Sermon Illustrations on Intelligent Design — page 2

The Course of Waterfalls

In his book RIVER OUT OF EDEN, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins explains, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”(1) In a similar vein, Dawkins praises the humorous rejoinder of Douglas Adams to arguments claiming an apparent order and purpose in the universe. Writes Dawkins, “To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow preordained for us because we are so well suited to live in it, [Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.”(2) Their claim is clear: Humanity has adapted to a blind and indifferent universe like water to the shape of its container.

Ernest Gordon may have at one time agreed. An officer of the British army during the Second World War, he was captured by the Japanese while at sea. At the age of 24, he was sent to work in the prison camp that would be constructing the Burma-Siam railroad. [see HolwickID #1795]

For every mile of track, 393 men are said to have died. Wearing nothing but loincloths, they worked for hours in scorching temperatures, chopping their way through tangled jungles. Those who paused out of exhaustion were beaten to death by guards. Treated like animals, the prisoners became themselves like beasts trying to survive. Adapting to their harsh captivity, theft was as rampant as disease among them. Gordon himself eventually became so weak from illness that he was removed and placed in the Death House. He describes his purposeless existence in that cruel and indifferent setting: “I was a prisoner of war, lying among the dead, waiting for the bodies to be carried away so that I might have more room.”(3)

Each night the Japanese guards would count the work tools before anyone was permitted to return to camp. One evening, when a shovel was found to be missing, a guard shouted relentlessly that the guilty man must present himself. When no one responded, he ordered callously, “All die! All die!” At this, a young man stepped forward, confessing to the theft, and was immediately killed before them.

The railroad prison camp was a place where many could have observed in horror, “the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no God watching over those in dire need of hope.” Like water conforming to the shape of its container, the captured men became like men fighting to survive, void of right and wrong, void of reverence for life, void of all meaning. Yet, amidst the stagnant waters of hatred and bitterness, something was astir.

After the incident with the shovel, upon returning to the camp, one of the guards discovered a mistake in their counting. There had never been a missing shovel. One innocent man had sacrificed his life to preserve the life of his fellow inmates.

Attitudes among the camp began to change dramatically. Instead of men in a detached game of survival of the fittest, they began to look out for each other. One of the men remembered the words of Scripture: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Gordon, who once lay forgotten for dead, was slowly nursed back to health by fellow prisoners. Fully recovered, he eventually became a makeshift chaplain of the camp. When the prison was liberated in 1945 — three years after his capture — Gordon entered seminary to become a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “Faith thrives where there is no hope but God,” he later testified. How contrary to the words of Richard Dawkins.

The transformation in the men of the prison was so thoroughly unlike the world they were forced to live in that one could argue it was more like a waterfall defying gravity and moving upstream than a puddle naturally fitting into the crevice that holds it. The sacrifice of one innocent man can reverse the flow of history. The Kingdom of God is among us, a spring of living water in a dry and weary land.

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1. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133.

2. As printed in The Guardian, May 14, 2001.

3. Ernest Gordon, To End All Wars (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002).

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Redefining the Debate: Catholics and Evolution

Much of the late John Paul II's pontificate was spent clarifying what Catholicism did and, just as importantly, DIDN'T teach. These clarifications, especially in areas such as humanity, sexuality, and the sanctity of human life, often earned him the enmity of self-styled “progressives.”

There was one area, though, in which many of these same “progressives” hailed the late Pope: And that was evolution. His 1996 statement calling evolution “more than just a hypothesis” was seen as an acceptance of the compatibility of Darwinian evolution and Catholic faith. It turns out that John Paul II's critics were as wrong about this as they were about the rest of his teaching.

Someone who should know is Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna. Schönborn was chosen by John Paul II to be lead editor of the CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. He is also close to the current pope, Benedict XVI.

In early April, Schönborn spoke with then-Cardinal Ratzinger and told him that he “would like to have a more explicit statement” about the Church's position on evolution. Ratzinger encouraged Schönborn “to go on,” and the result was a piece that appeared July 7 in the NEW YORK TIMES.

From the start, Schönborn rejects the idea that the “neo-Darwinian dogma” — of “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” — is “somehow compatible with Christian faith.” While the Church leaves to “science many details about the history of life on earth,” it also “proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world ... “

He characterized attempts to deny or “explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology” as “ideology, not science” and “an abdication of human intelligence.”

Schönborn's piece quickly provoked a reaction. “Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution” was the NEW YORK TIMES headline a few days later. The headline should have read: “Catholics Mean It When They Recite the Nicene Creed on Sunday.”

After all, the Cardinal simply said that a Christian cannot consistently believe in God, the Creator of “all that is, seen and unseen,” while also believing that life is the result of “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.”

Note that I said “Christian” and not just “Catholic.” The incompatibility Schönborn described is just as true for Protestants as Catholics. What's more, the piece was the product of unprecedented cooperation between Cardinal Schönborn and the largely evangelical Discovery Institute. Discovery's vice-president, Mark Ryland, “urged” Cardinal Schönborn to write the piece, and it was placed with the help of Discovery's public relations firm.

In many respects, this effort is a vindication also of Chuck Colson's sometimes controversial labors in “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” Instead of allowing our opponents to play us off one another, we affirm our shared beliefs. Intelligent design can no longer be dismissed as just an evangelical issue. It's a Christian one. Now that's a “redefinition” worth celebrating.

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Belief In A Creator

A Harris Poll reveals that 64 percent of American adults believe “human beings were created directly by God,” while only 22 percent believe they “evolved from earlier species.”

Those on the battle field in the nation's schools, where the debate over teaching evolution, creation and intelligent design continues, may be interested that of those surveyed, more than half believe children should be taught about all three. Of the remaining, 23 percent support teaching creationism only, 12 percent evolution only and four percent intelligent design only.

Other key findings from the poll include:

A majority of U.S. adults (54%) do not think human beings developed from earlier species, up from 46 percent in 1994.

Forty-nine percent of adults believe plants and animals have evolved from some other species while 45 percent do not believe that.

Adults are evenly divided about whether or not apes and man have a common ancestry (46 percent believe we do and 47 percent believe we do not).

Again divided, 46 percent of adults agree that “Darwin's theory of evolution is proven by fossil discoveries,” while 48 percent disagree.

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The Parachuting Pussycats: Respecting the Natural Order

Amos 5:19

Fifty years ago, a malaria outbreak occurred among Borneo's Dayak people. The World Health Organization came to the rescue. They sprayed the people's thatch-roofed huts with DDT — and set in motion a life-and-death illustration of the importance of respecting the natural order.

The pesticide killed the mosquitoes, but it also killed a parasitic wasp that kept thatch-eating caterpillars under control. The result? People's roofs began caving in.

And then things REALLY got bad. The local geckos feasted on the toxic mosquitoes — and got sick. Cats gorged on sick geckos — and dropped dead. And then, with no cats, the rats began running wild, threatening the people with deadly bubonic plague.

The World Health Organization was in a quandary. What unexpected disasters might occur if it now poisoned the rats?

Then someone determined that they needed to reintroduce part of the natural order that had collapsed: specifically, cats to eat rats.

So one morning, the Dayak people heard the droning of a slow-flying aircraft. Soon the sky was littered with parachutes bearing pussycats to earth. Operation Cat Drop delivered 14,000 felines to Borneo. They hit the ground — feet first, I suppose — and began taking care of the rats.

The story of the parachuting pussycats, while funny, makes a serious point. As I write in my new book, THE GOOD LIFE, there is a natural order to the world. Ecosystems work a certain way. Cycles of nature are unchanging. You don't grow a tomato plant in a dark closet.

No, the physical natural order of the universe is clearly evident, as the World Health Organization bureaucrats discovered when they tampered with it in Borneo. Not only that, but there is also a natural moral order that arises from our learning how to behave within the limits of the physical order. Morality, I argue, is basically choosing to cooperate with nature's directions. As we do this, we discover a known moral order. The object of life is to live in accordance with that moral order.

It's tragic the way so many people go through life fighting against it. We want to enjoy sex on our terms, not the way we were designed. We end up with dejection, family dysfunction, disease. It's like planting the tomatoes in a closet. It doesn't work. It breaks the immutable laws of the universe.

I argue in the book that this discernible physical order clearly reveals an intelligent designer. If God designed the physical universe — as the evidence is indicating — isn't it reasonable that He would teach us to behave in a way that conformed to His created order? Morality is cooperating, remember, with nature's directions.

This is what Christians believe by faith, and as I argue in the book, something we can all observe, that is, the natural order. And we need to help our neighbors understand this: The good life can't be found when you live in opposition to the natural order, regardless of its moral demands. In the end, the moral demands are the only path to health and happiness.

If you don't believe that, just ask the people of Borneo. They discovered what happens when you tamper with the natural order — and were rescued from mosquitoes, rats, and the World Health Organization bureaucrats by parachuting pussycats.

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Matchless Wonder

Psalms 8:3

For anyone who has ever been troubled by the lone sock left at the end of the laundry, help is on the way, and it comes in the form of indignation: Who ever said socks had to come in pairs? At least that is the rebellious philosophy of one sock manufacturer who is single handedly trying to change the way we see the sock problem. “The missing sock is never going to go away,” said one of the company's founders. “This is a way to really have fun with a real-world problem: that people lose their socks... Let's embrace the problem, and run with it.” Currently they have in circulation over 600,000 socks, all sold without matches in packages of 1, 3, or 7.

Type A personalities aside, the embracing of mismatched socks is catching on quickly. I happen to think the idea is clever, particularly among the target market (girls age 9-13), but I also think it is one more logical outworking of the current philosophical frame of mind. “Imbalance by design — and the studied quirkiness it reveals — is everywhere,” notes one cultural observer. “Random is the new order,” declares another product aimed at teens. Whether selling music or socks, in the constant undertow of marketing, the spirit and mood of the age can be felt.

Leon Lederman, the physicist and Nobel laureate, once jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt. With this challenge in mind, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins offered up his own T-shirt slogan: “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.” The universe, he insists, has neither design nor purpose; it exhibits nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But if the universe has always been a disordered series of time plus matter plus chance, how do we account for the intricate orderedness to life, the uniformity of nature, the very intricacy of the mind that asks this question? How can we believe in the non-random consistency of nature in a random world? What would it really look like if random was the new order? Even in the nonconforming concept of mismatched socks, the factories making them still exhibit a scrupulous degree of order; each random sock is designed and produced with creativity and intent.

Scribbled on a note card, a quote by Frederick Buechner marks the page of one of my favorite Scriptures. “We learn to praise God,” it reads, “not by paying compliments, but by paying attention.” Microbiologist Michael Behe, author of DARWIN'S BLACK BOX, is one who pays closer attention than most. In his book, Behe describes irreducibly complex systems, such as the blood-clotting mechanisms of the cell or the motor mechanisms of bacterial flagellum. Nothing has ever been written on how such systems could have evolved by random mutation and natural selection. There would be no reason for a pre-version of the mechanism to survive, and the probability of such an intricate, multi-component mechanism simultaneously and randomly developing at once is nil. They are mechanisms a chance-driven world simply cannot account for.

Martin Luther once said that the promise of the resurrection is written not in words alone but in every leaf in springtime. So the promise of purpose and intent, the matchless wonder of a Creator is written in every cell of every leaf, and in the very eyes that notice them.

The verse I have marked with a reminder to pay attention was written by one who did just that: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.... O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:3-4,9).

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If You Could Prove God, You Couldn't Love Him

President Bush sent reporters into a tizzy this week by saying that he thought schools ought to teach both evolution and intelligent design. Students ought to hear both theories, he said, so they “can understand what the debate is about.”

Well, the usual critics jumped all over the president, but he's absolutely right. Considering all competing theories was once the very definition of academic freedom. But today, the illiberal forces of secularism want to stifle any challenges to Darwin — even though Darwin is proving to be eminently challengeable.

Take biochemist Michael Behe's argument. He says that the cell is irreducibly complex. All the parts have to work at once, so it could not have evolved. No one has been able to successfully challenge Behe's argument.

In fact, the scientific case for intelligent design is so strong that, as BreakPoint listeners have heard me say, even Antony Flew, once the world's leading philosopher of atheism, has renounced his life-long beliefs and has become, as he puts it, a deist. He now believes an intelligent designer designed the universe, though he says he cannot know God yet.

I was in Oxford last week, speaking at the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute, and had a chance to visit with Flew. He told a crowd that, as a professional philosopher, he had used all the tools of his trade to arrive at what he believed were intellectually defensible suppositions supporting atheism. But the intelligent design movement shook those presuppositions. He said, however, on philosophical grounds that he could not prove the existence of the God of the Bible.

In the question period, I walked to the microphone and told him as nicely as I could that he had put himself in an impossible box. He could prove theism was the only philosophically sustainable position, but he could not prove who God was. I said, “If you could prove who God was, you could not love God — which is the principle object of life.”

I admitted that I had once gotten myself into the same position. I had studied biblical worldview for years and believed that I could prove beyond a doubt that the biblical worldview is the only one that is rational, the only one that conforms to the truth of the way the world is made. But that led to a spiritual crisis of sorts, when one morning in my quiet time I realized that while I could prove all of this, I could not prove who God was. I began to worry: When this life was over, would I really meet Him?

Some weeks later, as I describe in my new book THE GOOD LIFE, it hit me that if I could prove God, I could not know Him. The reason is that, just as He tells us, He wants us to come like little children with faith. If you could resolve all intellectual doubts, there would be no need for faith. You would then know God the same way that you know the tree in the garden outside your home. You would look at it, know it is there, and that's it, as Thomas Aquinas once said.

Faith is necessary because without it you cannot love God. So as I said to Dr. Flew, if you could prove God, you couldn't love Him, which is His whole purpose in creating you. He later told me that I have raised a very provocative point that he would have to give some thought to.

So, I hope you will pray for Antony Flew — a gentle and courageous man who appears to be seeking God. And we should remember that if this brilliant man can be persuaded out of his atheism by intelligent design, anyone can see it. Those of us contending for the intelligent design point of view, which now includes among our ranks the president of the United States, I'm happy to say, are on increasingly solid ground.

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Can You Believe In God and Evolution?

Job 40

Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Four experts with very different views weigh in on the underlying question.

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FRANCIS COLLINS

Director, National Human Genome Research Institute

I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods, that is something to celebrate.

I lead the Human Genome Project, which has now revealed all of the 3 billion letters of our own DNA instruction book. I am also a Christian. For me scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.

Nearly all working biologists accept that the principles of variation and natural selection explain how multiple species evolved from a common ancestor over very long periods of time. I find no compelling examples that this process is insufficient to explain the rich variety of life forms present on this planet. While no one could claim yet to have ferreted out every detail of how evolution works, I do not see any significant “gaps” in the progressive development of life's complex structures that would require divine intervention. In any case, efforts to insert God into the gaps of contemporary human understanding of nature have not fared well in the past, and we should be careful not to do that now.

Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence. For me the fundamental answers about the meaning of life come not from science but from a consideration of the origins of our uniquely human sense of right and wrong, and from the historical record of Christ's life on Earth.

