People of the Gap
The BBC reports that more than half of Britons do not believe in evolution, and that over 40% of them feel that intelligent design or outright creationism should be taught in public schools. Compare these stats with America, where over 50% of Americans also don’t believe in evolution.
Here’s the rub: when we start framing the debate about evolution in terms of belief, we’re already heading down the wrong path. The theory of evolution did not arise out of any religious dogma or belief system; it is based on centuries of scientific observation, has held up under rigorous applications, and has yet to be falsified.
When Christians accuse scientists of being stupid, liars or, worst of all, part of some conspiracy to disprove Christianity, they not only don’t get it, they themselves are guilty of all of the above (ignorance, deceit, and paranoia).
While a lot of my friends in the church apply most credibility to the intelligent design approach, I will honestly admit that I find the movement, its goals, and its methods despicable. The central question here is the validity of the process that produces understanding about the natural world from a purely mechanical perspective. We’re not talking about God, the spirit world, first cause, or any of that. It’s not a scientist’s job to figure out why, in terms of ultimate causes, we are here. On a personal level, he or she may struggle with those questions. But I have no respect for those people who let their personal struggles interfere with their very narrowly defined job description.
The intelligent design approach is based on a fallacy known as “the God of the gaps.” Erik, and a few others are probably very familiar with this fallacy but basically what it says is that there is a point at which, in the physical world, when we are unable to come up with a scientific explanation for a given phenomenon at the present moment, it is evidence that a designer was at work.
The problem of course, is that this philosophy is self-defeating because it restricts the possibility of its own validity to the linear passage of time. Get it? Every time we say that God must be involved and it’s proved because we don’t understand how the eye works, we end up looking stupid when a new discovery shows us how the eye works. The gap is a mental one that underlies this sort of reasoning.
So when church groups, and it appears to be happening in the U.K. as well as in the States, pressure public school boards to teach an “alternative theory” that is nothing more than a cover for a religious indoctrination I lose my patience. Sure we can be loving, etc. about this but if we are a group of people that value the pursuit of truth then let’s really value it and recognize that it is not necessary to come up with scientific proof that God created the world in order to achieve our own mission. That proof doesn’t exist and we actually jeopordize our mission when we resort to this sort of sophistry. The ID community is in serious danger of winning the battle and losing the war.
Finally, if there ever comes along a theory or explanation that falsifies the current theory of evolution and offers a better explanation, it will only convince me if it comes from the scientific community and has been subjected to a rigorous peer review process. This is not because I see an inherent conflict between science and religion, but because I do not.
January 26th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Ray,
Do you believe that God created the world?
John
January 26th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
I believe that God created the universe(s). I don’t know how.
There is a good deal of forensic evidence that shows how the universe has expanded and planets are formed since its initial nanoseconds. So when you ask if I believe that “God created the world,” I think He did something much better than just creating each individual planet. He set in motion, at some point in time, a system that would create, evolve, and form planets, animals, people, etc.
But those are my beliefs based on my experience and reading of the Bible.
None of them conflict with a purely mechanistic explanation of the universe nor do I expect anybody to teach my beliefs in classrooms that only wish to understand those mechanics.
January 26th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Ray,
Before I respond, I want to make sure I’m understanding you fully.
Are you saying that a purely mechanistic view of the universe is consistent with the teachings of the Bible?
Just want to clarify.
January 26th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Consistent?
That’s a touchy issue because there are multiple interpretations (even within fundamental evangelicalism) of the what the account of Genesis means.
I said, based on my understanding, that there is no conflict between the account of Genesis (which I believe was intended to be symbolic and metaphorical, not a science textbook) and the scientific process that examines the the mechanisms of life.
I’m not trying to play word games; the problem is that if we want to really understand the issue we have to move beyond the binary framework that has characterized this discussion.
January 26th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Okay. ‘Consistent’ was my word, not yours.
Are you saying that a PURELY MECHANISTIC (your phrase) view of the universe is not in conflict with the teachings of the Bible?
Just trying to get a handle on your position here.
Thanks.
January 26th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Here’s what I said:
“But those are my beliefs based on my experience and reading of the Bible.
None of them conflict with a purely mechanistic explanation of the universe…”
That’s really as simple as I’m willing to make it, but I’ll try to explain.
