Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Intelligent Design

  • Is there such a thing as a theistic evolutionist?

    Panda’s Thumb writer Pim van Meurs gave an irony award to Salvador Cordova whom he quotes as saying:

    Darwinian TE (Theistic Evolution) just doesn’t cut it scientifically.

    That is ironic, considering that young earth creationism makes many assertions that contradict archeology, not to mention geology. Young earth doesn’t even match the written record.

    But this statement does remind me of all the reasons I don’t like the label “theist evolutionist.” I’m a theist and I’m an evolutionist, but the two about as unrelated as any two ideas. As a theist I see nature as God’s handiwork, and thus evolution as God’s elegant way of producing diversity. But that doesn’t change what I see when I see nature.

    There really should be no difference between a theistic evolutionist and any other variety in the field or in the lab. Now I’m not a scientist at all, but I don’t keep inserting “and God did that” between the lines of every science book I read.

    Two commenters on Panda’s Thumb, Raging Bee and Doug S make extremely cogent comments.

    As I’ve argued in my response to The God Delusion, my theist is emphatically not a scientific thesis, nor do I claim scientific evidence for it. So in answer to my title question, I think not. But we’re probably stuck with the term to describe people like me no matter how weak it is.

  • The Complexity of the Creator

    The attack on moderation, or excluding the middle (broadly conceived) and the assumption that this is all there is are the two key points of disagreement, from which most everything else follows.

    The assumption that this physical universe is all that exists is illustrated in the discussion of the multiverse theory (pp. 145-147). Now do not take this too far. I’m actually attracted by the multiverse theory as he expresses it. It’s obviously speculation, but it’s enjoyable speculation at least, and may even point in the right direction in years to come. My knowledge of physics is too small to go any further than that.

    But for me the question still remains–who is the creator? At some point you do have to get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The environment in which the universes of the multiverse exist, such as to be subjected to natural selection must exist, and thus you only push the question back another step. Now, instead of asking where the universe comes from, you must ask where the multiverse comes from. The universe is clearly not nearly so universal as we thought (if these speculations are true). It is naturally caused by the multiverse.

    This should be familiar to those who have studied arguments for the existence of God. The question frequently comes back to where God comes from. But that is the point of that particular category of argument. Because nothing else is self-existent, we look for a self-existent source for other things, because it seems pretty clear that something must be self-existent. (Of course it may indeed be “turtles all the way down!”)

    At the same time if we admit that something is self-existent we have already taken a step beyond anything we understand within the physical world. We’re imagining something that’s so far out of the box that it’s, well, out of the universe, or perhaps even out of the multiverse. At this point, I think I’m making one of the best arguments for agnosticism. Whatever is the ultimate cause or “ground of all being” (Tillich), is not something we can measure according to the standards we know.

    Thus I find it totally irrelevant, though interesting, for Dawkins to claim that God must be “very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” Well, yes. And if theists in general were asserting that God had first evolved into what he is and then created the universe, that would be relevant. But this is a clear example of Dawkins assumption that even God must be natural. He first defines God into the natural universe and then argues against him, but that is simply a complex way of assuming one’s conclusions. As it is, it kind of misses the point.

    What theists are saying is that there simply is no natural force that can produce the creator, period, so the creator is something that is outside of our physical universe, who operates according to very different laws.

    For a contrary view more conservative than mine, see Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. (My company publishes that book.)

  • Points of Agreement

    [Continuing my series responding to The God Delusion. The starting entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]

    It may surprise many readers to know that I have a number of points of agreement with Dawkins. Since I have blogged about many of these things before, I’m only going to give a basic list with an occasional link to other writing I have done on the subject.

    First, I accept the theory of evolution, and I even appreciate the description Dawkins gives about it. For an understanding of atheistic evolution (and I believe the adjective is not unfair in his case), I recommend The Blind Watchmaker (link to my brief review). But I also recommend it to anyone who simply wants to understand the simple power of variation plus natural selection to produce amazing things. It’s wonderfully well written and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I even understood Gould’s punctuated equilibria much better after I read it! (Gould is one of my favorite science authors of all time, but he tends to be more wordy and is easier to misunderstand than Dawkins.)