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STEVEN PINKER

Psychology professor, Harvard University

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree, goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long-gone fur.

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design. What twisted sadist would have invented a parasite that blinds millions of people or a gene that covers babies with excruciating blisters? To adapt a Yiddish expression about God: If an intelligent designer lived on Earth, people would break his windows.

The theory of natural selection explains life as we find it, with all its quirks and tragedies. We can prove mathematically that it is capable of producing adaptive life forms and track it in computer simulations, lab experiments and real ecosystems. It doesn't pretend to solve one mystery (the origin of complex life) by slipping in another (the origin of a complex designer).

Many people who accept evolution still feel that a belief in God is necessary to give life meaning and to justify morality. But that is exactly backward. In practice, religion has given us stonings, inquisitions and 9/11. Morality comes from a commitment to treat others as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. Like physical evolution, it does not require a white-coated technician in the sky.

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MICHAEL BEHE

Biochemistry professor, Lehigh University; Senior fellow, Discovery Institute

Sure, it's possible to believe in both God and evolution. I'm a Roman Catholic, and Catholics have always understood that God could make life any way he wanted to. If he wanted to make it by the playing out of natural law, then who were we to object? We were taught in parochial school that Darwin's theory was the best guess at how God could have made life.

I'm still not against Darwinian evolution on theological grounds. I'm against it on scientific grounds. I think God could have made life using apparently random mutation and natural selection. But my reading of the scientific evidence is that he did not do it that way, that there was a more active guiding. I think that we are all descended from some single cell in the distant past but that that cell and later parts of life were intentionally produced as the result of intelligent activity. As a Christian, I say that intelligence is very likely to be God.

Several Christian positions are theologically consistent with the theory of mutation and selection. Some people believe that God is guiding the process from moment to moment. Others think he set up the universe from the Big Bang to unfold like a computer program. Others take scientific positions that are indistinguishable from those atheist materialists might take but say that their nonscientific intuitions or philosophical considerations or the existence of the mind lead them to deduce that there is a God.

I used to be part of that last group. I just think now that the science is not nearly as strong as they think.

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ALBERT MOHLER

President, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions. But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time.

Personally, I am a young-Earth creationist. I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself. But there have always been Evangelicals who asserted that it might have taken longer. What they should not be asserting is the idea of God's having set the rules for evolution and then stepped back. And even less so, the model held by much of the scientific academy: of evolution as the result of a random process of mutation and selection.

For one thing, there's the issue of human “descent.” Evangelicals must absolutely affirm the special creation of humans in God's image, with no physical evolution from any nonhuman species. Just as important, the Bible clearly teaches that God is involved in every aspect and moment in the life of His creation and the universe. That rules out the image of a kind of divine watchmaker.

I think it's interesting that many of evolution's most ardent academic defenders have moved away from the old claim that evolution is God's means to bring life into being in its various forms. More of them are saying that a truly informed belief in evolution entails a stance that the material world is all there is and that the natural must be explained in purely natural terms. They're saying that anyone who truly feels this way must exclude God from the story. I think their self-analysis is correct. I just couldn't disagree more with their premise.

Evolution Incompatible With Christianity

Job 40

[This article is a summary of HolwickID #29802]

Evangelical Christianity and evolution are incompatible beliefs that cannot be held together logically within a distinctly Christian worldview, R. Albert Mohler Jr. says in the Aug. 15, 2005, edition of TIME magazine.

TIME solicited the views of four experts with different answers to the question “Can you believe in God and evolution?” Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, comments from an evangelical Christian perspective.

Other participants include Francis Collins of the Human Genome Research Institute who argues for theistic evolution, Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker who articulates the naturalistic evolutionary position, and Lehigh University professor Michael Behe who makes a case for intelligent design.

Mohler, a young-Earth creationist, says the Bible is clear about the way in which God created the earth in six days. He argues that Christianity and evolution offer opposing views of human origins.

“Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions,” Mohler writes. “But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time.

“...I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself.

“But there have always been Evangelicals who asserted that it might have taken longer. What they should not be asserting is the idea of God's having set the rules for evolution and then stepped back. And even less so, the model held by much of the scientific academy: of evolution as the result of a random process of mutation and selection.”

Pinker argues that the moral design of nature “is as bungled as its engineering design,” evidence itself that life did not arise from an intelligent and good creator.

“Many people who accept evolution still feel that a belief in God is necessary to give life meaning and to justify morality,” Pinker says. “But that is exactly backward. In practice, religion has given us stonings, inquisitions and 9/11. Morality comes from a commitment to treat others as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. Like physical evolution, it does not require a white-coated technician in the sky.”

Behe says he does not reject Darwinian evolution on theological grounds but disagrees with it for scientific reasons. God could have made life any way He wanted to, says Behe, a Roman Catholic.

“I think God could have made life using apparently random mutation and natural selection,” Behe writes. “But my reading of the scientific evidence is that he did not do it that way, that there was a more active guiding.

“I think that we are all descended from some single cell in the distant past but that that cell and later parts of life were intentionally produced as the result of intelligent activity. As a Christian, I say that intelligence is very likely to be God.”

Collins, who considers himself a Christian, says believers may view evolution as a bona fide explanation for the origin of the universe.

“I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature,” Collins says. “...I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God’s intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified.”

But theistic evolution usurps the biblical teaching of man being made in the image of God, Mohler says. Evangelicals must affirm the special creation of humans by the sovereign Creator who rules, cares for and governs His creation, Mohler says. The God of Scripture is not merely a “blind watchmaker” who steps back from His creation and watches in a detached fashion, Mohler says.

Stalwart evolutionists in recent years have moved away from theories that involve God, Mohler points out. While he disagrees vigorously with their views, Mohler says the evolutionist’s rejection of God and embrace of pure naturalism is more consistent than theistic evolution’s attempt to wed the God of the Bible with natural selection.

“I think it's interesting that many of evolution's most ardent academic defenders have moved away from the old claim that evolution is God's means to bring life into being in its various forms,” he says.

“More of them are saying that a truly informed belief in evolution entails a stance that the material world is all there is and that the natural must be explained in purely natural terms. They're saying that anyone who truly feels this way must exclude God from the story. I think their self-analysis is correct. I just couldn't disagree more with their premise.”

Has Science Disproved Religion? (part 2)

As we observed yesterday, the starting points for the naturalist and Christian are very different: it is either chance or God. In the first case, the mind of finite man must be the ultimate criteria for truth. The Christian theist on the other hand holds that God and his infallible Word are the ultimate criteria for truth. God alone (who is not confined to the inductive method) has all the facts readily available. So, humans do not create knowledge or fashion the universe from their own minds, but rather they look to the God of creation as the ultimate source of all knowledge and reality.

People with both religious worldviews are looking at the same data or evidence. However, the facts do not speak for themselves; they are interpreted according to a worldview. Thus, when the naturalistic thinker looks at the evidence, he interprets everything accordingly. He claims, for example, that he does not see design in the genetic code, just selfish genes and random replication. He claims not to see God revealed in the heavens, he sees cosmic evolution. In looking at himself, he does not see a creature made in God's image, but an animal that has arisen from lifeless chemicals. To him all “facts” must be naturalistic, evolutionary facts in order to be facts at all.

The Christian theist, on the other hand, sees all the evidence as pointing to God. All facts are theistic facts. They are not interpreted arbitrarily by the finite and ever-changing thinking of people but pre-interpreted by the mind of God. All facts are therefore read in the light of God's revelation in scripture.

So we see that the idea that science has disproved Christianity is a myth. Naturalism as a religion has its science and the theist has his science. Each worldview stands antithetically opposed to the other. It is one faith (religion) that opposes the other, not an objective scientific establishment that opposes religion.

For the genuine seeker, the REAL QUESTION then is simply, which faith makes scientific knowledge possible? Which view provides an adequate foundation for the sciences?

If the universe is ultimately chaotic, just time plus matter plus chance, if all is in flux, then you cannot finally know anything at all. Thus, how can we believe in the uniformity of nature in a chance-driven universe? How can we trust that the chemical accident of our brain is giving us valid knowledge? How could we judge what is valid from what is invalid? If everything is matter in motion how can we apply abstract, universal and immaterial laws of mathematics and logic to reality? How can we even use meaningful language to communicate ideas in science if we have come from nothingness and are returning to it?

Has science disproved religion? Some scientists would like to make their views synonymous with science itself, and so claim that science HAS indeed disproved religion. I suggest however, that the Christian faith must be the very bedrock of all intelligible science. It is the Christian worldview alone that can provide the pre-conditions of intelligible science. It is God who gives order, structure, and regularity to the universe, who makes the cosmos rational. He has made us in his image with mind and Spirit distinct from matter, capable of exploring understanding and investigating the world. It is the God-given nature of human beings living in God’s world that makes science possible.

And without such a faith, there is no science to speak of.

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America To Science Educators: Teach the Controversy

It's amazing how much brain-washing the American people can endure and still come out of it with their brains in good working order.

We had fresh evidence of this in recent days in the New York Times. In an excellent article, religion writer Laurie Goodstein described the results of a new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: Nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools. Surprisingly, it's not just Christians who want this: So do majorities of non-Christians.

This is amazing. For more than a century, scientific and cultural elites have told us that if we believed in anything except Darwinian evolution — if, heaven forbid, we believed that God designed the world and everything in it — well, we must be descendents of those Neanderthals who showed up at the Scopes trial.

The poll used the word CREATIONISM. I suspect that if the poll had used the term INTELLIGENT DESIGN, the results would have been even more striking. CREATIONISM is, after all, a religious term that attempts to prove that the first chapters of the biblical book of Genesis are literally true. But intelligent design is scientific in nature and would have much broader appeal. It maintains that the appearance of design in living things is best explained by positing an intelligent cause — not by a belief in an undirected process like natural selection.

Intelligent design has gained tremendous traction in recent years. Hundreds of scientists now openly support it. Everyone from Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to Cardinal Schönborn to President Bush has come out in favor of teaching both theories. Naturally, this infuriates the Darwin lobby. Eugenie Scott, who directs the National Center for Science Education, dismisses the science behind intelligent design as “dismal.” But the empirical evidence is not so easily dismissed.

In fact, you might wonder, given the mounting evidence for intelligent design, why so many scientists and teachers fiercely oppose letting students hear about it. The answer is that Darwinism entails a complete philosophical worldview called naturalism, which allows for nothing but nature and natural causes; it denies any transcendent purpose to life. In fact, the two central elements of Darwin's theory — gradual changes and the blind sifting of natural selection — were proposed expressly to get rid of design and purpose in biology, that is, to get rid of God. As Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor, confided, Darwin made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist.

Well, you and I ought to take advantage of this new poll data. We can approach local school boards and say, “Look, questions are being raised by respectable scientists about the validity of Darwinian evolution, and our kids need to hear about them.” Information on our website (www.breakpoint.org), including the poll data, will help you do this.

It's ironic to find the secular New York Times running stories proving that no matter how much propaganda gets thrown at us by Darwinian evolutionists, Americans know better. The imago Dei in us whispers the truth: God designed the heavens and the earth.

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Here We Go Again: the Darwinist Inquisition Starts Another Round

It's happening again: another scientist, another academic institution, another attempt to stifle freedom of thought. The “Darwinist inquisition,” as a Discovery Institute press release calls it, is as predictable as it is relentless.

This time the setting is Iowa State University. One hundred twenty professors there have signed a statement denouncing the study of intelligent design and calling on all faculty members to reject it. The statement reads, in part, “We, the undersigned faculty members at Iowa State University, reject all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor. ... Whether one believes in a creator or not, views regarding a supernatural creator are, by their very nature, claims of religious faith, and so not within the scope or abilities of science.”

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this thing is getting out of control. To begin with, the reasoning of the Iowa State professors is, frankly, some of the weakest I've ever seen. They give three reasons for rejecting intelligent design. The first is what they call “the arbitrary selection of features claimed to be engineered by a designer” — which, even if that were true, would prove nothing. If certain features were chosen arbitrarily for study, how does that prove that no other features showed evidence of design? The number two reason given is “unverifiable conclusions about the wishes and desires of that designer.” That is a dubious claim; most serious intelligent design theorists have made very few conclusions about any such “wishes and desires.”

But the third reason is my favorite: They say it is “an abandonment by science of methodological naturalism.” Now this gets to the heart of the matter. The statement goes so far as to claim, “Methodological naturalism, the view that natural phenomena can be explained without reference to supernatural beings or events, is the foundation of the sciences.” I'll be the first to admit I'm not a scientist, but I thought that the heart of the sciences was the study of natural phenomena to gather knowledge of the universe. I thought we were supposed to start without any foregone conclusions about the supernatural at all, that is, if we wanted to be truly scientific.

It seems to me that the intelligent design theorists aren't the ones trying to inject religion and philosophy into the debate — the Darwinists are, starting out with predetermined conclusions.

But it gets even better than that. The Iowa State fracas started because one astronomy professor there, Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, has attracted attention with a book on intelligent design. It's a little odd to accuse Gonzalez of being unscientific; he's a widely published scientist whose work has made the cover of Scientific American. But that's exactly what's happening. And here's the kicker: Gonzalez barely mentions intelligent design in the classroom. He wants to wait until the theory has more solid support among scientists. All he's doing is researching and writing about it.

Now the lesson here for all of us is very clear: Don't be intimidated when confronting school boards or biology teachers about teaching intelligent design. All we are asking is that science pursue ALL the evidence. That's fair enough. But that's what drives them into a frenzy, as we see in Iowa.

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Did Darwin Believe In Intelligent Design?

The majority of Americans believe Darwinian evolution should be taught alongside Intelligent Design, while the education establishment adamantly believes Intelligent Design is religion rather than science, and must be banned from schools.

Interestingly, evolutionist Charles Darwin himself mentioned a creator in the final page of his book, “On the Origin of the Species.” Darwin wrote, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

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There's A Monk In the Courtroom: the 14th Incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion

Parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, have sued to block the teaching of intelligent design ordered by the school board. They claim that intelligent design “effectively promotes the Bible's view of creation.” For them, what's happening there in Dover and elsewhere is merely an attempt to get “Christian creationism” in through the back door.

Tenzin Gyatso would probably be surprised to learn that he's promoting “Christian creationism.” It's true that his new book criticizes what he calls “radical scientific materialism.” And, like Phillip Johnson, the Berkeley professor, he doesn't hesitate to point out that the materialistic worldview is every bit as metaphysical as a theistic one.

Still, it's absurd to label Gyatso's work a stalking horse for “Christian creationism.” After all, if you call him by his proper title, he is the 14th Dalai Lama.

In his new book, THE UNIVERSE IN A SINGLE ATOM, the Dalai Lama warns readers about the consequences of seeing people as “the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes.” This materialistic account is “an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty.” Correct.

He writes that “the view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is ... as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.” What's more, he insists that both “are legitimate interpretations of science.”