When I say “purely mechanistic explanation of the universe” I am not talking about whether the universe came about as the result of a purely mechanical event. I believe it was supernatural, many do not. There is no way to prove it either way.
What I am talking about is an examination of physical processes from a mechanistic point of view. For example, when we study the physics that make birds fly, we don’t require a supernatural explanation. We can sufficiently explain why things fly and how to make the physics of flight work for ourselves.
I view evolution the same way. It is the description of a mechanical process, that so far, offers the best explanation, physically, of how we got to where we are.
Supernatural discussions are out of scope, deliberately.
It doesn’t mean they aren’t important in other contexts–it just means that in order to understand how life adapts, or blood flows, or birds fly, we don’t have to say “God makes it work.”
We have the capability to look at things in more ways than one and not be in conflict.
January 26th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Ray,
Thanks for clarifying.
January 26th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
WRT scientists determining, or stating, ultimate causes of observable phenomena. I see your point that that’s what the proponents of intelligent design are doing. I agree with you. Science, by it’s very definition, is the study of the natural and therefore has nothing to say, one way or the other, about the existence, purposes, or actions of the supernatural.
Which is to say that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.
So when you put it that way, I finally understand how intelligent design can be rightfully accused as not being science. It occurs to me that the problem is on both sides. Intelligent design came about as a backlash to atheism which states, “Science has found no evidence of a supernatural being, therefore such a being does not exist.”
The first part of that statement is true, but redundant. Science, by its very definition, will never find evidence of a supernatural being because it does not look at the supernatural. It cannot. It’s like saying, “We have carefully examined every game in Major League Baseball for the past 200 years, and we are sad to say that there was no evidence of a good quarterback.”
The second part of that statement (”… therefore such a being does not exist”) is doing exactly what you have accused the ID camp of doing. It is making a statement about the supernatural based on observations of the natural. To add to my analogy, it would be like saying, “Therefore we conclude that there are no good quarterbacks, and the NFL is doomed to mediocrity.”
January 26th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Great points, Adam.
That’s where we can go next after establishing these baselines. We can look at scientists who, as you rightly note, are doing the same thing as the ID community when they say that because there is no proof that God exists that proves He does not exist. This is also outside the scope of science. Any person is free to express those views but to use their credentials as a scientist to enforce those views in an educational context is equally unethical.
Now to the backlash. That’s one of my goals with posts like this, is to get those of us in the church to move beyond backlash mode.
Instead of playing catchup with the implications of a 200 year old theory, let’s look forward and demonstrate to observrs that we are capable of both rational observation and belief.
January 26th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
BTW, Ray, I apologize if my tone seemed contentious; I’m simply trying to define terms here. This is not unlike another conversation I’m having these days, and I’ve found it useful to figure out what is and isn’t being said before I jump in.
Thanks.
January 26th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Ray–man, I’m glad that you brought this stuff up on your blog. Though, once again, I’m envious that it wasn’t mine
I know, that’s bad.
Okay. The tough thing about this particular iteration of the discussion about ID vs. evolution is that there are so many qualifiers that need to be introduced from the get-go, so many definitions that are fuzzy that can get tangled and make people piss each other off easily. It’s the closest thing that we have to an intellectual minefield in philosophy of biology. So let’s start with some things that we can hopefully all agree on:
1. Evolution. This word can have 10 different meanings (at least). The most benign is simply “change over time.” Since the 1930s, and in a biological context, evolution has meant: “Change in gene-frequencies across a discrete population with corresponding phenotypic effects such that one particular set of organisms in the population out-competes others in the same ecological niche, thereby increasing the frequency of the set’s particular genotype in the population.” But we all know that this definition isn’t the one causing all the controversy. This definition, for one, makes no metaphysical claims. It isn’t even an especially “mechanistic” account of what’s going on–it’s simply a population genetics term. (A problematic one, at that).
2. Natural selection. The contention is that all the variety that exists in the world of living things was produced through random mutation at the genetic level and expressed at the phenotypic level (skin, bones, teeth, immune systems, brains, etc.). And then, that the phenotypic developments led to adaptive advantage of some sort. Meaning that all living things are a result of competition and chance genetic events. Here, the implications definitely take on a quasi-metaphysical significance. Believers in an Infinite-Personal God should perhaps feel a little nervous here.