    Second, while I know that many Christians have been offended by the title and the tone of the book, I’m afraid I don’t see the point. I titled my opening entry From the Land of the Deluded. Why? Is it because I believe I am, in fact, deluded? No. I just find it amusing. What is puzzling to me is that Christians are concerned that an atheist calls them deluded. If he is, in fact, an atheist, as what else could he regard them? If he is an atheist he doesn’t share many basic assumptions with them. What possible offense can his judgment have on them? I’m a believer in dialog, and I think dialog needs to be courteous. But dialog also needs to be clear. We need to know what each party to the discussion actually believes, otherwise we cannot possibly hope to come to a real understanding.

    Third, I deplore the negative stereotyping of atheists in American or any other culture. I do not believe that atheists are by nature immoral any more than anyone else. I would have no problem voting for an atheist for public office.

    Fourth, I do not believe in indoctrination. I do believe in religious education. I advocate this distinction in churches. A child should know about more than his birth faith and should have the right to make an informed choice. This means hearing about other faiths and about the option of no faith, and I would provide this training in Sunday School. Note that I don’t mean teaching from one of the little “Different Religions and How to Convert Them” kind of books, but from materials that positively present the views of the particular group. I blogged about this previously here.

    Fifth, I’m pretty happy both with the Zeitgeist commandments enumerated on page 263 and 264, and with Dawkins’s amendments to the same. It’s perhaps odd that coming from such different positions, we look for such similar things in society, but I think it is a good indication that moderation is a possible option.

    Sixth, I do believe that religious beliefs should be subject to challenge, and I agree pretty much down the line with his comments on the Danish cartoons story (p. 24ff). I blogged about it previously here.

    Sixth, last but not least, I must call attention to the footnote on page 321, quoting Ann Coulter: “I defy any of my co-religionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.” Well, I have not read Ann’s book, so assuming Dawkins has quoted her correctly, I will say simply that I do not laugh at any such thing, nor do I regard it as a Christian attitude for anyone to laugh at the prospect of anyone else burning in hell. (Hell itself is another worthwhile topic, but I’m not going there right now.)

    When there is conflict on issues such as this, I am in favor of religious freedom. I wish I had come away from The God Delusion with the feeling that Dawkins also favors freedom, but I’m not certain. He seems to have a certain tendency to assume that he is right (not necessarily a bad thing), and to assume that he can also make a better choice for everyone else, which I think is a bad thing.

  • God Guided Evolution

    Ed Brayton has an interesting post on views of evolution amongst doctors, which is based on this post by Steve Reuland on the Panda’s Thumb. I should have gotten around to it earlier, like when it was first posted, but it’s finally Saturday, I have a few minutes to work on it, and Ed’s post got me started.

    Quoting from the Panda’s Thumb:

    One question gives respondents three choices, each of which requires the respondent to make a statement about his or her belief in God. The choices are as follows: 1. God created humans exactly as they appear now; 2. God initiated and guided an evolutionary process that has led to current human beings; 3. Humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement – no divinity played any role.

    Ed further notes that:

    Option #2 – God initiated and guided an evolutionary process that has led to current human beings – is not ID, it’s theistic evolution.

    I have a serious problem with the survey question in that I would have to answer option 3 for myself, and yet I’m a theistic evolutionist–or I think that’s what I am. It depends on what one means by the word “guidance,” I suppose, though it seems to me that “thesitic evolutionist” should refer to one who is both a theist and who accepts the theory of evolution. Since option 2 refers specifically to human evolution, it gets right down to the ultimate question of guidance occurring within the process of evolution of one life form to another. Does evolution work by itself or not?

    There are theistic evolutionists who believe that God guided the process of human evolution, for example, but did so in such a way as to conceal his tracks. Now that’s entirely possible, but it introduces a specific purpose into the process–the productions of humans such as you and me. To many, it seems a no-brainer that a Christian would have to accept this concept of evolution. After all, what meaning do concepts like original sin and redemption mean if God didn’t specifically create human beings, as we are, in some sense of the word. As I understand evolution, it would require some kind of guidance to guarantee that random variation combined with undirected selection would produce any particular creature. There are simply too many accidents involved.