If this sounds familiar, it ought to: These are the very arguments that we have made here at “BreakPoint” and that other proponents of intelligent design make. In view of the profound differences between Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity, it simply isn't credible to dismiss intelligent design as simply “a repackaging of [Christian] creationism.”

The Dalai Lama is not the only one whose writings make comparisons between the Dover trial and the Scopes trial ridiculous. As the NEW YORK TIMES puts it, you would get much the same from Pope Benedict XVI.

The other misrepresentation that can't withstand scrutiny is the one that depicts advocates of intelligent design as being opposed to scientific inquiry. In this version, what's happening in Dover, Pennsylvania, is “objective” science pitted against religious dogma.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We welcome scientific inquiry. We want our kids to learn more about evolution, not less. We want them to understand both its strengths and its weaknesses.

What we oppose is the idea that nothing can be taught that challenges the belief that materialism accounts for everything from the beginning to the end. It's not a scientific claim; it's a philosophical or metaphysical one. Like the Dalai Lama, we oppose metaphysics being taught under the guise of science.

It is the close-minded academics who are being dogmatic, foreclosing scientific inquiry. They call even the merest mention of scientific evidence suggesting that life couldn't have arisen as a result of an unplanned, random process as “religion,” and they throw it out.

Now, this debate isn't about science. It's about the philosophy of materialism, which insists that it alone answers all of life's questions. It will countenance no rivals. It will smear its dissenters — even, now, the soft-spoken monk from Tibet.

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The Pope On Creation

Pope Benedict XVI has waded into the evolution debate in the United States, saying the universe was made as an “intelligent project” and criticizing those who say its creation was without direction.

The pope focused on scriptural readings that said God's love was seen in the “marvels of creation.” He quoted St. Basil the Great as saying that some people, “fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance.”

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Why Darwinism Survives

“What is it about even the slightest dissent from Darwin's theory of natural selection that drives liberal elites (and even some conservative elites) bonkers?” Adam Wolfson asks that question in “Survival of the Evolution Debate: Why Darwin Is Still a Lightning Rod,” an essay published in the January 16, 2006 edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Wolfson now serves as consulting editor of COMMENTARY magazine and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. He formally served as editor of THE PUBLIC INTEREST, which was for many years one of America's premier intellectual journals.

In this essay, Wolfson wonders aloud why Darwin, together with his theory of evolution, still serves as such a lightning rod for controversy in American culture. In one sense, Wolfson seizes the opportunity to suggest that controversies over Darwinism are often, if not usually, easily traced to the fact that intellectual elites will accept no criticism of Darwinism whatsoever.

Looking back to the 1920s and the infamous (and usually misunderstood) Scopes trial, Wolfson acknowledges that the elites were offended “that anyone could believe the story of Genesis in a literal way.” Five decades later, the scientific establishment and the elites were driven to apoplexy by the emergence of “creation science,” often reaching the front pages of the nation's leading newspapers. The intellectual elites cannot abide such naysayers in their presence, so they attempt, as Wolfson helpfully explains, to marginalize, ridicule, dismiss, and send into exile anyone who refuses to swallow Darwinism hook, line, and sinker.

As Wolfson cleverly adapts H. L. Mencken, “Liberals are haunted by the specter that someone, somewhere harbors doubts about Darwin's theory.” Criticism of evolutionary theory is most commonly found among those who reject the overarching evolutionary worldview. Most often -- and most naturally -- this group would include conservative, Bible-believing Christians who understand the unavoidable collision between evolutionary theory and biblical authority. Beyond this, the huge worldview implications of the debate transform every point of the controversy into a debate of major significance.

In reality, the issue of evolution not only divides, generally speaking, liberals from conservatives in our current age of ideological conflict. Beyond this, the question of Darwinism divides even some conservatives, revealing a split between conservative Christians and those whose conservatism is more directly linked to social, economic, or political concerns. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has emerged as one of the flagship institutions of modern conservatism. Accordingly, Wolfson's essay is written in a rather detached mode, as Wolfson's main point appears to be that the elites are overreacting to the challenge of Intelligent Design, and thereby revealing their own intellectual insecurity and the inherent weaknesses in the theory of evolution.

Indeed, Wolfson asserts that, “in truth, most people nowadays do believe evolution's basics -- which is to say that species evolved -- and most people believe that natural selection explains part of the change of adaptation.” The debate, he asserts, “is over whether natural selection explains EVERYTHING.”

The “all or nothing” character of Darwin's theory is often glossed over (if not explicitly denied) by many proponents of evolution. Yet, as Wolfson acknowledges, Charles Darwin understood this dimension of his thought all too well. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down,” Darwin wrote in ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

In effect, Darwin invited a challenge to his own understanding of evolutionary theory. In recent years, that challenge has been taken up by the proponents of Intelligent Design, whose central argument is that the complexity of the cosmos cannot possibly be explained by the blind and purely accidental process Darwin described. The concept of “irreducible complexity” counters Darwin's faith in natural selection with an assertion that such complexity would be mathematically impossible without the presence of intelligence and design guiding the process.

As Wolfson explains, the proponents of Intelligent Design rely on recent developments in physics and biochemistry and “argue that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection cannot explain the existence of some complex biological systems.” Just in case any reader missed his point, Wolfson simplifies the argument with this simple summary: “That is to say, the emergence of these systems is neither mathematically nor biochemically plausible without some intelligent designer in the background.”

Still, Wolfson doesn't appear to buy the theory. He suggests that the proponents of Intelligent Design “are putting old wine into a new bottle.” Wolfson cites Thomas Aquinas and William Paley as advocates of a theory-from-design deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. “The basic point is that one can make a legitimate, rational inference from the orderliness and regularity of the cosmos to some sort of intelligent first mover. And it's important to point out that this inference was thought, up until recent times, to stand on its own merits, requiring no assistance from Divine Revelation.”

In essence, Wolfson sees the debate over Intelligent Design as an example of philosophical, rather than scientific, conflict. He also recognizes that the most well-known advocates of Intelligent Design argue that the theory should be taught as part of the science curriculum in the public schools. Wolfson clearly believes that the Intelligent Design theorists are on to something, and he acknowledges his own concerns about the viability of Darwinism as a worldview, but he accepts the argument of the dominant scientific community that Intelligent Design is simply not science.

He cites Princeton professor Robert P. George as another conservative intellectual who believes that Intelligent Design is more properly considered as philosophy rather than science. Like Wolfson, George believes that the theory of Intelligent Design has been useful in countering the hyperbolic arguments offered by evolutionary radicals such as Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, along with Daniel Dennett. Accordingly, Dawkins, who once claimed that “if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane,” is dismissed as one who misuses Darwinism “as a battering-ram against religion.”

Yet, Wolfson argues that Intelligent Design simply has no adequate scientific model that would replace natural selection in a scientific context, and he cites George as a supporting authority on the question. He also cites Stephen Barr, a theoretical physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware, as arguing that “some IDers have strayed beyond the confines of science rightly understood.” To these authorities Wolfson adds Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. As Wolfson argues, “Kass credits IDers for drawing attention to various difficulties in orthodox Darwinian theory, as well as for understanding the human stakes involved in such questions.” But Kass argues that the idea of a “Designer-God” is not warranted by the evidence. “There is simply no evidence in support of this proposition,” he claims.

As should be evident by now, Wolfson has attempted to write an essay that praises Intelligent Design as a means of humbling Darwinism but rejects claims that Intelligent Design can be a replacement for Darwin's theory of natural selection. He fears that Darwinism has become something of an untouchable subject among the elites. Furthermore: “What's unfortunate is that the ideology of Darwinism -- that is, the mistaken notion that Darwin defeated God -- not only reigns culturally supreme, but also apparently increasingly has the legal backing of the state.”

Beyond this, Wolfson laments the establishment of “orthodox Darwinism” as the dogma taught in the public schools. “This marks not so much enlightenment's progress as a narrowing of our intellectual horizons,” he suggests.

Missing from Wolfson's argument is any intellectual suggestion about how Darwin's theory is properly scientific while Intelligent Design is presumably not. Beyond this, even as Wolfson rightly criticizes the elites for their ideological insecurity in anxiously dismissing all challenges to evolution, he never explicitly points to a factor that would have strengthened his argument -- the fact that Darwinism is as much about a theory of life's meaning as about its origin. In other words, if Intelligent Design is criticized as philosophy without science, Darwinism is excused as science without philosophy. This is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, Adam Wolfson has demonstrated his intention to write a balanced and fair introduction to the controversy over Intelligent Design and evolution. For that, he deserves our appreciation. Furthermore, the fact that an essay of this character is found in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD indicates that many conservatives, who would not be counted as conservative Christians, are open to a credible critique of Darwinism. In our present intellectual climate, that factor alone may serve to distinguish conservatism from liberalism and to reveal which system of thought is truly open-minded.

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Expected Guests: John D. Barrow and the Anthropic Principle

On March 15, mathematician John D. Barrow joined the likes of Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was named the winner of this year's Templeton Prize. The prize is awarded for “progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities.”

What constitutes “progress” is as varied as the recipients themselves. I received the award in 1993, so it includes prison ministers and nuns ministering to the poor in Calcutta and noted scientists.

Barrow, who teaches at Cambridge University, is the latest in a recent series of scientists to win the prize. He is best known for his work on what is called the “Anthropic Principle.”

Simply stated, the Anthropic Principle is an account of the “seemingly incredible coincidences that allow for our presence” in the Universe. The existence of carbon-based life, which is what humans are, is dependent on a series of independent variables, what Astronomer Royal Martin Rees calls “just six numbers.” These include “the particular energy state of the electron to the exact level of the weak nuclear force,” to name but two.

If any of these values were off by even an infinitesimal amount, carbon-based life like us would be impossible — so would science, which is the act of observing nature. Barrows argues that the universe that “emerged out of the big bang ... was already governed by laws that were fine-tuned to encourage the rise of carbon-based life forms.”

This is what prompted Freeman Dyson, “the best physicist never to win a Nobel Prize,” to say that “it appears that the universe knew we were coming.”

Not surprisingly, this kind of talk makes today's evolutionary establishment — orthodox materialists, after all — nervous because it suggests that perhaps blind chance and purposelessness don't govern the cosmos. This prompted evolutionists to look for an alternative to the Anthropic Principle, one that would keep intelligence and purpose out of the picture.

Since the incredible fine-tuning of THIS universe can't be scientifically denied, the alternatives they looked to were STAR TREK stuff. They posited the existence of multiple universes, and given an infinite number of universes, so they say, at least one of them will be fine-tuned in a way that makes carbon-based life possible.

The key word there is GIVEN, which, by definition, means we can't prove their existence. The “alternatives” are nothing but mathematical models that can neither be proven nor disproved. So, as philosopher Karl Popper wrote, this makes them METAphysics, not physics — in a word, SPECULATION.

Ironically, this is the very charge directed by many of these same people at the intelligent design movement — that we are introducing religion or metaphysics. Yet, while the intelligent design movement is ruled out-of-bounds, this kind of speculation, whose true goal is to avoid thinking about the possibility of God, is regarded as the scientific cutting edge.

This unwillingness of many scientists to consider the implications of the Anthropic Principle made Barrow's work risky, courageous, and significant. Our congratulations to the Templeton committee for honoring such an eminent scientist, whose scientific work affirms that the idea of a Creator is the “best explanation” for the universe.

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Science and Democracy : What Scientists Can't Tell Us

When a U.S. district court ruled last December that the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district could not require the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, opponents of intelligent design thought the issue had been settled — not just in Pennsylvania, but also across the entire country. Well, their celebrations may have been premature, unless school policies are somehow exempted from the requirements of democracy.

Virginia Commonwealth University recently released the results of its “Life Sciences Survey,” which measures public attitudes toward scientific issues. Among the issues asked about was the “origin of biological life.”

By nearly a 5-1 margin, people believe that God, either “directly” or by guiding the process, was responsible for the “origin of biological life.” Only 15 percent agreed with teaching a strictly materialistic explanation.

Most Americans, you see, favor a “pluralistic approach to teaching about origin of life in public schools.” In this “pluralistic approach,” sometimes called “teaching the controversy,” students would be exposed to various explanations.

These polling results cause weeping and gnashing of teeth among doctrinaire Darwinists, who see it as evidence of irrationality or superstition among ordinary Americans. Some even suggest that America's leadership in science and technology is threatened by these “unscientific” attitudes.

Nonsense! What's on display is not irrationality or disdain for science: It's simply a reflection of the innate human understanding of God — what theologians call the IMAGO DEI. Years of propaganda by scientists and teachers can't erase it, and it's also a recognition of the limits of science.

Father Richard Neuhaus captured this in the March issue of FIRST THINGS. The “controversy,” he wrote, “is composed of a complex mixture of science, religion, culture, and politics.” This “complex mixture,” which involves every aspect of human life, cannot be settled by a single judge's opinion or by the Darwinists' propaganda. People simply know better, and they want to have a say in how their children are educated.

This is true not only of intelligent design. The same dynamic is at work in the embryonic stem-cell research debate. The scientific establishment insists that it must operate without interference from those it deems “irrational,” like Christians it considers enemies of progress.

Yet 56 percent in the same survey agreed that “scientific research doesn't pay enough attention to the moral values of society.” Fifty-two percent agreed that this research creates as many problems as solutions. For a group aspiring to god-like status, like scientists, this is bad news.

But it cannot be otherwise. Science does not operate independently of the larger culture. Scientists are not exempt from, as Neuhaus puts it, paying their respects to democracy. Thinking otherwise is not science: It is SCIENTISM, the ideology that regards science as the only way to the truth. And if this survey is any indication, Americans don't buy it.

That's why debates over science and culture will continue. They will continue until the scientific establishment — and the courts — acknowledge the limits of what science can and cannot tell us, and when it begins to give a say to the people on how they want their children educated.

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A Rational Belief: Faith In God

I’ve got to hand it to the new wave of militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens and arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins. They are getting their message out, in best-selling books and in page-one articles in major newspapers like the WASHINGTON POST. Their message is simple: There is no God, and people who believe there is a God are simply being irrational. But is faith in God truly irrational?

The much-respected philosopher Alvin Plantinga is well-versed in the arguments employed by these atheists. He has debated his secular colleagues many times on the question: “Is it reasonable to presuppose that God exists?”

Their response, of course, is “no” because they believe only in physical phenomena and a material universe. Plantinga then asks them whether it is rational to believe that other people have minds. After all, there is scarcely more material evidence that other people have minds, as distinct from brains, than there is for God’s existence.

When the philosophers say “yes,” Plantinga argues that believing in God is just as rational as believing that other people have minds: Both conclusions reflect a faith of sorts.

There are other reasons why belief in God is rational, which I discuss in my book THE FAITH. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that the universe is the product of intelligence, not chance.

What’s called the “anthropic principle” says intelligent life is possible only because of a precise combination of “seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics.” As one physicist put it, it is as if the “universe knew we were coming.” And the billions of human cells that make up our body, we know function only because of intelligent information.