3. Origins. It’s the “all” that should make us nervous. If all life is the result of uncontroled genotypic alterations expressing themselves through the phenotype that then leaves us with precious few metaphysical alternatives to explain how varieties arise.
a) Cartesian mechanism
b) Aristotelian/Aquinian organicism
For the purposes of space and interest, I’m lumping both atheistic evolutionism and natural theology/creationism/ID under “a” and self-organizing, internalist explanations under “b”. Here’s why. Mechanical explanations became popular in biology and Christian thought at pretty much the same time–the mid-16th century Reformation. Descartes and his followers, the Cartesians, believed that mind and body were dual entities and that the body was essentially a glorified machine, a mechanism. Mind was the “ghost in the machine”, impressed upon the body from somewhere else. When you died, your mind/soul went back to heaven. The body was constructed by an outside Designer. Christians bought this for the most part. So did atheists, since it allowed them to think of all bodies as crass machines to be used and discarded. Catholics and some (very few) Reformers continued to hold to the very old Aristotelian idea that God formed the initial principles that allowed life to effectively organize itself anew at each generation.
Modern day evolutionists, like their Cartesian atheist counterparts, accord the body as a mechanism designed by an external force (the environment acting on genotype). They just don’t think that there’s a separate mind/soul to account for. ID advocates, and creationists in general, also relegate the body to a mechanistic position that needs to be “fashioned” by God, an external “watchmaker”, who then inserts the soul into the mortal coil. The argument of ID is that, given the complexity of the mechanism, there must be someone that designs it. The argument of naturalistic evolutionism is that, given the complexity of the mechanism, there must have been many eons of chance and stiff competition between species that made it work so well. Both are arguing from the, in my mind at least, same narrow metaphysical perspective that departs significantly from both empirical evidence (if we have any empirical evidence of the metaphysical) and the historical interpretation (going all the way back to Augustine and the early Fathers) of Genesis.
When we ask, as John did, “Do you believe that God created the world”, we can confidently answer “yes” without then capitulating to a mechanistic interpretation–whether a theistic or an atheistic mechanism. “Pure mechanism,” at least how it is usually defined implicitly in a modern science textbook, is indeed counter to the spirit (and probably the letter) of Scripture. And if evolutionists like Dennett and Dawkins and creationists like Henry Morris and Ken Ham would lay down their weapons, we might be able to get somewhere, carving out exactly what metaphysical (not just religious–which gets brought up all the time) commitments are being made on both sides that are serving to confuse the issue further….
Man, there’s like 20 more pages of stuff that could be (and likely has been) written about this very issue. But this is, after all, a blog. So I’ll get off my soap box and shuffle off.
>–shuffle, shuffle–
January 26th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
John - Nope, I knew exactly where you were coming from, so no worries there.
Erik - Ok, I’m going to start reading now…
January 27th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Wow, Erik, thanks for that. I’m beginning to get a sense for the divide here but I still need a better understanding of what exactly the Aristotelian/Aquinian interpretation implies and assumes.
Most intriguing is this:
This to me sounds like an explanation of the watchmaker who winds things up and lets them go, but in the next paragraph you put the watchmaker theory in camp ‘A’.
And:
I’d like to get a better sense of what you think the B camp (if that is truly what you are promoting) offers this debate, in terms of “getting somewhere.”
Hope those questions make sense.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:23 am
ray–thanks for pinning me on that. very shabby explanation indeed.
i’ll be able to give a better one, but probably not until tomorrow afternoon when I have some uninterrupted time to try to think (and type) through these things more clearly.
as a disclaimer in advance: i don’t know where people are coming from and/or what backgrounds in biology, philosophy, history, and religion are. if anything i say comes of as condescending, it’s only because i want to make sure that i don’t forget to spell something out. my pet peeve is when people (professors, especially) say something that you’ve never heard before and then pretend that it’s common knowledge. so if i do that, i apologize. if i do the opposite, spelling out something in detail that is actually obvious, i apologize for that, too.
apologies all around then.
and i haven’t even started.
good thing it’s friday.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
You so need a mystic response to this. I honestly think the creation of the universe is not that relevant to anything. Science will never be able to explain everything and neither will faith. So i think the origins of all things should be kept as a mystery because it will never be solved. We will never find all the species that existed btwn now and our apelike ancestors. We will never be able to prove God speaking/singing creation into existence. Either way science has to be used to show what will come and faith must be used to heal the things science can’t touch. I really don’t understand why there has to be a split. I think that’s the problem with the whole divide.