    Say we have a mastodon with a particularly nice mutation for dealing with excessive cold, but he is struck by lightning before passing on that trait. The trait disappears, but not because it’s not a good one; it is lost by accident. Over millions of years the likelihood of such accidents is extremely high, and the particular result cannot be guaranteed unless you have some sort of guidance, whether that comes from front-loading or from intervention along the way.

    But I personally think it’s necessary to give up the idea that human beings, precisely as we now have them, are the goal of evolution. I do believe in a type of teleology in creation, i.e. that God has a purpose, but that purpose can be primarily stated as diversity. Given the possibility of intelligence being produced through evolutionary processes, and the extended amounts of space and time available, I think it was inevitable that intelligence would be produced by evolutionary processes. It’s hardly my field of expertise, but I suspect that we’ll find that life has come into existence numerous times and it’s quite possible that intelligence has occurred many times in the universe also and that we are not unique in that sense.

    In fact, I think that such a God makes much more sense. In other words, I believe that evolution can contribute to broadening and deepening our understanding with God. The idea that God created this giant universe with the intent to deal solely and exclusively with one group of intelligent creatures off to the side in a rather ordinary galaxy has never made sense to me. Understand evolution as being God’s means of producing diversity makes sense of that point to me. I think it’s likely that there’s some creature out there somewhere who has a body type I might not even recognize and who is also trying to figure out just where he fits into the grand scheme of things. I find that fascinating and exciting!

    So to me, as a theist, the guidance of evolution is solely in the sense that God chooses to produce a universe with natural laws that will eventually create a great diversity of creatures, and I suspect that we haven’t even a minimal clue as to just how extensive the variety this method can produce actually is. We may want to feel special, but I think we might as well get started now realizing that we’re just one of many very interesting things that could be produced by the evolutionary processes God created.

    Christians may object that the Bible speaks of us as special. I would ask simply just what would you expect of a book involved in the specific interactions of God and human beings? Of course I see a much greater human involvement in scripture than do most Christians, but I think we’re reacting to certain statements much like the grandchild whose grandfather tells him that he’s “grandpa’s special boy” and assumes from that statement that granpa loves him more than all the other grandchildren. Meanwhile, grandpa is off telling the others that they are also “grandpa’s special girl or boy” and so forth. If we’re serious about God being infinite, then we also have to realize that “special” doesn’t exhaust his attention. He doesn’t have to have priority lists.

    My own view is that any naturally occurring intelligence would call forth God’s spiritual contact and communication as those creatures struggle with who they are and why they exist. As they come to realize just where they stand in the general scheme of things it’s time also for them to realize that they have to make a lot of their own way in the universe, because while they may be special to God, they don’t have an exclusive on being special.

    I’m not trying to exclude those who believe in a more direct guidance from the ranks of theistic evolutionists; that would be pointless, and they’d be more likely to win and exclude me. I just want to point out that there is more than one way to be a theist and also accept evolution. God is the ground of all being, as Paul Tillich said, and he is thus the ground of all evolution. But that doesn’t mean he has to tinker with it.

  • Rosenhouse Dissects Johnson

    Jason Rosenhouse has an excellent discussion or even better dissection of some recent writing by Philip Johnson. I’ve had this partial entry on Johnson sitting amongst my drafts for ages, but since Johnson is now bringing forth many of the same arguments, and Rosenhouse has quite thoroughly demolished them, I will simply refer you to his post.

    For some reason lawyers think they have a special handle on argument, but on scientific and religious topics it appears to be largely vacuous. Perhaps they should allow some facts to interfere somehow.

  • Plantinga on The God Delusion

    Ben Witherington alerted me to Plantinga’s review of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion on Christianity Today. Now I must be frank (well, no, I don’t have to, but I will!) and say that I find philosophers provide the most annoying of reading. They seem to me to be the world’s best rationalizers, providing excellent reasons to believe what they already believe. I have previously commented on some other work by Plantinga in my post An Evolutionary Understanding of Kinds, and I found his arguments in favor of a theistic science pretty seriously unconvincing. Other philosophers regard him as a heavyweight, however, so I suppose he must be.

