – either a natural one or a designer.  However (and strangely) either’s assumption could be disproven by the existence of things or events that we are not capable of observing.  And both would say this very fact discredits the other as true science – science cannot prove design (and a designer) do not exist, ID cannot prove that spontaneous organization of complexity cannot happen.  

Darwinists say no test could ever be imagined let alone proposed which could disprove Intelligent Design, therefore it is not science.  On the other hand to date no test has been proposed that could disprove the evolution of new species.  Darwinists assume that given enough time future speciation would be shown.  The problem is that no amount of time can be proposed after which it is assumed that speciation cannot occur.  It becomes an endless or open ended proposition – we will only know that it cannot occur when time ends and it hasn’t occurred.   If no test can be proposed which would disprove speciation, how is that any different than the inability to propose a test which proves design?

Next -  The Politics of Science

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

As an Orthodox priest, I am always interested in the question, “what does it mean to be human?”  Science has a particular take on that question, which I find useful for understanding both humans and the universe. 

For example, scientists can with a high degree of accuracy determine the amount of each chemical element that is found the human body.   We learn from these studies that humans are largely composed of the four elements oxygen, carbon hydrogen, and nitrogen (by mass these 4 elements make up almost 97% of a human).   Oxygen by far composes the greatest mass in a human – slightly more than 61% of a human by mass is oxygen.  By contrast the air we breathe is 23% oxygen by mass.   Air is 75% nitrogen, while a human is only 2.6% nitrogen by mass.  A chemical analysis of humans will give us truth about what it means to be human, but it doesn’t give us the full truth for we know that a human is far more than simply chemicals.  The same is true of DNA – we now can describe the human genome and have a very accurate picture of what it means to be human in terms of DNA – or the ACGT bases which are the code defining the various characteristics of every living thing.  From the point of view of genetics it is precisely DNA which makes us human and is what distinguishes us from other animals.  This is all true and tell us something about what it is to be human, yet again, we would not agree that being human can be reduced to studying proteins, for we believe humans are more than simply protein alignments.  No matter how much chemistry and genetics can accurately and truthfully describe a human, we would say to limit our understanding of humanity to elements and proteins would not give a full and complete understanding of what it means to be human.

From my point of view science, biology, genetics or evolution are no threats to my understanding of what it means to be human.  They cannot prove or disprove any of the claims of the Bible, for the Bible is not science but rather offers an understanding of humanity that goes far beyond the reductionist definitions which chemistry or genetics offer about what a human is.  Indeed a merely scientific worldview can devalue humans, reducing them to chemicals, proteins and inert matter, and this can lead to denying that human embryos or fetuses are really human and to other errors in thought.   The understanding of what it means to be human, for Christians is shaped by faith in the revelation of God that humans are in His image and that we are animated material – animated by the Holy Spirit of God.   Humans can be described in terms of materialism, but such a description is neither complete or sufficient for understanding humans.

I write all of this really as an introduction to two thoughts and observations I want to make on comments offered by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson in the NY TIMES:

• 1) Judson in ALL HAIL THE APPLE MAGGOT! offers an explanation for why we can more readily observe the extinction of species than the evolution of new species. Basically her argument is that extinction is fairly observable – a last known animal of a species dies – and this has happened in our lifetimes. The emergence of a new species takes place over an extended period of time, and what we can observe is the process but the real emergence of a new species will take much longer than any generation of humans will be on earth. She offers the apple maggot fly as an example of an emerging species. This fly is still part of the hawthorn fly species but according to Judson began in the mid 19^th Century to evolve into a separate species with the introduction of apples to North America. You can read her explanation of why she believes the apple maggot fly is a species in formation. The limit to her argument is that while the divergence of the hawthorn fly into an apple fly is in process, speciation still hasn’t occurred. And though given enough time and the right conditions, one can imagine the apple fly evolving into a separate species, it cannot yet be scientifically proven – we will always be able to observe that speciation of the apple fly has not occurred but there will be no time limit in which we would be able to declare that it will not occur. So speciation possibly could occur at some time in the infinite and indefinite future, but there is no point at which it can definitely be declared that it cannot or will not happen. So it is a hypothesis which cannot be disproven, which is very similar to claims of logical fallacy that some atheists make against arguments for the existence of God.
• 2) In RESURRECTION SCIENCE Judson describes the excitement created in mapping the genome of the Woolly Mammoth from genetic material extracted from frozen bits of mammoths which died 10,000 years ago. What stood out for me in her article is the description of how fraught with failure is the science of cloning. It turns out that it is not as easy as science to create life. Even cloning life turns out to need a tremendous amount of human intelligent design to make it happen. There are implications for why it is reasonable to believe that it would have needed the intentional meddling of a Creator to cause life to exist in the first place. And while Judson can imaginatively be excited about a resurrection of the woolly mammoth, she acknowledges it would take a whole lot more knowledge than we currently have to pull it off. And even at that science would not be thinking about the resurrection as we Christians understand it – bringing a deceased being back to life, but only of reviving the genetic line of an extinct species. That would be a scientific miracle of sorts, but will do little to help us understand what it means to be human.