This and similar evidence make belief in God far from an irrational leap in the dark, much less a delusion, as Dawkins says. Even atheist Richard Dawkins admits that there is a one-in-seven chance that God might exist.[see correction below] He simply chooses to take, as he sees it, the six-in-seven chances that God does not exist. That’s a bad bet.

The great philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that if there is no God, and you bet your life there is, you have lost nothing. But if there is a God, and you bet your life there is not, you have made an eternal mistake. Or put it this way: If Dr. Dawkins had been on the TITANIC and was offered two lifeboats — one certain to sink and the other with a one-in-seven chance of staying afloat — he would not have chosen the one that was sure to sink. That would be irrational.

But there is another kind of evidence for the rationality of belief in God: that is, its impact on human lives and society.

As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, people noticed that, compared to the squalor and general hopelessness of Rome, Christians lived a profoundly different, more hopeful life. This difference made conversion to Christianity a rational choice.

The same thing is true today: Studies of evangelization show that people come to Christianity because it delivers the results. It changes families, which atheistic worldviews cannot.

All of this and more makes belief in God rational and makes one wonder what’s behind disbelief. Philosopher Mortimer Adler, one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, believed Christianity was true, but refused to accept it because it would interfere with his lifestyle. In time, he overcame that objection and became a Christian, which, given the evidence, was the only rational thing to do.

CORRECTION:

This commentary contains an inaccuracy. Colson states that "Even atheist Richard Dawkins admits that there is a one-in-seven chance that God might exist." Instead, according to a New York Times Book Review article dated October 22, 2006, "On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, [Dawkins said] and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.' "

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This is part four in a five-part series.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20920]

We Are Wonderfully Made

We don’t need to look far to be amazed by the intricate designs of creation. Our very own bodies bear witness to the wonders of our Creator. Each of us contains around 1 trillion cells, of more than 100 types, knitted together in a very complex manner. Our hearts pump the equivalent of 1,800 gallons of blood a day. Our brains process roughly 100 million pieces of data each second yet use far less electricity than a light bulb to do so. We can hear over 300,000 different tones and see approximately 8 million color differences. As for our muscles, if all 600 pulled together in one direction, we would be able to lift around 25 tons of weight.

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Matt Redman, “Facedown.” Regal Books, 2004, p. 73.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20889]

One Truth, Many Evidences: 20 Compelling Evidences That God Exists

In the first chapter of their new book, 20 COMPELLING EVIDENCES THAT GOD EXISTS, Ken Boa and Robert Bowman write, “We don't mean to discourage you from reading the rest of this book. But in the interest of full disclosure, we should tell you that, in a sense, there is only one good reason to believe that God exists: BECAUSE IT'S TRUE.”

That statement is both profound and well expressed. Unfortunately, these days it's not the kind of statement you can make in public without having scorn heaped upon your head. As the authors jokingly point out, the popular viewpoint regarding truth is, “Anyone who believes that he is right and others are wrong is intolerant.” Now that's self-contradictory on its face, but it's almost certain to be thrown at you if you assert a truth claim.

That's why Boa and Bowman have titled their book 20 COMPELLING EVIDENCES THAT GOD EXISTS — because they recognize that for any claim to truth to be taken seriously in today's culture, it needs solid evidence to back it up. As the authors write, “There are many such evidences, but they all have value because they help us see that the God of the Bible is REAL.” In fewer than two hundred pages, they clearly and concisely examine some of today's most pervasive worldviews and their flaws. Then they present their case for God's existence and His revelation of Himself through Jesus Christ.

What kind of evidences are they talking about? There's an amazing variety. They don't state it right upfront, but they are organizing their “20 compelling evidences” in a way that takes readers through the doctrines of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration — the four basic elements of the Christian worldview that I set forth in HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE?

They start with evidence about the universe and the origins of life. And they talk, for example, about how finely our solar system and our planet had to be calibrated to support life. At “an extremely conservative estimate,” they say, the probability of our planet being capable of sustaining us is about one in a billion. It had to be at just the right place in the solar system, which had to be at just the right place in the galaxy. Even the expansion of the universe had to happen at just the right rate in order for all of us to be here today.

From evidence about the universe, the authors move on to evidence of humanity's sinful nature; then evidence of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection; and finally, evidence of those who have lived and died for Christ. Examining concepts ranging from Greek philosophy to archeology to the Big Bang theory to postmodernism, the authors make a powerful case for the existence of a loving Creator.

In short, I highly recommend Boa and Bowman's book. They provide in a very readable form an excellent apologetic resource for Christians wondering how to defend their faith in a world that's “tolerant” of everything except Christianity.

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What Has Darwin To Do With Shakespeare?: A Meaningful World

Over the years, you’ve heard me recommend many publications on the subject of intelligent design. But I believe it is safe to say that I have never before discussed one that featured two chapters on Shakespeare’s HAMLET.

The reasoning behind these chapters is that Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s new book, A MEANINGFUL WORLD, is about so much more than the narrow concept that many people have of “intelligent design.” Their book’s subtitle helps explain their idea: HOW THE ARTS AND SCIENCES REVEAL THE GENIUS OF NATURE. It’s an original and utterly fascinating approach to the subject.

Wiker and Witt are arguing against what they call the “poison” of our time: reductionist materialism and the nihilism that stems from it. To put it more simply, they are fighting against the idea that the universe is without meaning. We’ve all heard this idea before, but we don’t always realize just how much it has permeated our culture and our lives.

Which brings me back to Shakespeare. Most of us have heard someone say that “if a million monkeys banged away on typewriters for a million years, eventually they would generate the entire works of Shakespeare.” I have tended to laugh this off as most of us do, not aware that the people who embrace reductionist materialism are really serious.

As Wiker and Witt explain it, “Reductionist materialism seeks to give an entirely material explanation of human intelligence, one that reduces it to a string of pointless material causes. It must kill the soul, and in the process, reduce all the evident genius of humanity to dust.”

And that, the authors show us, is exactly why materialists came up with the “million monkeys” idea. Scientific reductionism — the view that we all came into being by random chance — is closely linked to literary reductionism — the desire to “force the beauties of [literature] into [a] box.”

Thus, scientists came up with the “million monkeys” theory to show that Shakespeare’s genius was nothing special, that his works could have come about purely by chance. And, the theory goes, “If monkeys could knock out a Shakespearean tragedy given enough time, then what about creating Shakespeare himself? Couldn’t he be almost as easily explained on Darwinian grounds?”

But do you know what happened when scientists tried to test their theory? Obviously, they couldn’t test it for a million years, but they thought they could get some idea about the truth of the theory by testing it for a month. The monkeys pressed some random letters on the keyboard, bashed the computer with stones, and — to put it as delicately as possible — used it as a toilet. “Suffice it to say,” the authors remark dryly, “their literary efforts fall a good deal short of the Bard.” It’s difficult to see how extending this farce for a million years would have made any difference at all. In fact, a scientist at MIT used a computer simulation to prove that it could not have happened.

This is only the beginning of Witt and Wiker’s exploration of their theme. Tomorrow, Mark Earley will be with you to take a look at their argument that not only do the arts and culture point to a universe full of meaning, but so do mathematics and the sciences.

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Patterns That Point To Design: A Meaningful World

Chuck Colson spoke yesterday about Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s interesting new book, A MEANINGFUL WORLD: HOW THE ARTS AND SCIENCES REVEAL THE GENIUS OF NATURE. Wiker’s and Witt’s argument, as you may recall, is that the wonders of our world point to a universe full of meaning — meaning that, in turn, points to a Designer. The uniqueness of their work is that they focus on the arts and sciences to make their case.

Chuck already touched on the book’s argument about Shakespeare. The authors show that all efforts to force his works into a tidy little box have come up short. Materialism and deconstructionism insist that all people and all literature are basically the same — that “everybody is a genius, so no one is.” Shakespeare’s beautiful and profound plays and poetry stand as a living rebuke of such a despairing worldview.

Wiker and Witt write, “The playwright’s themes pose a profound challenge for materialism.... But more fundamental still is the challenge Shakespeare’s genius poses to any worldview that would reduce everything, including the human mind, to the mindless flux of matter and energy.... Are we really to believe that natural selection moved from a single cell in a dirty pond to this?”

But that’s only the beginning. From exploring the genius of one human being, the authors move on to exploring another kind of genius. Specifically, they go on to talk about geometry and chemistry.

But they’re not talking about the intelligence of the human beings who came up with the Pythagorean Theorem and the periodic table. After all, these things weren’t INVENTED by humans. What they’re pointing to is the genius that created the orderly physical and mathematical laws that govern the whole universe. Without this intentional design, there would have been no Pythagorean Theorem or periodic table to discover.

The authors ask that, if the world was born out of chance, how is it that nature acts according to rational laws? If we’re all here because of random and meaningless events, it doesn’t make sense that, one, there are mathematical and scientific laws that govern our world, and, two, that our efforts could discover what those laws are. We would be fumbling in the darkness of randomness, looking for explanations that didn’t even exist.

But the universe is full of patterns — patterns that extend to the smallest particles of an atom, that can be seen in the orderliness of the periodic table of elements. Furthermore, they’re patterns that the human mind could discover and comprehend. How does random chance explain all that?

Materialists look at these natural laws and patterns and say that they allow a closed and godless universe to function properly. Wiker and Witt show that this is utterly “absurd.” They give the proper respect to these natural laws and patterns by showing that there’s nothing random or godless about them. The universe is saturated with evidence of the Designer’s existence. The very mathematics and science — and literature — that lead some to posit a barren and meaningless existence are actually the very KEYS to discovering a universe full of intelligence and meaning.

________

How Theistic Is Theistic Evolution?

One has to admire attempts by religious adherents to allow discoveries in science to effect their theological positions. Often the opposite cannot be said for scientists even though religious sentiment is grounded in intuitions about reality, and science also relies on intuitions. When it comes to evolutionary theory many religious thinkers have also tried to embrace the science and find a theological consilience with it. This has led many adherents to reject young earth creationism and the literal interpretation of scripture with regard to origins and organic change.

For many years from Darwin’s day his theory seemed to be the best explanation how species came to be. This obviously created a challenge for theists because it seemed to undercut God’s activity in the emergence of life. For many the seeming metaphysical underpinnings of Darwinian theory were applied to reality in general, calling into question special providence itself. The theological reaction to this among prominent theistic theologians resulted in attempts to “save” divine providence. In my view, theistic evolution is among these attempts. For those theologians who accepted the notion of Darwinian theory that evolutionary change is the result of chance and necessity, how can divine action which is so fundamental to theism be “saved” and do these attempts really fit systematically within a theistic framework?

If one looks at the theology of theistic evolutionists it is obvious that there is a tremendous struggle going on. How can the God of theism be seen as personally engaged in reality in general and biotic reality in particular when only chance and necessity are the causal factors? This struggle resulted in theological language where one must question how systematic it is and if it is really theistic.

Perhaps the first way to approach this issue is to examine the difference between theism and deism. In deism God creates the world but after that is no longer involved. The cosmos just takes the structure given it and does its own thing. Theism by contrast claims that God is engaged in the cosmos, typically characterized as in general and special providence. In general providence God acts universally in sustaining creation. In special providence God acts in specific events to bring about God’s will. In other words God acts specifically and intentionally. It is in this area of special providence that the challenge emerges. It is my view that theistic evolution theology either loses this sense of special providence or creates unsystematic contrivances to save it.

In trying to make Darwinian theory theistic instead of deistic, theistic evolutionists emphasize general providence. In this approach God is intimately involved (over against a deism) in the cosmos but God’s role is one of sustainer of “natural process”. The way that Arthur Peacocke puts it God acts “in, with and under” the natural processes of chance and natural selection. Another way it is put is that God sustains secondary causes which do all the work. Perhaps a metaphor might illustrate this. Within this framework God could be represented as a superintendent of a residential building. God keeps the water flowing and the heat on but does not interact personally with the tenants. Here’s a sample from A CATECHISM OF CREATION, AN EPISCOPAL UNDERSTANDING:

“Theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes that God uses random genetic

mutations to ensure variety, resilience, novelty and freedom in

the world. At the same time, the universe operates by certain

natural laws or “secondary causes” by which God, the Primary

Cause, ensures regularity and reliability in nature.”

and

“As the nineteenth-century Anglican minister Charles Kingsley put

it, God has made a world that is able to make itself.”

What we don’t see in theistic evolutionary theology is clear cut reference to a strong divine intentionality involved in evolution. Instead God’s intent is relegated to the role of sustainer of chance and necessity. Is this enough to “save” theism or is this really a neo-deism being disguised as a theistic approach? That is for theists to decide.

The other issue that arises from this view of divine activity by theistic evolutionists is what to say about the representations of God’s activity found in scripture. Scriptures of all kind talk about God acting specifically both in history and in personal lives. If God merely sustains or works only “in, with, and under” chance and necessity in evolution, how can the special acts of God found in scripture be resolved? Are they really just metaphors for the activity of secondary causes. Howard Van Till claims that God “fully gifts” nature and that no “intervention” is needed. (Of course an interventionist view is only one theological view where God can act but that is another post) Or does God act only with secondary causes in evolution but directly in other aspects of life? The systematic difficulty here is one of demarcation. Where would one draw the line? And is this just a contrivance to save both Darwinian theory and theism? Biologist and theistic evolutionist, Kenneth Miller opts for this approach where, although he is a staunch Darwinist, he also affirms miraculous events caused by God:

“The Christian God isn’t a deist one; neither is Allah, or the

God of Abraham. Any God worthy of the name has to be capable of

miracles, and each of the great Western religions attributes a

number very specific miracles to their conception of God. What

can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the

miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding,

beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur.

A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a

virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense–there is the

matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the

point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific

sense. They are specific acts of God, designed in most cases to

get a message across. Their very rarity is what makes them so

remarkable.” _FINDING DARWIN’S GOD, p. 230-240.

From a systematic theology point of view this is appears to be a contrivance. Consistency is the hallmark of systematic theology. Does this inconsistently survive examination? I think not.

There has been a lot written in support of theistic evolution by prominent theologians in the literature. However, the dicey issue of how to reconcile it with the rest of theology(prayer, revelation, salvation schemes, etc.) is largely ignored and probably for good reason. To do so would require stripping the veneer off of, in my opinion, very weak theological assertions. At the very least, theists should require theologians to fully treat the implications of theistic evolution. Then they can decide for themselves how theistic, theistic evolution is.

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10 Comments »

1.