    In this case, I haven’t read The God Delusion because I suspect it’s largely going to annoy me. I truly love Dawkins when he is writing about scientific topics, and I note that Plantinga expresses much the same sentiment for many passages on biology. Dawkins is a gifted science writer. But I find his hostility toward theism, and particularly liberal theism as kind of gratuitous. Having discovered that complexity can come from simplicity without any demonstrable guidance (a point on which Plantinga disagrees with him), Dawkins seems anxious to move forward and make claims about things he can’t possibly know.

    Of course, making claims about things you can’t possibly know is a time honored religious tradition. So if Dawkins were to admit that he is speculating, I would generally have no problem with what he does. As it is, I just avoid reading those portions of his writing. I’ve already heard the argument. I’m still a theist. I shrug my shoulders and go on.

    Now I’m not going to quote more than a few lines of the lengthy review. You really should read the whole thing to get the flavor. But Plantinga seems to believe that the evidence is solid for his viewpoint, and Dawkins is on thin ice. I think they’re both well past the ice, and just waiting, like cartoon characters, for the law of gravity to notice. As a theist, I look back at the chasm over which I have leapt in a classic leap of faith, and I have great understanding for those who shake their heads and call me an idiot. I think my concept of God works well with the universe as it is, but I know the evidence I see admits of other explanations.

    Arguments like fine-tuning sound so good in philosophy classrooms, but when it comes right down to it, I know I have to start my argument from the point of view of a universe that was capable of producing me to think about it. In practical terms, astronomical odds against my being here are irrelevant. I’m here, after all. (Yes, I know, philosphers don’t think that’s a good answer, but I think it’s a real answer.) Even more, though, all arguments about the probability of one type of universe existing over another are founded on nothing. Nobody knows just how a universe comes into existence at all, nor at this point whether there is one universe or many, or if many, in what relationship they are to one another. We cannot even imagine what creatures might inhabit a universe substantially different from ours, and who might speculate on the existence of God because their universe was precisely designed for them.

    The thing that really gets me about Plantinga’s argument, and Dawkins’s, if Plantinga has characterized it accurately, is that it places both Dawkins and Plantinga in the position of claiming their own position is true, because it hasn’t been disproven. In other words, Plantinga wants us to default to his position, Dawkins to his. Plantinga summarizes what he thinks Dawkins’s argument amounts to:

    We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;
    Therefore
    p is true.

    But to me, both arguments push beyond the bounds of science, and both questions should be answered with a form of “I don’t know.” And here Plantinga has the upper hand. He is a philosopher, and is thus doing the stuff he is supposed to be doing. When he starts talking about theistic science elsewhere, I think he transgresses in the other direction, but here he is on the ground appropriate to his field. (I am an interloper in either direction, but it’s my blog and I get to interlope!) Dawkins, on the other hand, whether he intends it or not, is seen as a spokesman for science saying that there is no God, no supernatural. And science is simply not capable of testing that. It can see the effects, but it can’t track them back.

    All of this leaves me in pretty much the same place I was when I started. But Plantinga’s review is interesting and well worth reading.

  • Automotive and Human Evolution

    One of the most dangerous types of arguments is the argument from an analogy. In fact, I think that argument is rarely used to good effect. Illustration from analogy, yes, but no additional weight of argument supplied otherwise.

    Ed Brayton discusses another example as Bill Dembski, always the master of spin, claims that vestigial organs can indicate a designer. His analogy? The development of the automobile, and particularly the running board.

    Running board, appendix; running board, appendix. No, I don’t get it. (FWIW, I’m aware of arguments about precisely how “useless” an appendix is. Substitute your favorite vestigial organ as desired.)

    Ed’s comment is on point:

    What an odd argument – “I found something that humans designed that had an unnecessary aspect to it; therefore, God would have created things just like that too.” As if God learned how to design from his own creation? Just bizarre reasoning. Of course, the good thing about invoking God as an explanation for things is that He could have created absolutely anything in any way at his whim.

    Certainly God can do anything he wants. It happens he wanted to allow evolution to produce the variety of life we now have. Get over it, Bill. God doesn’t need your spin.

  • Evolution Sunday Meditation

    Why do I consider an “evolution Sunday” a good idea?

    Well, the fact is that I have some mixed emotions. I like the idea of a Sunday dedicated to religion and science, and the specific meeting point right now is evolution. No other scientific theory is eliciting the type of attack from the number of religious people that evolution does. Amongst Christians, it is often presented as a fundamental issue of belief in God or not, that Christianity is valid, or not.