There really doesn’t have to be one.
p
January 28th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
payshun: no doubt you’re right and (like Stephen J. Gould professed) religion and science just talk about different things. let both things exist in harmony.
and for the most part i agree. but only for the most part. though the origins of the universe and perhaps life on earth, the solar system, etc. will never be known in their entirety, it seems that we crazy people just can’t leave “mystery” alone. we keep pressing to know more and more. and the pressing curiosity means that ultimately, those thinkers among us will crash up against the envelopes of mystery and will sometimes, perhaps not very often, come up with contradictory evidence. we naturally want to know why. and we press and press until we have satisfactory answers. or maybe just better questions.
in either case, we can’t just leave mystery alone when it comes to the natural world. we haven’t been able to for the entire scope of human history.
January 29th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
I think the issue revolves around the concept of teleology (goal-directedness). Specifically: are living things subject to internal or external teleology?
Here, in a tiny bit more detail, is what I mean.
In his Parts of Animals Aristotle investigated the functionality of the different organs, limbs, etc. of animals. He categorized traits into essential (lit. “in the essence”), derivatively required (partially important and not limited to the essential characteristics of an animal kind), and non-functional “body residues”. By sketching out all these traits across animal “kinds”–what we whould think of as orders, families, genera, and the like–he showed that animals encompass all ends of a “great chain of being” from very plant-like, sedentary animals (mostly marine life) to very human-like, sentient animals–mostly domesticated animals like dogs, cats, horses, etc. Parts of Animals suggested that all life was somehow related to all other life and was differentiated based on the “fitness” of the organism to its environment. Though Aristotle probably didn’t mean “fitness” or “relatedness” in exactly the same way that we mean it today, it is clear that he was very aware of the tremendous impact of the environment and other animals on the shape/function of a given organism or type.
In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle took up the even more difficult task of explaining how and why animals grow and develop, die and persist beyond death (through their offspring). Whereas in Parts of Animals Aristotle looked at the synchronic functionality of the various characters of animals, in Generation, he tried to show that matter and form was intertwined in animals and ultimately explained why the functional parts did what they did for the animal. When looking at overall functionality of traits diachronically across the lifespan of whole types/species, Aristotle makes it clear that his teleology of animals is not an external one of either materialists or those looking for external designers. Rather, his teleology is the internal teleology of a complex system that moves through contingency after contingency on its methodical way toward an ultimate end.
From conception, Aristotle sees animals as following a “cascade of events” toward the purpose of the organism–each stage of development is caused by what came immediately before it–rather than a scripted plan. The organism is always a fusion of material and formal causes. Material alone is insufficient; neither can form act on nothing. For Aristotle, form and material work together like “seeing and the eye”: neither is seperable from the other. And because the end is driven by internal rather than external teleology, the end actually reached is often quite different than the ideal. Deformities and irregularities happen and are accounted for in his system.
So the crucial difference between the mechanistic account and the Aristotelian account is where the teleology derives. In a system where teleology is pressed upon an organism from the outside, such as it is in mechanistic accounts, one would expect a type of stasis. When stasis is not achieved, it must be accounted for. Theists who envision a supernatural designer must account for apparent inconsistencies, glitches, anomalies, imperfections, and–above all–waste in the system. Athesists see these anomalies as evidence against the existence of design altogether. Likely both camps shortchange the very non-empirical possibility of internal teleology, preferring to either discount or emphasize the “broken parts” of the design.
If the teleology is internal, however, it leaves open the possibility of an Infinite-Personal God who is neither negligent nor capricious nor absent when confronted by apparently “imperfect” nature.
January 31st, 2006 at 11:44 pm
The great thing about this divide is the lack of using one’s intuition to understand or even experience one’s connection to the universe. The truth is we (humankind) do experience both exterior (sp?)and interior influences. Too much solar radiation can kill us, too little leaves us with some imbalances and some pastiness.