Since the time of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution has changed the way we see both the world we live in and ourselves. Today evolutionary thought permeates and shapes our understanding of everything about us. Every branch of our science is based upon it. It has altered and molded the scientific worldview at all levels. While this is especially true for the biological sciences, it is not limited to them. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: “Blind indeed are those who do not see the sweep of a movement whose orb infinitely transcends the natural sciences and has successfully invaded and conquered the surrounding territory-chemistry, physics, sociology, and even mathematics and the history of religions. One after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been shaken and carried away by the same under-water current in the direction of some development. Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illumining all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”

Theology has been the most reluctant of the great disciplines to embrace evolution as a fundamental part of its doctrines. Organized religions have either grudgingly admitted that evolution exists and then try to ignore the implications this presents, or else they hide behind creationism, a pseudo-scientific world view which carefully chooses and interprets scientific data out of context to prove pre-conceived religious doctrines. For many religious groups today, evolution is at the least an embarrassing word if not actually a dirty one. They still believe in a transcendent God and in an instantaneous creation. They see the natural world as the deficient reflection of a perfection that exists beyond time. Evolutionary change with its process of becoming is a meaningless aberration that deviates from this fixed perfection. God is the prime mover existing outside of the universe which itself is viewed as static and materialistic. Modern science, on the other hand, accepts a typically mechanistic view of evolution. For both modern science and organized religion, evolution still lacks its own God.

As in all theories, there are extremists who seize upon them and accept them uncritically and without reservation. For some people, a type of atheistic neo-darwinianism has become a transcendent religion. Carried away by the great discoveries in evolution, they have attempted to explain all of reality by its premises. They have posited a scientific materialism that goes far beyond what science actually knows. For these true believers, the blind force of nature is not really blind at all. Natural selection becomes supernatural selection. The survival of the fittest becomes the perpetuation of the chosen. They believe that nature operates by principles that transcend the natural, though they will seldom admit it. For them, the seemingly random occurrences in nature are guided by physical principles that seem to have a supernatural ability to design and shape our universe. A mysterious force that serves the same purpose replaces God as creator. Ethical values become relative and changing as they seek to make temporary adjustments to this force in order to go along with it. People who embrace scientific materialism are the high priests of a cult that finds its deity in a new emergent principle that gives conscious life to natural forces.

While fifteen billion years may seem like a long time, our universe and the life force within it could not have spontaneously evolved as they have in that short a period of time without some kind of intelligent design and direction. It would have been a statistical impossibility. The origination of any particular protein molecule by chance, for example, is inconceivably improbable. There are twenty different amino acids. To construct a protein chain of one hundred amino acids, the number of possible combinations is enormous. If they were randomly shuffled a billion times a second, it would take many times the history of the universe to exhaust all of the combinations. Random throws of the dice will yield nothing, unless the dice are loaded. Then it becomes a question of who has loaded them. Is it a purposeful God who has loaded them or is it some emergent principle that lets specific attractive forces and combinations take precedence over blind chance?

Scientific materialists solve this problem by attributing a supernatural designing ability to the forces of nature. Atheists usually try to resolve the problem by saying that the universe and everything in it has just been here forever, despite the findings of science to the contrary. Both believe that anything can happen, if you just give it enough time. According to their premises, an orangutan dancing a soft-shoe routine upon a computer keyboard would eventually produce a perfect copy of MARY POPPINS. Two orangutans dancing a minuet upon the same keyboard would produce it in half that time. But some things never happen, no matter how long you wait. Eternity without God just sits there. Half of never is still never. When you have no place to go, you stay home.

Directive evolution is the process God is using to build the Cosmos. This process began operating at the moment of creation. It started functioning with that first elemental explosion of space/time into an ever-expanding universe. It is the method by which God is fashioning all of space-time, from the tiniest building blocks of energy to the most massive galaxies. God is operating within all of reality. This gives direction to the arrow of time.

Directive evolution is a process of cumulative change that is going someplace. Overall, it is characterized by an increasing complexity of organization. The process of directive evolution has seen the development of the Cosmos from lower to higher states of complexity, differentiation and organization. It follows immutable laws step by step. It is the logical, methodical building process of God’s stupendous intellect. As vast and great as this process is, it is a perfectly natural one. It is consistent with all of the laws of science. These laws come from God and do not have an existence separate from God. This process is never capricious, illogical or dependent upon suspending the natural order of the universe. Fundamentally, it is in accord with the second law of thermodynamics. Each succeeding step forwards is the natural outcome of what has preceded it. Tiny alterations of direction by God at the quantum level can result over time in major changes at the macro level. An immanent God working naturally within the system does not need the miracles that a transcendent God working supernaturally from the outside requires to effect changes in direction.

Evolution’s God expanded from eternity to create space-time. God is immanent in a dynamic, organic universe that is still in the process of becoming. Creation is alive and continuous. God is drawing us into the future. The Cosmos presents us with a reality which combines the past and present into an arrow pointing to the yet to be. The strong version of the anthropic principle claims that the first moments of the Big Bang demonstrated how uniquely contingent the initial conditions were that permitted a universe like ours to develop. This principle tells us that the universe must have had, unconditionally from the beginning, the properties for intelligent life. It is a theological affirmation that the universe is the work of God whose purposes included the tribe of humanity.

For scientific materialists whose philosophical outlook has been shaped by the materialistic reductionism of modern science, atheistic neo-darwinianism appears to provide a simplistic explanation for life. Their claims to have solved all of the secrets of life completely by applying the same types of causal analysis to them that are used in physics and chemistry seem very shallow when their results are studied. Whether they appeal to the algorithmic necessity of natural selection or stress the role of contingency, they raise more questions than they answer. They skirt all around the questions that matter most without ever really grappling with them in earnest. They don’t even attempt to answer why there is anything at all. They believe that everything is materialistic and can be explained by a process of epistemological reductionism. They try to break things up into tiny little pieces, thinking in this way to see what makes them what they are. But in the hierarchy of creation, higher complexities contain relationships and processes that are not found in those of lower order complexity. Evolutionary history has seen the emergence of novel forms of order and activity that could not have been predicted from previous forms. As molecules, cells and organisms appeared successively, they brought with them new properties and kinds of behavior. They cannot be reduced to smaller bits without losing vital aspects of their totality. When a living frog is dissected into fragments of bone, blood and tissue, and then sewn back up, it is immediately obvious to the dullest among us that that frog is no longer going to hop. Something has been left out.

Directive evolution is characterized by a metaphysics of the future. This is the religious belief that the past and present are way stations on a continuing journey whose destination we can only perceive dimly. Continuing creation gives us a new view of nature as a dynamic, interdependent, evolutionary process of which humanity is a fundamental part. Because it is part of the real world, the evolutionary process is not without trial and error. This is part of the learning process, for God is learning also. God has experimented many times and has tried many different things. Some of them haven’t worked out and have had to be discarded. When God goes down a blind alley, the built-in forces of natural law suggest a return to a more proven path. At each wrong turn, warning signals say ‘go back’. Design is built into the laws and processes that science describes. God has created a self-organizing system that is a multi-faceted ongoing process of chance, necessity and novelty. But God has loaded the dice. Working within the system at the tiniest level of reality, God can guide and change the process of evolution. Evolution is a vital, dynamic method for creating real things in the real world of space-time. It is always new and it never repeats itself. It is definitely going someplace. Teleology is displayed in the process as a whole, but not necessarily in the design of particular structures.

Comment by John Swanson — July 9, 2006 @ 10:03 pm

2.

Hm, my experience, limited as it is, tells me that generally speaking, attempting to reconcile darwinian theory and theism is a mistake. As a comparison, that is like trying to reconcile Christianity and Islam, while they have points of similarity, the differences are such that it can’t be done.

The points of similarity between darwininian theory and theology, or at least the main one, is faith. Science in general, it seems, and darwinian theory specifically, require a certain level of faith just as any system of theology or religion.

The reason that there is such difficulty in reconciling the two is that in theology (as my understanding of it goes) faith (belief with out proof, but not neccearilly without evidence) is an integral, organic part of the system, where as in science generally, and darwinian theory specifically, faith is denied as beleif with out proof but with evidence and instead is called random and chance and relabeled as fact.

I think where many theologians and theists get into trouble is they forget that faith is a key part of any theological system (not blind faith btw, belief without either proof or evidence) and they begin to try to make their theology or theism look more like science thus losing coherence...

thats my take on this so far

Comment by carbon14atom — July 9, 2006 @ 11:15 pm

3.

Hi carbon14atom,

"The points of similarity between darwininian theory and theology, or at least the main one, is faith. Science in general, it seems, and darwinian theory specifically, require a certain level of faith just as any system of theology or religion."

I agree. In my view religious faith can be framed as a faithing fallibilism. As you say religious beliefs may not be based on “proof” but they are also not necessarily devoid of evidence. If there is no evidence then the charge of fideism is warranted. However, there is evidence for religious belief. This is commonly called natural theology which can include scientific evidence. While a natural theology may not provide a knock-down proof neither does Darwinism. This is becoming more and more clear, especially as ID progresses.

Comment by Steve Petermann — July 9, 2006 @ 11:53 pm

4.

just re-read the article, skimmed through Mssr Swanson’s comment and re-read what I said. something I find interesting is that it is possible to look at the ‘miracle’ of the christian creation story from a scientific view point and find that it generally follows accepted scientific principles. As an example, read the order of creation for plants, it follows the well known and documented order of progression from simple to complex that plant life uses to take over bare ground and even rock. Even though I am not trying to actively promote my faith I do think it is a fascinating study of Intelligent Design, to go through and compare what is stated in various holy writings of various religious beleifs to what ID predicts...

Comment by carbon14atom — July 10, 2006 @ 6:01 am

5.

It might be worthwhile to substitute Mendelian genetics for evolutionary biology and see whether it changes the theological argument at all? It seems to me, that Mendel has the same implications for theology as Darwin.

Most Christians believe that each individual is created by God as part of the working out of God’s sovereign will. At the same time, one can study real pedigrees and show that inheritance of traits is statistically indistinguishable from the predictions made by geneticists. Furthermore, population genetics serves as a link between Mendelian genetics of individual pedigrees and the evolution of populations.

So, does Mendelian genetics lead inexorably to deism? If Christians can reconcile the apparently impersonal and mechanistic inheritance of genetic traits with special and general providence, why would evolution require additional rationalization?

Comment by Nick P. — July 10, 2006 @ 2:41 pm

6.

Hi Nick,

Welcome.

"So, does Mendelian genetics lead inexorably to deism? If Christians can reconcile the apparently impersonal and mechanistic inheritance of genetic traits with special and general providence, why would evolution require additional rationalization?"

But in my view Christians or other theists, for that matter, cannot in a good systematic sense reconcile the view that that biotic change is impersonal and mechanic with special providence. The only way to do that is adopt some form of deism w.r.t (with respect to) evolution and theist w.r.t. God’s personal activity. How would a theologian justify that sort of demarcation?

Comment by Steve Petermann — July 10, 2006 @ 3:06 pm

7.

Hi Steve,

But in my view Christians or other theists, for that matter, cannot in a good systematic sense reconcile the view that that biotic change is impersonal and mechanic with special providence.

So, given that, do you have any idea why so many trees and electrons have been consumed to debate the issue wrt evolution, but no one seems to care about genetics? The problem of reconciling special providence with an apparently impersonal scientific theory seems identical in both cases. Since genetics deals directly with who we are as individuals, it could be seen as an even more personal and intimate threat than evolution. Yet, we don’t see theological arguments against Mendel. Why?

Comment by Nick P. — July 10, 2006 @ 4:46 pm

8.

Nick,

The problem of reconciling special providence with an apparently impersonal scientific theory seems identical in both cases. Since genetics deals directly with who we are as individuals, it could be seen as an even more personal and intimate threat than evolution. Yet, we don’t see theological arguments against Mendel. Why?

I don’t think there really are many theological arguments against evolution or even population genetics, per se, except those coming from the young earth creationists. What is argued theologically is that religious insight, whether from scripture, natural theology, or personal religious experience, leads one to believe that biotic emergence in particular and reality in general have a teleological grounding. This, of course, is not a scientific argument. However, if these theological arguments have no basis in some sort of experiential evidence then they would rightly be classified as fideistic. It’s just that the sorts of evidence for special providence do not readily find a happy validation in science. Even ID, which in my view is analogically based probably will never become a “science” as it is normally understood. It is enough for many religious adherents, myself included, that there is enough “evidence” to make belief reasonable. In fact, some of the things I see emerging from cell biology absolutely scream teleology to me as a design engineer. When I read descriptions of what is happening in the cell by biologists like James Shapiro who is not an IDist, as a design engineer my mind is boggled at how all this could have come about in some undirected fashion. However, that intuition cannot rule out that some undirected mechanism will be found at some point. I just don’t think it is reasonable to expect it.

Comment by Steve Petermann — July 10, 2006 @ 5:58 pm

9.

As a theist who accepts evolution (yet flirts with OEC), I personally find no problem reconciling a God of miracles and evolution (even if entirely naturalistic).

It is critical to remember what the theological understanding of miracles is. Namely, that it is a tool of authentication that communicates God’s will. Of course, when considering creation, there was no need for miraculous intervention for the communication of God’s will, for there was no one else present. This, of course, does not mean that God could not have intervened during the evolution of Creation out of his sovereign will (is the problems involving the origin of life evidence of such?). It is, however, to say that there was lacking a critical element virtually always involved in miracles otherwise. While I don’t necessarily defend the perspectives of other theistic evolutionists, I can find no problem why God does not have the omnipotence or omniscience, to create a universe that has the intrinsic properties to bring forth specifically what He decrees without additional intervention. Furthermore, I have no problem reconciling this concept with a God who intervenes miraculously to reveal himself to mankind.

Comment by Dane Parker — July 10, 2006 @ 9:35 pm

10.

It is critical to remember what the theological understanding of miracles is. Namely, that it is a tool of authentication that communicates God’s will.

It may be true that the biblical miracles were thought of as such, but I don’t think that would fully represent religious sentiment for divine activity in general. There is much in religious sentiment that points to God’s activity within a person’s life and history in general, that is unknown. Is communication all that God’s will is about? Or is it as many theologians claim that God’s activity is the purposeful guiding of reality? This is found in all the eschatological language of scripture as well as non-traditional theologies like process theology.

The problem, as I see it, is where and why one would draw the line between “fully natural” and the “supernatural” activity. For example if God was not active in the emergence of biotic reality but is active in both physical and mental healing, as many believe, doesn’t this seem an arbitrary place to demarcate God’s activity? In the case of prayer, aren’t many people asking God for something that is not inherent in “natural processes”?

[Note: I am not arguing for supernaturalism. I merely offer the sentiments of many theistic evolutionists. That is why I put scare quotes around a lot of terms. Those need to be fleshed out in detail and will be explored in subsequent threads.]

Comment by Steve Petermann — July 10, 2006 @ 10:14 pm

Can Religion Stand Up To Science?

Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines’ increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates -- in color! -- the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you’ve got 300 billion universes, why not?)

The Gonna Getcha God

I grew up in rural Georgia. My mother’s mother was Southern Baptist, so my mother was, so we were. In my small town you were either Baptist or Methodist. To the Baptist, even the Methodists were going to hell. I spent my formative years in church morning and night. I dutifully saved pennies for the Lottie Moon Christmas offering. Lottie Moon was a missionary to China. None of the Chinese knew about Jesus, so they all needed saving.

At some point, I became born again trying not to incur the wrath of God. But I felt like no matter what I did, God was gonna get me. “Gonna Getcha God” was the name I gave to the presence who stalked my childhood, just because I had been born Baptist and a sinner. Night after night I dreamt that I was being sucked to hell in a glass tube, and there was nothing I could do about it but get hotter and hotter, yank the covers off and wake up. I seemed unable to not incur wrath.