    The date doesn’t work for me nearly so well. There are three reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of convenience. In many years the date will fall within Lent, and in most others very shortly before that. For many churches that means that there are many scheduled activities and there are fixed items on the liturgical calendar that pastors and church leaders are rightly reluctant to alter. The second is that the specific date, Charles Darwin’s birthday, does tend to put the focus on the issue of Darwin himself, raising such questions as whether Darwin should be regarded as a “saint” or some sort of symbol. The third reason is that many churches have members who take different positions on evolution. The church of which I am a member is such a church. The name “Evolution Sunday” is a substantial barrier for such a church.

    On the first issue I see a simple solution. If a church does not want to dedicate that particular Sunday to this topic, they can simply designate a different Sunday to carry out the same type of discussion. The rather considerable season after Easter would probably be a good time for such a Sunday.

    On the second and third, I would suggest that one simply rename the day to something like “Science and Religion Sunday.” This covers the topic, but doesn’t lead to the same connotations as “Darwin Day” or “Evolution Sunday.” I personally have no problem with publicly expressing my support for the theory of evolution as a theistic evolutionist, but I recognize that there are other theologically valid positions within Christianity, and for a church that is not unified on the topic, a more open title might be appropriate.

    In the same way, I would suggest that a church conduct their commemoration, celebration, study, or other such activity in a way that allows open debate and discussion. While I do not think that either intelligent design or any form of creationism belong in the public school classroom, both because of the issue of religion supported by state money and because I believe that public school curriculum should come from consensus positions of the various fields of study, the church is an excellent place for such a discussion. Churches can and should be places of lively intellectual exchange, and such intellectual activity will be a spiritual blessing to the church as well as to the community.

    One irony, in my view, of the stenuous efforts to introduce intelligent design or other varieties of creationism into the public school classrooms is that the educational opportunities available in churches are so massively underutilized. And here is what I regard as an even better idea for introducing activities about science into church life–year round educational activities. Educate parents, educate the young people, educate the parents to use their homes as a place of active spiritual and intellectual development. There is no reason for the church to constantly lose ground to secular forces in the area of education. Much of what passes for Sunday School and for youth educational programs is really a rather poor excuse.

    Science is part of the world in which we live, and one way or another, we need to deal with it and integrate it with our spiritual life. That must be a function of the church.

  • The Difficulty of Scientific Conspiracies

    . . . is illustrated here, in a nice post by Carl Zimmer. I’m extremely interested in the debate about these fossils, so I read what I can find, but I lack the scientific expertise to have a relevant comment on the science.

    What I would like to point out is the way in which the controversy is conducted by the scientists. These are not people who take well to orthodoxies. They tear at each other’s theories with great vigor, and they keep on studying and researching to find out more. Contrary to claims of critics, if there is a scientific problem with any aspect of evolutionary theory, there will be plenty of scientists there to point out the difficulties and debate them.

    When scientific errors have been debunked it has been by scientists using scientific methodology and not by detractors arguing on religious or philosophical grounds.

  • Theodicy: Taking a Stab at Natural Evil

    Theodicy is a big subject, but for many people it relates closely to acceptance by Christians of the theory of evolution. I recall conversing with one friend who commented that while he could understand my acceptance of evolution, he just had a terribly hard time accepting a loving God who could, at the same time, use a process that involved so much killing and destruction in the creation of life.

    Now personally, I have a much harder time dealing with the holocaust, the Russian revolution, or the death of Saudi Middle School girls because of the actions of religious police. Those actions represent clear evil to me, moral choices made in favor of evil resulting in pain and death. The fact that God allows such things requires a bit of explaining.

    Nonetheless, the sheer bloodiness of the evolutionary process is certainly troubling to many. Since I grew up believing in young earth creationism I can understand this. To go from the idea that God painlessly and bloodlessly created all the creatures essentially as they are, and that all pain and death are the result of evil, to a view that pain and death are simply a part of existence in the universe is quite a step. There are those who will say blithely that evolution really doesn’t make any theological difference. It’s just a matter of the technique God used to create. But that is to ignore serious implications.