Intelligent Design – Still a Matter of Faith

In the debate between secular humanist scientists and biblical literalist creationists, some creationists have offered what they see as a compromise – Intelligent Design (ID).  ID has been seen by many believers as a good way to deal with the otherwise unbridgeable contradictions between the discoveries of science and the claims biblical literalists say are the scientific truths of the Genesis creation story.   Because some believers accept the truth of secular science regarding the age of the earth and the mechanism of evolution, they have wanted to find a way to reconcile the discoveries of science with the Genesis story of creation.   Since there are some “gaps” in evidence for the theory of evolution, believers have proposed ID as the key to fill the gaps and explain the unfolding of the universe.  Secular scientists criticize ID as a “God of the gaps” idea, whose need shrinks with every new scientific discovery that fills one of the existing gaps in our knowledge.  

All of this introduction, which is simply restating this old debate, to get to the point of this blog.  While Intelligent Design seems like a good solution to many believers as they synthesize their beliefs from the bible with their knowledge of science, it has not proven itself to be a very useful tool for evangelism and outreach to secular scientists and atheists.  So while believers take comfort in it, if our goal is to preach the Gospel to all nations and peoples, we must be aware that ID is not convincing to many secular scientists and non-believers because it is not science.  Take for example the concluding comments of Harvard’s sociobiologist E.O. Wilson in his book written as an outreach to biblical literalists, THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH:

“Much as I would like to think otherwise, I see no hope for compromise in the idea of Intelligent Design.  Simply put, this proposal agrees that evolution occurs but argues that it is guided by a supernatural intelligence.  The evidence for Intelligent Design, however, consists solely of a default argument.  Its logic is simply this: biologists have not yet explained how complex systems such as the human eye and spinning bacterial cilium could have evolved by themselves; therefore a higher intelligence must have guided the evolution.  Unfortunately, no positive evidence exists for Intelligent Design.  None has been proposed to test it.  No theory has been suggested, or even imagined, to explain the transcription from supernatural force to organic reality.  That is why statured scientists, those who have led in original research, unanimously agree that the theory of Intelligent Design does not qualify as science.  …  it is a dangerous step for theologians to summon the default argument of Intelligent Design as scientific support for religious belief.  …. In science, as in logic, a default argument can never replace positive evidence, but even a sliver of positive evidence can demolish a default argument.”

Wilson says the very glory of science is to propose theories and to prove or disprove them.  He says the person who could prove through scientific method the existence of God would gain instant fame and recognition.  So he dismisses the idea that scientists are simply closed minded to God, and says that instead since no theory or test has been proposed to prove ID’s claim of a God, it is de facto not science. 

My only point in this blog is to say as comforting as ID is to believers to help them reconcile biblical faith with secular scientific truth, ID at this time is not an effective evangelistic tool with which to bring the Gospel of Truth to secular scientists and atheists.  Let us not blind ourselves to scientific truth because we find ID reassuring to our shaky faith.  ID remains totally unconvincing to secularists.  And instead of us committing ourselves to ID as science and then trying to convince scientists that ID is science, we are better off acknowledging that ID belongs to the realm of faith not science.   Otherwise we believers are once again going to find ourselves trying to offer as truth something which science rejects – just like the biblically based claims that the earth doesn’t move, that the sun circles the earth, that the earth is the center of the universe – and we will be placed again in the odd position of arguing against the truth, and we will not bring secularists to faith in God.  It will simply be a modern version of the Copernicus/Galileo controversy all over again, and the Pope already apologized for that debacle.