At 15 I wondered why the continent of China going to hell when they had a postage stamp in circulation before Jesus was born. Christianity didn’t make sense to me, so I stopped going to church and declared myself to be agnostic. It put me at some distance from the only social context I knew, but at least I was no longer afraid.

When I look back, I spent my childhood and adolescence slap full of hell-fire and brimstone, feeling guilty for nothing and terrified I was going to burn for eternity.

Before I could catch a glimmer of anything sacred, I had to turn loose of the Gonna Getcha God. It happened in the simplest of ways. I stopped using the word “God” and substituted the word “Universe”. When I wasn’t so preoccupied with heaven and hell, I had more time and energy to look around. Started to learn a little about the workings of nature. The bear, for instance, can go into hibernation, completely change it’s blood chemistry, give birth to and suckle a cub, not eat a thing, wake up and change it’s blood chemistry back - all with no signs of arthritis. Much of nature seemed imbued with genius and wasn’t I part of nature? My first real inkling of intelligent design caused me to re-imagine God. Less judgmental, more pervasively wondrous.

When I was a child, the whale really did swallow Jonah. Jesus really did change water to wine. My agnostic phase ushered in vocal cynicism of the literal interpretation of the Bible, but here’s the kicker. Growing up with that literal interpretation actually prepared me for the experience of a re-imagined God in my own life. I mean, a girl born of the deep-south finds her grownup self living in the snowy backwoods of Pennsylvania, asked by a new friend, in a class he was teaching, to do something she’d never even considered. To write and tell a story. That was 13 years ago. Haven’t stopped since. Jesus dividing the loaves and fishes got nothin’ on my life, which seems just as miraculous to me.

I believe that I was born into this world with a knowing of God at odds with the Gonna Getcha God I was taught and feared. It sounds counter intuitive to forget so that you can remember, but that’s how it happened for me.

The Stuff of Philosophy

Isaiah 1:18

I had never paid much attention to the significance of the kidneys until something went wrong in the kidneys of someone close to me. The kidneys, notes one scientist, are the “master chemists” of the body. Regulating acid and salt levels, producing and maintaining hormones, the kidneys also carry out the life-sustaining task of cleansing the blood. Every minute more than two pints of blood enter the kidneys through the renal arteries, filtering out waste and toxins while keeping in protein and red blood cells. After the blood is cleansed, it flows back into the body through the renal veins. I dare say I will not overlook the significance of the kidneys again.

In a book titled FROM FISH TO PHILOSOPHER, Dr. Homer Smith makes a fascinating comment about the role of the kidneys in life. He writes:

Recognizing that we have the kind of blood we have because we

have the kind of kidneys we have, we must acknowledge that our

kidneys constitute the major foundation of our physiological

freedom. Only because they work the way they do has it become

possible for us to have bones, muscles, glands, and brains.

Superficially, it might be said that the function of the kidney

is to make urine; but in a more considered view, one can say that

the kidneys make the stuff of philosophy itself.(1)

Interestingly, much of Dr. Smith’s research is aimed at supporting the theory of evolution. And yet, his insight seems to me profoundly theological. We have clean blood because of the masterful work of our kidneys. How is it, then, that we have these intricate kidneys? I am reminded of the Nobel Prize winning physicist Freeman Dyson, who once noted that it seems as if “the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”(2)

In all of the wonder that exists behind such a statement, in a universe so intricate where the margin of error is so minute that the odds of it all just coming together on its own is virtually incomprehensible, is it so inconceivable to conclude that the universe is so because there is one who designed it to be this way? Peering at the sheer complexity of organs that work so intricately and efficiently, can we reasonably conclude that we are products of chance? Indeed, this is the stuff of philosophy.

But the kidneys set me thinking in yet another direction. We are indeed complex creatures with intricate working bodies, but there is also an awareness that we are so much more. We are people who get hurt feelings and hurt other peoples’ feelings. We hold appetites for things we claim not to want; we harbor bad motives and can fool ourselves into believing that we don’t. As our bloodstream must be continually cleansed lest we die from pollution, what of the pollution in our lives? What of our hearts and minds? What cleanses us? As the kidneys cleanse the blood, what cleanses you from the pollution of the world, the pollution of your heart and mind?

I remember reading a book that seemed to reach into my teenage mind and challenge me to answer that very question. THE CROSS AND THE SWITCHBLADE is a true story about the street gangs of New York City. Like a scientist suddenly aware that it is as if something knew we were coming, I remember thinking that there was quite unarguably something powerful at work among these kids. In the darkest of forgotten streets, the truth of Christ changed lives, cleansed hearts, minds, and bodies, and shined as a testimony that could not be overlooked. There was a philosophy at work within this cleansing. What then, I had to ask, of the filth in my own heart, the messes I have made, the sin-stained scars I try to hide? If it was Christ who could transform this dark and sin-stained world, then Christ is something a reasonable mind cannot ignore.

“‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool’” (Isaiah 1:18). Indeed, let us reason. What cleanses us with efficiency and diligence? What washes us within and without? Let us be wary of overlooking the one who can.

________

1. Homer W. Smith, FROM FISH TO PHILOSOPHER: THE STORY OF OUR INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1953).

2. Freeman J. Dyson, as cited in John Barrow and Frank Tipler, THE ANTHROPIC COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 318.

________

The Atheists Have Darwin, But We Have Newton

Who is the greatest scientist of all time? The contest is between Newton and Einstein, and Newton wins! Newton wasn’t “wrong,” as many people think. Rather, Newton’s laws were modifed and given a deeper and more elaborate context by Einstein’s theories of relativity. But it was Newton who made the real breakthrough. So Newton gets first place, Einstein second, and if Darwin wins at all it must be the bronze medal.

Why is this significant? Because the atheists cite Darwin as their champion, and the Christians should counter with Newton. Newton was both an incredible scientist and a devout (although not strictly orthodox) Christian. He wrote more about theology and prophecy than he did about science. From Richard Westfall’s essay on Newton in Gary Ferngren’s collection SCIENCE AND RELIGION I get the following Newton quotation: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and compets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.” If the atheists are right that there is some great conflict between science and religion, how come Newton didn’t experience this? Newton believed the two were entirely COMPATIBLE. Even more, he was convinced, on what he felt were good scientific grounds, that science vindicates the central premise of religion.

How Far Should God Be Pushed Back?

In response to an article [#34693] that argued science is compatible with religion because great scientists like Isaac Newton have been believers, one writer responded:

“God” has always been the default explanation when there is no good rational explanation for a given natural phenomenon. But as time goes on, and science progresses, “God” gets pushed further and further into the background. Today, he/she is way back behind the big bang, if anywhere...

Yes, Newton was brilliant. Way back in the 17th century, he invented a scientific theory that perfectly (to the degree that such things could be measured at the time) accounted for the motion of any two celestial bodies. In his description of his solution of the 2-body problem, he never mentioned “God”, because he had tamed that problem with his intellect. On the other hand, he could not solve the general N-body problem and thus could not explain how the whole solar system could be stable. This is where he invokes “God”, as the designer of the whole solar system, because he could not master the N-body problem.

But mathematics and astronomy has progressed since then. At the end of the 18th century Laplace came up with perturbation theory to handle the N-body problem, and could thus rationally explain the stability of the solar system. Laplace found no need to invoke “God” to explain that phenomenon.

Likewise, biology has progressed, in a huge measure thanks to Darwin in the 19th century, to the point where we have a very good rational, materialistic explanation for life, and anyone who understands modern biology has no need to invoke “God” to explain the diversity of life forms on earth.

The Origins of Life: An Evangelical Baptist View

Job 40

The great divide between secularists and evangelical Christians is growing, not shrinking. This divide determines many, if not most, of our national controversies. Debates over education, abortion, environmentalism, homosexuality and a host of other issues are really debates about the origin -- and thus the meaning -- of human life.

On this very basic issue, our worldviews -- those of evangelical Christians and secularists -- are fundamentally and completely incompatible. It is no wonder each side of this divide has a hard time understanding, and few on either side look very carefully at the real thought processes of their counterparts.

Secularists start with a basic commitment to a naturalistic universe. Humans are thus an evolved species who must find some way to organize themselves into meaningful units, limit their behavior, direct their energies, and pass the world on to the next generation.

Evangelical Christians, on the other hand, are committed to a supernatural worldview, which starts with the purposeful creation of the universe by God. Human beings are a special creation of God, made in His own image, and are granted important privileges, responsibilities and gifts that are to be used to God’s glory.

According to the book of Genesis, the creation of human beings represents the crowning act of God in creation. Genesis 2:7 says, God “formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Human beings are not accidents, nor are we mere animals living among other animals, for human beings alone are made in God’s image.

The theory of evolution argues that human beings -- along with all other living creatures -- are simply the product of a blind, naturalistic process of evolutionary development. Thus, humans are distinct from other animals only in terms of brain size or other capacities. By definition, evolution has no room for the concept of the image of God, for evolutionary theory has no room for God at all.

This is the most basic issue that divides naturalistic science from the rest of us. For over 100 years, the dominant scientific establishment has been moving toward an enforced orthodoxy of naturalism, materialism and secularism. According to this worldview, the universe is a closed box that can be understood only on its own terms. Everything inside the box can be explained only by other matter and processes within the same box. The box itself is explained as a cosmic accident, and naturalistic science allows no place for a designer or a design in the entire cosmos.

Of course, the evolutionists remain frustrated that the vast majority of Americans simply will not buy this theory. Even though they are not credentialed scientists, most Americans have a fairly good grasp of reality. As they observe the world, they are unable to accept an explanatory theory that says that everything -- from human beings to the starry heavens above -- just “happened” and came to exist without any design whatsoever.

Perhaps that is because most people recognize that there is something special -- something unique -- about human life. Human beings are set apart from other creatures and are the only self-conscious creatures.

A dog may dig a hole, but he never sits back to ponder the meaning of the hole. Birds fly through the air, but they have no spiritual consciousness of why God made them to do so. Fish swim across oceans, but they never write books about the experience. The entire animal kingdom declares the glory of God -- but the animals are unaware of this great fact.

Human beings, as the only creatures made in God’s image, are made to know God.

Moreover, evolutionary theory stands at the base of moral relativism and the rejection of traditional morality. If human beings are not made in the image of God, and if the entire cosmos is nothing more than a freakish accident, morality is nothing but a mirage, and human beings -- cosmic accidents that we are -- are free to negotiate whatever moral arrangement seems best to us at any given time. Human life has no inherent dignity, morality has no objective basis, and we are alone in the universe to eat, drink and be merry before our bones join the fossil record and we pass from existence.

Worldview commitments are truly foundational. What we believe about creation -- and especially about the origin of human beings -- determines a host of other beliefs on issues ranging from the meaning of life to the grounding of morality.

The Christian doctrine of creation sets the stage for a comprehensive Christian view of life and human dignity. Without the doctrine of creation, Christianity is only one more artifact of an evolutionary process. The Christian affirmation represents the most significant intellectual challenge to evolutionary naturalism.

The Origins of Life: A Jewish Perspective

Job 40

The increasingly nasty debate between believers in Darwinian evolution and advocates for intelligent design theory hinges on the fact that most creationists relate to evolutionists as if they have no soul, and most evolutionists relate to the creationists as if they have no brain.

Since according to Jewish tradition we all possess both, this is where our discussion should begin -- no small feat in a culture in which the absolute obliteration of the other side’s views is often the only basis for thinking that one’s own position is correct.

Such thinking is totally inconsistent with the Jewish intellectual tradition of healthy debate, the acceptance of multiple positions on complex issues, and the awareness that even those claims judged to be incorrect still have a great deal to teach us. In fact, according to the Talmud, the views of the “losing side” in every debate are preserved precisely because they may, at some future point, be deemed to be correct. It is that intellectual modesty, sorely lacking on both sides of today’s debate, which my tradition brings to its teachings about the divisive nature of the origin of life.

Jewish tradition teaches that God is the ground of all being and the ultimate source of all life. That said, both the positions of Darwinian evolution and those of the intelligent design theorists can fit with classical Jewish thought. The argument for the former bases itself on readings of the creation stories in Genesis as being non-literal with respect to time, i.e., the seven days of creation according to many rabbinic commentaries are understood as seven eons (the word “day” being a literary conceit helping the reader to comprehend the process), developmental in roughly the ways that Darwin describes, i.e., moving from less to increasingly complex forms of life, and guided by a process that supports the expansion of life in the most efficient and successful ways.

The argument for intelligent design is also easily made by reading the Genesis story as a literal account of the initial stages of the creation of all that is. This approach is driven by an understanding of God as more intimately involved with the ongoing processes of the world and all forms of life within it, the willingness to stand awe-struck before something of seemingly incomprehensible richness and complexity, and the ability to provide answers to life’s questions that supply meaning beyond the mechanisms by which life proceeds.

How can a single religious tradition support both of these readings? It can do so in much the same way that the book of Genesis can include two distinct creation narratives. The Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition recognize that each approach is a valid response to a different set of issues. Both evolution and intelligent design attempt to explain the origins of life and to understand how life takes new forms. But the first is primarily interested in understanding the mechanics, while the second is at least as driven by the desire to appreciate the presence of the creator of life.

That difference does not imply that one is more valid than the other, or even more accurate. It simply means that when each of them is taught, there should be full recognition of the different biases that each approach carries with it. While each of them is in fact a “theory,” the meaning of that term is not applied equally by those who use it. Intelligent design theory is simply not testable in the way in which evolution theory is. More importantly, the proponents of evolution theory would be just as happy to find out that they are wrong, as to continue believing that they are right.

Excluding those Darwinians who understand their position to be a proof against the existence of a creator -- itself a kind of fundamentalist position -- the primary interest of evolutionary biology is the deepening of our understanding of life, regardless of the theological implications. The premise of intelligent design theory is that it can provide evidence that confirms the existence of a specific kind of creator. If it failed to do so, then not only would the theory be wrong, but the proponents of it would see themselves as having failed in their pursuit of knowledge and in their attempt to confirm what they already believe.

Jewish tradition has always made room for both of these impulses, the one that seeks confirmation of the purposefulness and meaningfulness of existence, and the one that challenges our very definitions of those terms. In fact, the only unacceptable position in this debate between the intelligent design folks and proponents of Darwin is the one that insists there is no room for both of these positions in our classrooms, homes, hearts and minds.

________

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is vice president of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

The Origins of Life: A Catholic View

Job 40

The Origins of Life: A Catholic View

Since the theory of evolution touches on the subject of human origins, the Catholic Church naturally has a deep interest in the topic. There are three important questions: How does the creation account in Genesis square with what science can reasonably demonstrate about the origin of the universe and mankind? What are the implications of Darwinian anthropology, which understands the human person to be an accidental “thing”? And what is the scientific status of the claims made by evolutionists who often disagree about major aspects of the theory?