    In this case, however, the implications also apply to old earth and/or intelligent design creationists just as much as they do to theistic evolutionists. The blood and guts exist, and they exist before any human being has made a choice to sin. Thus they seem to be a feature of the universe rather than the result of some wrong action. This is called “natural evil.” Wikipedia gives a fair definition, but when dealing with creation one needs to note in addition that the traditional Christian view that has accomplanied young earth creationism is that there was no natural evil in the world prior to the fall of man (Genesis 3), and that all natural evil resulted from that moral failure. Thus while you can distinguish natural evil from moral evil on an ongoing basis, even natural evil ultimately was caused by the actions of a moral agent.

    Dr. William Dembski has written an excellent article on this subject, Christian Theodicy in Light of
    Genesis and Modern Science    . Those who read this blog regularly will be aware that I generally don’t hold a positive view of Dembski’s work, so listen to me here. This article is the best single discussion of natural evil that I’ve read. It’s clear, well argued, and creative. I think those who write on theodicy will be responding to it and referencing it for some time to come. Having said that, I disagree with the major conclusion and would debate a number of individual elements. Dembski believes in an old earth, though he also supports intelligent design, which makes his overall view very close to that of most old earth creationists. I’m going to quote it here simply to demonstrate the widespread acknowledgement that this is a problem. In some later posts I plan to respond to individual elements of Dembski’s view.

    With regard to Hugh Ross, he says:

    Nonetheless, the actual arguments I’ve seen from old-earth creationists that attempt to preserve both theological and scientific orthodoxy have struck me as inadequate if by theological orthodoxy one means a traditional understanding of the Fall that traces all natural and personal evil in the world to human sin. Take Hugh Ross. Ross does not believe the Garden of Eden was free of death, decay, pain, and suffering. For him, there was never a perfect paradise. To justify this claim scripturally, Ross will cite Genesis 3:16, in which God informs Eve after she has sinned that he will greatly multiply her pain in childbirth. Since zero multiplied by anything remains zero, Ross infers that God did not here initiate Eve’s pain but rather increased her existing pain in childbirth. More generally, Ross will suggest that God uses randomness, waste, and inefficiencies (his terms) to bring about the “very good” world into which he placed Adam.

    I will simply note that I sympathize with the problem here. For people who are used to thinking of a God who uses no “randomness, waste, and inefficiencies” this seems a pretty serious problem. Dembski cites Ross as accepting that, and indeed he accepts that he himself has a need to discuss this particular problem.

    I was thinking about all of this when I ran across a post by Carl Zimmer on The Loom, Cancer: An Evolutionary Disease (follow links from there to an abundance of additional information). My son died of cancer, and suddenly the whole issue becomes personal. In my view of evolution, cancer is just as much a product of natural selection as is anything else. So “natural evil” touched me rather directly in this case. At the same time, I’m extremely interested in seeing evolutionary research aid our understanding of cancer and help find cures.

    Now let me try to get to the point of this note. After thinking a bit about how I’ve answered this question before, I simply don’t believe in natural evil. What we call natural evil is simply the environment in which we live, and which rewards our good choices and “punishes” our bad choices. Further, the sort of environment proposed by young earth creationists–which I believe for the first 20 odd years of my life, is non-sensical. Dembski quotes Ross as referring to the “increase” in labor indicated in Genesis 3 as part of the curse as a reason to believe that there was hardship and death prior to the fall and it was merely increased.

    I would suggest that there’s a better reason: It simply couldn’t be any other way. And Genesis confirms this, I believe, when it says that God placed the man in the garden ” to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15 NRSV). Do you suppose that if Adam did not till the garden, the plants would grow equally well? If he chose one seed over another, would there be more of what he did plant than of what he didn’t? Even the much maligned author of the second creation story (Genesis 2:4b and following) doesn’t imagine a perfect world in the way that Christian theology imagined. There would still be choices and there would still be consequences, ultimately confirmed simply by the fact that the human couple were able to make the choice to sin, and noticed consequences even before God came a talked to them.

    There would simply be no meaning to moral evil, or no possibility of it in a world in which there were no consequences to one’s choices, and if there are consequences, then it must be possible for them to be negative as well as positive.

    I’ll be posting more details. This is just my opening shot on the topic. Watch for the category Theodicy in the coming weeks.