The need to have all mystery explained is the sign of hubris. The truth is science doesn’t have to account for everything and neither do mystics but they do have to account for what they can tell you about. That’s the rub.
That information and experience is constantly growing. I think if we spent more time trying to experience life instead of explain all facets of life and the universe we would be happier as people. But what do I know I am just a crazy mystic. *winks*
But mystery is a gift when it can be solved and a curse when it can’t. A bigger problem is that mystery has become the white whale to Ahab’s journey on both sides. It’s swallowing everyone up and really distorting debate on the tenets of Christianity. What makes Christianity powerful is mystery of Jesus not whether it took 7 days to create the universe. Its the love and union with Christ that makes the religion real in the lives of its adherents. That’s in stark contrast to Athiest claims of no God.
The origins of the universe are never going to be solved. We could literally spend 1000 years and only uncover more questions. I say let that lie. Let’s see what science can really do to fix the problems of today, like disease…
p
February 1st, 2006 at 7:32 am
Payshun–no doubt you’re right on many things. We likely will not know the origins of the universe with the same degree of confidence that we know that the sun will come up tomorrow.
And it seems absolutely correct that “mystery” is so crucial to christianity that to try to pull it apart, dissect it, and explain it innards would be sacreligious.
Nevertheless, I would put things like the origins of life, humans, and the rising of the sun in a different category than something like the transubstantiation of the host during the Eucharist. One seems clearly closed off to human reason–subject only to experience and something beyond the mind. The other seems open to inquiry at least.
I think this is much more than a fine point of doctrine or personal preference. The scandal of the evangelical mind is that we fail to appreciate–and therefore pay for–exploration of the unknowns in the natural world. We could know something about our current problems by doing more research on present conditions. We could know a whole lot more if we expanded this research out far beyond the confines of immediate concerns. But the manifest conservativism of our country–as influenced by a particular take on religious questions–often (though definitely not always) restricts inquiry to those things that seem immediately relevant and easily answerable. Everything else seems to fall under the category of “unexplorable,” “mysterious,” or “irrelevant.”
This is perhaps one reason why we tend to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.
February 1st, 2006 at 8:33 am
This is a debate that I’ve had with myself (yes, I talk to myself) for a long time.
Russell’s History of Western Philosophy really made the case for giving empiric knowledge the respect it deserves and furthermore explained how a purely mystic / romantic vision of the world / universe can be just as dangerous as a purely mechanical one.
More recently, Brian McClaren helped (in his Generous Orthodoxy) re-establish the importance of mysticism in my mind, although I am not willing to write off empirical knowledge as a necessary and valuable instrument. It is the reason that we are having this conversation across thousands of miles, at light speed, instead of sitting in a muddy cave grunting at each other.
Whether that’s progress, I don’t know, but it is something.
February 1st, 2006 at 6:12 pm
I am all for scientific exploration when it is not trying solve things it simply cannot. It cannot explain or understand the creation of the universe. But it can potentially explain why gravity works the way it does. Great, find out why some things work. But leave the big questions alone unless there is a plan to go back and duplicate the process.
p
February 1st, 2006 at 6:13 pm
I think we’re all on the same page then.
February 3rd, 2006 at 1:06 pm
P–> yeah, but the big questions are the fun ones!
February 6th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Great than let’s start on how we can love our enemies better? Do I really know what it means to be the beloved? Or some bigger questions do I love the homeless poor? What am I doing to honor the environment? Honestly those questions are more pressing than how the universe was created.
p
February 6th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
I feel you but I have to stress the importance of this question both in the minds of an entire community of people who are scientific minded and have written off the church and its ministry because of this issue and also in the political sphere in the U.S. This issue is becoming another symptom of the ‘Religious Right’ and it’s another reason why people, while they may not be scientifically inclined, see this as yet another reason to reject Christ on account of His followers.
In other words, for many, this issue is just as big as the others you bring up.
February 6th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
I can see that. I don’t agree at all but I can see your point. It’s hard for me to understand why this would be such a huge issue. It just seems like a smoke screen for me.
p
February 18th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Is the 3rd law of thermodynamics our introduction to entropy? It would seem to me that entropy would need to be addressed from any position regarding origin and development whether from a scientific or religious point of view.
What a great thread. I’ve enjoyed reading this - got my cylinders to hit a little harder than normal.
-Nate