Pope John Paul II, who had a deep interest in science, went a few steps beyond his predecessors in laying down some ground rules for approaching these issues.

First, the book of Genesis is not a scientific textbook. Written in an archaic, prescientific Hebrew idiom, it tells us what God did, not how he did it. The highly figurative language of the “six days” of creation does not preclude a cosmic process that took billions of years to produce carbon-based life in a suburb of the Milky Way.

The church has had no problem with evolutionary theory or the idea that the first humans had biological antecedents -- so long as divine causality is not kept out of the big picture. The pope added that there had to have been an “ontological leap” from any presumed ancestor to Homo sapiens. In other words, we are not simply trousered apes -- something you can verify by trying to explain the Superbowl to the smartest chimpanzee.

What raises red flags for Catholics is not evolutionary theory per se, but materialist philosophy disguised as science. “The church,” wrote Pope John Paul II, “distrusts only preconceived opinions that claim to be based on science, but which in reality surreptitiously cause science to depart from its domain.” There is no question that the writings of many Darwinists flunk this test.

People like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Richard Lewontin start with a philosophical premise: There is no God, therefore a purely materialistic explanation of everything, including us, must be true. But this is ideology, not science. Lewontin, who teaches genetics at Harvard, admits as much: “We take the side of science ... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”

Unfortunately, this crusading materialism leads many Darwinists to make exaggerated claims about what we actually know about the origin of species. Most textbooks still teach a brand of neo-Darwinism which Gould long ago declared “dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.”

Darwinists also muddle the discussion by failing to distinguish between “Darwinism” and “evolution.” The idea of evolution has been around since the ancient Greeks. St. Augustine was a kind of evolutionist, although hardly a Darwinist. What Darwin did was suggest a simple mechanism -- natural selection -- to explain how evolution happened.

But neither the fossil record, nor breeding experiments, nor mathematical probability support the idea that small DNA copying errors “guided” by natural selection created everything from bacteria to human consciousness. Leaving aside the vexed question of how DNA assembled itself in the first place, a significant minority of scientists (especially outside the Anglo-Saxon world) think that Darwinian selection is a grossly inadequate mechanism for the creation of complex life forms.

As for the fossil record, Steven Stanley, a paleontologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins, writes in THE NEW EVOLUTIONARY TIME TABLE that “the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” Darwin described the Cambrian explosion 540 million years ago as “inexplicable,” and that remains the case. A man from Mars looking at the record since then would say that species replace other species, rather than evolve into them.

Several years ago, I had drinks with an evolutionary biologist who works at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I waited until he’d had a couple of beers and then said: “You claim that classical Darwinism is dead, and you’re obviously not a creationist. So, what do you believe?” His reply is worth pondering: “Look, we know that species reproduce and that there are different species now than there were a hundred million years ago. Everything else is propaganda.”

We still lack a hard scientific story of how a batch of inorganic material morphed itself over billions of years into giraffes and trilobites. Man is a separate mystery altogether. The explanatory glibness of much Darwinian literature retards, rather than helps, the scientific investigation of these issues. And, evolutionary theory turns out to be a rather weak stick with which to beat on religion.

________

George Sim Johnston is the author of DID DARWIN GET IT RIGHT: CATHOLICS AND THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION.

How Was the Genesis Creation Story Interpreted Before Darwin?

Job 38

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” — Genesis 1

INTRODUCTION

Many people assume that Darwin’s theory must have shaken the foundation of the Christian faith because of the stark difference between evolution and the idea of six-day creation. In truth, the literalist six-day interpretation of GENESIS 1-2 was not the only perspective espoused by Christian thinkers prior to the publication of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. The works of many early Christian theologians and philosophers reveal an interpretation of Genesis compatible with Darwin’s theory.

EARLY CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Origen, a third-century philosopher and theologian from Alexandria, Egypt — one of the great intellectual centers of the ancient world — provides an example of early Christian thought on creation.

Best known for ON FIRST PRINCIPLES and AGAINST CELSUS, Origen presents the main doctrines of Christianity and defends them against pagan accusations. ON FIRST PRINCIPLES offers the following perspective on the Genesis creation story:

“What person of intelligence, I ask, will consider as a reasonable

statement that the first and the second and the third day, in which

there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and

moon and stars, while the first day was even without a heaven? [ ... ]

I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions

which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history.” 1

Origen opposed the idea that the creation story should be interpreted as a literal and historical account of how God created the world.

St. Augustine of Hippo, a bishop in North Africa during the early fifth century, is another central figure of the period, Although he is widely known for CONFESSIONS, Augustine authored dozens of other works, several of which focus on GENESIS 1-2.2 In THE LITERAL MEANING OF GENESIS, Augustine argues that the first two chapters of Genesis are written to suit the understanding of the people at that time.3

“Perhaps Sacred Scripture in its customary style is speaking with the

limitations of human language in addressing men of limited

understanding. ... The narrative of the inspired writer brings the

matter down to the capacity of children.” 4

In order to communicate in a way that all people could understand, the creation story was told in a simpler, allegorical fashion. Augustine also believed God created the world with the capacity to develop — a view that is harmonious with biological evolution.5

LATER CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

There are many other non-literalist interpretations of GENESIS 1-2 later in history. St. Thomas Aquinas, a well-known 13th century philosopher and theologian, was an Italian priest who was particularly interested in the intersection of science and religion. Aquinas did not fear the possible contradiction between the Genesis creation story and scientific findings. William Carroll notes,

“Aquinas did not think that the opening of Genesis presented any

difficulties for the natural sciences, for the Bible is not a textbook

in the sciences. What is essential to Christian faith, according to

Aquinas, is the “fact of creation,” not the manner or mode of the

formation of the world.” 6

Aquinas’ interpretation of the creation story is evident in SUMMA THEOLOGICA, in which he responds to the question of whether all six days of creation are actually a description of a single day, a theory Augustine had suggested. Aquinas does not take sides in the debate, but attempts to seek harmony between the two views. Aquinas argues in favor of the view that God created all things to have potential:

“On the day on which God created the heaven and the earth, He created

also every plant of the field, not, indeed, actually, but “before it

sprung up in the earth,” that is, potentially. ... All things were not

distinguished and adorned together, not from a want of power on God’s

part, as requiring time in which to work, but that due order might be

observed in the instituting of the world. Hence it was fitting that

different days should be assigned to the different states of the world,

as each succeeding work added to the world a fresh state of perfection.” 7

Clearly, Augustine strongly influenced Aquinas.

Augustine’s creation perspective can be seen even as late as the 18th century — just before Darwin published THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES — in the works of John Wesley. An Anglican minister and early leader in the Methodist movement, Wesley, like Augustine, thought scriptures were written in terms suitable for their audience. He writes,

“The inspired penman in this history [Genesis] ... [wrote] for the Jews

first and, calculating his narratives for the infant state of the

church, describes things by their outward sensible appearances, and

leaves us, by further discoveries of the divine light, to be led into

the understanding of the mysteries couched under them.” 8

Wesley also argues the scriptures “were written not to gratify our curiosity [of the details], but to lead us to God.”9 Darwin’s theory of biological evolution would not necessarily have conflicted with the perspectives of Wesley, Augustine, Aquinas, Origen or others, but the interpretation of Genesis was only one of the issues at hand . (See QUESTION 6 about THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO DARWIN.)

CONCLUSION

The history of Christian thought has not been consistently dominated by proponents of a literalist interpretation of Genesis. Although a comparable list of theologians who did believe in a six day creation could be made, the examples cited here show that many prominent Christian theologians embraced an allegorical interpretation of Genesis long before science presented evidence in its favor.10 The discoveries of modern science should not be seen as a contradiction to scripture, but as guideposts toward a proper understanding of scripture’s meaning.

Augustine offers this advice:

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in

Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways

without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we

should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side

that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this

position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the

teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to

conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of

Sacred Scripture.” 11

________

NOTES

1. Origen, “Book IV, Ch. 3,” in FIRST PRINCIPLES, trans. G. Butterworth (London: SPCK, 1936), quoted in Ernest Lucas, “INTERPRETING GENESIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY,” Faraday Papers, no. 11 (2007), (accessed January 28, 2009). Also available online at “DE PRINCIPIIS (BOOK IV),” New Advent. (accessed January 28, 2009).

2. Gillian Clark, AUGUSTINE, THE CONFESSIONS, LANDMARKS OF WORLD LITERATURE (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

3. Bishop of Hippo Saint Augustine, THE LITERAL MEANING OF GENESIS, ANCIENT CHRISTIAN WRITERS, no. 41 (New York, N.Y.: Newman Press, 1982).

4. Saint Bishop of Hippo Augustine, THE LITERAL MEANING OF GENESIS, ANCIENT CHRISTIAN WRITERS, no. 41 (New York, N.Y.: Newman Press, 1982).

5. For a further discussion of Augustine’s perspective on creation, see chapter six of Francis Collins, THE LANGUAGE OF GOD: A SCIENTIST PRESENTS EVIDENCE FOR BELIEF (New York: Free Press, 2006), as well as chapters eight and fifteen of Alister McGrath, A FINELY TUNED UNIVERSE: THE QUEST FOR GOD IN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).

6. William E. Carroll, “Aquinas and the Big Bang,” First Things 97 (1999): 18-20.

7. St. Thomas Aquinas, “Question 74: All the Seven Days in Common,” IN THE SUMMA THEOLOGICA OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, 2nd ed., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1920). Also available online at “Summa Theologica,” New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1074.htm#2.

8. John Wesley, WESLEY’S NOTES ON THE BIBLE (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Francis Asbury Press, 1987), 22, quoted in Darrel R. Falk, COMING TO PEACE WITH SCIENCE: BRIDGING THE WORLDS BETWEEN FAITH AND BIOLOGY (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 35. Also available online at John Wesley, “John Wesley’s Notes on the Bible,” Wesley Center Online, http://wesley.nnu.edu/john_wesley/notes/index.htm (accessed January 28, 2009).

9. John Wesley, A SURVEY OF THE WISDOM OF GOD IN THE CREATION: OR, A COMPENDIUM OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, 3rd ed. (London: J. Fry, 1777), 2:463, quoted in Falk, COMING TO PEACE WITH SCIENCE: BRIDGING THE WORLDS BETWEEN FAITH AND BIOLOGY, 35.

10. The Catholic Church also acknowledges the diversity of early Christian interpretations of Genesis. See, for example, Catholic Answers, “Creation and Genesis,” Catholic Answers, http://www.catholic.com/library/creation_and_genesis.asp (accessed January 28, 2009).

11. Augustine, THE LITERAL MEANING OF GENESIS.

An Evangelical Critique of Theistic Evolution

Genesis 1

The 2017 fall meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) featured a critique of theistic evolution from several angles. The event featured scientists, philosophers and theologians presenting arguments against the notion that God created humans and other living beings through the process of evolution rather than by direct creation of distinct species -- a view known as theistic evolution.

At issue in particular were some theistic evolutionists’ claims that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor in the distant past and that seemingly random mutations in the genetic code produced all the varieties of life observed today.

Among the claims of the ETS presentations: “Theistic evolution is incompatible with the teachings of the Old Testament” and “theistic evolution is incompatible with the teachings of the New Testament.”

Wayne Grudem, research professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix Seminary, argued in his presentation that “theistic evolution denies 12 creation events and undermines crucial doctrines.”

Grudem claims theistic evolution entails several problematic assertions. Among them:

• “Adam and Eve were not the first human beings (and perhaps they never even existed)”;

• “God did not act directly or specially to create Adam out of dust from the ground”;

• “God never created an originally ‘very good’ natural work in the sense of a world that was a safe environment, free of thorns and thistles and similar harmful things”; and

• “After Adam and Eve sinned, God did not place any curse on the world that changed the working of the natural world and made it more hostile to mankind.”

Countering such claims, Grudem writes, “A nonhistorical reading of Genesis 1-3,” as required by theistic evolution, “does not arise from factors in the text itself but rather depends upon a prior commitment to an evolutionary framework of interpretation, a framework which the science and philosophy chapters in this volume show to be unjustifiable.”

Other presentations supplemented the biblical critique of theistic evolution with theological, scientific and philosophical arguments.

Theological critique

Gregg Allison, professor of Christian Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, delivered a presentation claiming “theistic evolution is incompatible with historical doctrinal standards.” His chapter of the same title in “Theistic Evolution” cites writings of early church fathers, medieval theologians, Protestant Reformers and contemporary Christian thinkers to show followers of Jesus have always rejected the types of claims advanced by theistic evolutionists.

For example, the fourth-century Nicene Creed’s “specification that God is the ‘maker’ of ‘all things visible,’” Allison writes, “was uniformly understood in the early church to affirm God’s direct creation of all the varieties of plants and animals on earth. Yet this creedal affirmation contradicts the claim of theistic evolution that God was the ‘maker’ only of the initial inanimate matter in the universe and that that matter, apart from divine guidance or intervention, eventually developed by pure natural processes into ‘all things visible.’”

Likewise, the medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas “affirmed that God alone creates and he rejected the idea that creation itself possesses the ability to create or develop other living realities,” Allison writes.

Despite Protestants’ many disagreements with Catholics in the 16th century, they reaffirmed the “traditional view” of creation, Allison writes, citing numerous examples from Protestant confessions of faith.

Among Allison’s conclusions, “Theistic evolution’s affirmation that God created matter is, in itself, neither wrong nor controversial, but it does not go far enough. Such a view falls short of affirming, as the church has historically believed, that God created not only inanimate matter but also all visible things ... and all invisible things.”

Scientific critique

Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, made a presentation on “the growing scientific problems with contemporary evolutionary theory.” The Discovery Institute is a Seattle-based think tank that plays a leading role in the Intelligent Design movement, which argues the universe is the product of intelligence rather than blind chance.

The chapters Meyer authored in “Theistic Evolution” similarly highlight scientific problems with the theories advanced by some theistic evolutionists. In particular, he takes issue with the claim that an undirected process which appears random under scientific analysis yielded complex life and the appearance of design.

“According to textbook neo-Darwinian theory,” according to Meyer, random mutations in DNA sometimes produce genetic changes that “confer a survival advantage on the organisms that possess them.” Those changes are passed on to the next generation, evolutionists claim, and over time, accumulated genetic changes gave rise to new species of animals.

But Meyer, citing contemporary biological research, counters that the number of possible DNA arrangements “are simply too vast, and the available time” for natural selection to cycle through the possible mutations is “too short for there to have been a realistic chance of producing even one new gene or protein by undirected mutation and selection in the time allowed for most evolutionary transitions.”

In other words, “it is overwhelmingly more likely than not that” random genetic mutation “would have failed to produce even one new functional (information-rich) DNA sequence and protein in the entire history of life on earth,” writes Meyer, an editor of “Theistic Evolution.”

Philosophical critique

J.P. Moreland, distinguished professor of philosophy at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, Calif., addressed “philosophical problems with evolution” at ETS. Theistic evolution has a tendency to rob “Christians of confidence that the Bible is a source of knowledge.”

Moreland expresses alarm that many in western society claim “the hard sciences” -- such as biology, physics and chemistry -- “are the only or the vastly superior way to know things.” According to that viewpoint, statements “that cannot be tested with the five senses ... such as those at the core of ethics, political theory, and religion are not items of knowledge, but rather, matters of private feeling.”

In contrast, the Christian worldview holds science as one of several valid sources of knowledge, including the Bible.

Theistic evolutionists unwittingly “become the church’s gravedigger” by treating speculative claims of scientists as a more reliable source of knowledge than Scripture.

“It can hardly be doubted that the greatest impact of evolutionary theory is its significant contribution to the secularization of culture, a shift that places a supernatural God ... outside the plausibility structure of Western society. In light of that, why would any Christian want to flirt with theistic evolution?”

Life, Even As We Don’t Know It, Is No Accident

Job 38:1

Recently, a Scientific American article titled “The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It” reflected on the continued search for life across the universe. Not long ago, the search had been for life as we know it on Earth: carbon-based lifeforms, oxygen, DNA, and RNA.

Today, the search has expanded. After all, what if life takes other forms elsewhere?

In 2016, one group of thinkers offered a new focus for the search for life: complexity. Journalist Sarah Scoles described it this way: “[I]f you come across a fleet of 747s on Mars, you might not know where they came from, but you know they’re unlikely to be random.” That idea became the foundation for a NASA funded group, Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures, who look for forms of life in the universe.

The group may claim to be “agnostic,” but complexity points to design, and design points to a Mind. Maybe they will find Life (with a capital L) after all.

________

The Snout-Weevil’s Colors: Mimicking God’s Art and Engineering

Job 38

What on earth is a Philippine snout weevil, and what does it have to do with Christian worldview?

It’s no exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for the amazing design found in nature, much of the best of our modern technologies wouldn’t exist. Digital Trends documents a whole collection of examples, from bullet trains that mimic the beaks of kingfisher birds, to high-rises that copy the ventilation systems of termite mounds. I’m not kidding. The film “Incredible Creatures that Define Design” by my friend Steve Greisen, talks about what’s called “biomimicry.”

And yet, despite all of our technological achievements, we’re not even close to exhausting the riches of engineering and artistry available in nature. One of the most eye-catching examples to emerge in recent months is a tiny insect — a species of beetle known as the Philippine snout weevil.

Full disclosure: I’d never heard of this creature until our BreakPoint editor decided he would enjoy hearing me say “Philippine snout weevil” on the air. But it’s worth it.

A recent report in WORLD magazine revealed this miniature marvel’s true colors. Literally. You see, this beetle has a series of rainbow spots on its wing casings that do something very rare in nature: They maintain the same color no matter which angle you view them from. This has scientists fascinated, not only is this so-called “high-fidelity” color rare in nature, it’s nonexistent in human technology. Not a smart phone, laptop, tablet, or HD TV in existence can successfully produce colors that remain true, no matter how you look at them.

The website Optics and Photonics reported on the joint research by a Singaporean-Swiss team who discovered just how the weevil accomplishes this dazzling feat.

Each spot on its wing casings forms concentric circles of color which cover the full visible spectrum from blue to red, in the same order as a rainbow. But unlike most hues in nature, which are generated using pigments, the snout weevil’s brilliant design comes from what scientists call “structural color.”

Like the wings of the much more famous blue morpho butterfly, the weevil’s spots have a gleaming, metallic quality. This is because their color comes from tiny, crystalline structures made of chitin that split sunlight like a prism.

It was Isaac Newton who discovered that white light contains all the colors of the rainbow. Using glass lenses of the right shape, he noticed it was possible to refract those colors into their different wavelengths. The structural color used by the snout weevil and morpho butterflies takes advantage of this same principle.

But the weevil does something almost no other insect can. By using spherical scales instead of flat ones like a butterfly, and by controlling their size and volume, the weevil maintains near-perfect color fidelity across hues, regardless of how you look at it. In other words, unlike our own electronic displays, its colors are always true.

If human engineers could ever mimic this mechanism, it could have applications in electronic displays, more efficient fiber optics, more vivid paints, and even cosmetics.

What a strange and wonderful reminder that God is not only a master engineer; He’s an artist. Nature didn’t have to be this beautiful, this extravagant, especially in the humble, easy-to-miss wings of an insect.

That it is, tells us something of God’s character. He reserved the special privilege of perfect color fidelity for one of the lowliest creatures. Remember how Jesus said that even King Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as well as the lilies of the field?

And of course, the more we find even our best technology outdone by nature, the more ridiculous the idea that life created itself seems. No, the creation is the handiwork of an Engineer and Artist, who saw fit to share with us His creativity, inviting us to create, too, as a way to express His image and to glorify Him.

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Resources:

“A beautiful design humans can’t replicate,” by Julie Borg, World.wng.org, October 14, 2018. .

“A Tunable Biophotonic Rainbow,” by Molly Moser, The Optical Society of America, September 25, 2018. .

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Our Bodies Tell God’s Story

Mark 10:6

Now, in what may be called the wake of the sexual revolution, expressions of sexual chaos are everywhere. What started with the separation of marriage, sex, and babies has led to aggressive attempts to indoctrinate and reorder society against the essential realities of male and female.

The list of things that Christians must reject is a long one: pornography, abortion, infidelity, abuse and harassment, gender “reassignment,” same-sex marriage, polyamory, reproductive technologies, commercial surrogacy, even “drag queen story hours.” With so much to stand against, it’s more important than ever that Christians remember what they are for.

Despite an unfortunately common mis-reputation, both within the Church and without, Christianity doesn’t teach that human bodies are evils to be controlled in order to avoid sin. Rather, it teaches that our physical bodies are part of who we are as made in the image of God. As part of the created order, then, our bodies are a type of natural revelation, designed by God to reveal Himself.

Because God frequently uses physical realities to reveal and even embody the mysteries of who He is and what He wants us to know, Christians need to know the why behind the what when it comes to our bodies. Thankfully, to this end, Christopher West has made a remarkable contribution in a new book entitled “Our Bodies Tell God’s Story.”

West is best known for effectively making Pope John Paul II’s magisterial work “The Theology of the Body” accessible to the average person in the pew, especially the average Protestant. In his new book, West details a vision of our humanness, which includes our bodies as a feature and not a bug.

This is no vision of sexual repression, but of how our humanness fits in God’s overarching work of redemption. On this foundation, we can answer, both for ourselves and for others, the difficult questions of our culture, about why not all sexual impulses are good or just, about what it means to be male or female, about how human sexuality was intended by God in both single and married contexts, and about how the ultimate purpose of sex and marriage is found in God’s ultimate purpose for His image bearers and His creation.

After all, at the end of the day, all of the questions about sex dominating our culture right now are ultimately questions of purpose, not just morality. We are a world lost on who we are and therefore what our bodies are for.

Our purpose, as West reminds us, is revealed by God in His word and in His world. As the masterful storyteller He is, even our bodies point to the deeper realities of Christ’s self-giving love for His people who will, ultimately, be united with God in eternal communion. In the marriage covenant, God designed a way for us to act out His great cosmic drama on the smaller stage of our everyday lives together. Its significance is grounded in its imitation of the real thing: God’s covenantal love for His world.

In fact, the symbolism of marriage ties Scripture together from beginning to end. Genesis begins with a wedding and Revelation ends with one. The first points to the last and reveals the kind of relationship God wants with us through Christ.

Many Christians have long forgotten that our exalted view of marriage is not ultimately about preserving traditional moral norms or achieving personal happiness, but about God Himself. Many are called to human marriage, but all are called to eternal communion with God through Christ. This is why the Christian tradition values both human marriage and human singleness.

“When we get the body wrong,” says West, “we get the divine story wrong as well.” It only makes sense that the body and sexuality are under so much attack today.

To be clear, West approaches this topic as a faithful Catholic who maintains the teaching of his tradition. Not all Christians will agree on all the implications of his teaching (like the role of contraception), but I still say this book is must-reading for all followers of Christ who want to be theologically clear about who we are as made in the image of God.

As my friend Eric Metaxas writes in the Foreword, “This bold, compelling, hopeful, and healing vision of our creation as male and female has been hailed by Catholics and Protestants alike as an antidote to the sexual crisis now plaguing the church and the world.”

Stephen Hawking's Leap of Faith: Unnecessary Science

Western culture has an undeniable fascination with scientists, and with good reason. Patiently using the scientific method, they have brought us many good things, from the telephone to the airplane to antibiotics. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the world’s first scientists were Christians who were seeking to discover not whether God created, but how he created the universe. Because science is based on the premise that God created an orderly universe. And the scientific method was a Christian contribution to our civilization. But later some scientists, in their pursuit to find the Holy Grail, began to question the God hypothesis. Many today (at least the most outspoken among them) have become determined atheists, insisting that science makes the God hypothesis unnecessary.

Well for a while, Stephen Hawking, the brilliant scientist at Cambridge, was more in line with the traditional view. In his famous book, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, he said, “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.” Unfortunately, in his new book, The Grand Design and in a companion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Hawking now says God is unnecessary after all.

Hawking and his coauthor, American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, are seeking a so-called “theory of everything” to explain life and the universe. They first address the undeniable reality that the cosmos seems incredibly fine-tuned for life. This reality, called the Anthropic Principle, has led many thinking scientists to make room in their equations for a Creator.

But not Hawking. In THE GRAND DESIGN, he takes refuge in the unproven, un-testable, and completely theoretical hypothesis that we live in one of a multitude — perhaps an infinite number — of universes, each created spontaneously, run by unplanned physical processes that in a few cases could make life possible. But is this flight of fancy called the multiverse any more scientific than the simpler and more satisfying declaration, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”?

Of course not! It’s based on an unscientific, unproven presupposition. But opting for atheism, Hawking still gives human beings — who are apparently alone in the multiverse — at least a fig leaf of dignity. He writes, “Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense lords of creation.”

Lords of creation? Those are stirring, but meaningless words. Actually, a godless multiverse would make us the puny inhabitants of a dead creation — a creation, mind you, without a Creator!

Whether or not there’s anything to Hawking’s theory — and Christians, who believe in heaven and hell, should be the very first people to acknowledge the possibility of dimensions that we cannot see — the fact remains that the great physicist has left the world of science with a breathtaking leap of faith.

Which, after all, is easier to believe — an infinite, soulless, universe-making machine, or a loving and powerful Creator who has set in motion the awesome, just-right creation we are still only beginning to explore?

Which answer you choose is, of course, ultimately a matter not of science, but of FAITH.

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He Couldn't Prove Creationism

Mark 4:17

Rob Rhinehart, age 25, is Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He grew up in suburban Atlanta, with four older sisters. His father was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, and his mother stayed at home. His parents are both devout Christians, and, until he was eighteen, Rhinehart was, too.

The trouble started in science class, at his small high school, Whitefield Academy. Rhinehart, who built computers in his spare time, had grown interested in astrophysics. Like everything at his school, science was taught according to creationist principles, which hold that the world is less than ten thousand years old. Rhinehart decided to write his senior thesis proving creationism from a scientific point of view.

He began delving into Dawkins and Hitchens, and searching the Internet; he thought that he’d write, “‘I’ve been through this quest and found all this evidence for Christianity and now I don’t doubt anymore.’ But the opposite happened.” His paper, titled “Bad Religion,” was about “why I was no longer a Christian, why I no longer believed in God.” He got an F on it. And he was “ostracized” from the community, he says.

His parents now accept that he holds different views. “They compartmentalize,” Rhinehart said.

Science, God, and the Improbability of Life

I’m not a scientist, and I don’t play one on TV. But I can examine scientific evidence and ask the question, “How is life possible?” Stay tuned.

This past Christmas, the Wall Street Journal ran an essay of mine entitled “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God.” The content will be familiar to those who have read my latest book, “Miracles,” or heard me talk about it here at BreakPoint.

I noted that the initial euphoria over the possibility that there were a septillion -- that’s one followed by 24 zeros -- planets capable of supporting life in the universe was followed by the sober fact that such planets, never mind evidence of extraterrestrial life, are exceedingly rare.

That’s because science has learned just how “fine-tuned” the universe has to be in order to support life of any kind, never mind intelligent life.

As I wrote in the Journal, “Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life — every single one of which must be perfectly met,” or our existence would be utterly impossible.

Yet, not only do we exist, we’re discussing the fact that we exist, which prompted me to ask, “What can account for” all of this? and “Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions actually require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?”

Well, the response to the column was overwhelming. The piece really went viral and garnered more “likes” on Facebook than any article the Wall Street Journal has ever published -- over 350,000 as I read this now! I find that amazing and more than a little humbling.

Not surprisingly, the piece had plenty of critics. One scientist wrote to the Journal complaining about “religious arguments for the existence of God thinly veiled as scientific arguments” and “allowing a Christian apologist to masquerade as a scientist.”

This objection, which I’m told figured prominently in the comments section at the Journal, essentially amounts to saying that only scientists should be allowed to talk about the religious implications of scientific things. Scientists, it seems, can dabble as metaphysicians, philosophers, and theologians, but not vice-versa.

This is the foregone conclusion even when the person of faith is merely citing scientific findings, as I did. However, this objection is not rooted in science but in scientism, which holds that “empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.”

The criticism wasn’t limited to comments from atheistic scientists. Several religious believers, including those whose work I respect, took me to task for saying that science can “prove” the existence of God, much less the God of the Bible. As one Christian philosopher put it, a god whose existence can be proved scientifically isn’t God.

That is true, which is why I’m happy that I never said anything resembling that. What I did was point to the sheer improbability of our existence and ask whether it might not be reasonable to infer, like Fred Hoyle, who coined the phrase “Big Bang,” whether the universe might be, as he put it, a “put up job.”

The scientific findings I cited aren’t “proof” that compel belief in God’s existence but “signs” pointing to that possibility and inviting you to follow them to see where they might lead.

In the end, belief in God, especially the biblical God, is an act of faith. But so too is believing that our existence is simply the result of chance. Like it or not.

Virtual-Reality Reality: The Simulation Hypothesis As Secular Religion

Job 38:1

The scene is movie legend: Morpheus sits with Neo beside a fireplace while a storm rages outside, and tells him that the world he calls reality — what he sees when he looks out the window or turns on the television, when he goes to work — it’s all an illusion. If he takes the blue pill, Neo can remain comfortably in the illusion — you know, “The Matrix.” But if he takes the red pill, he will wake up to a very uncomfortable real world.

It’s a cool movie, but some scientists are entertaining an idea almost exactly like its premise. The “simulation hypothesis” proposes that the world around us, our bodies, and even our own minds might not be real. Instead, they could be the illusions of a sophisticated computer program created by a super-intelligent being or beings.

In fact, writing at NBC, Dan Falk quotes top scientists and philosophers who think that it’s not just possible, it’s likely. They think we could exist in some version of the Matrix. “If we are living in a simulation,” writes Oxford philosopher Nick Bostram, “then the cosmos we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence.” The world we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell, may not be “located at the fundamental level of reality.”

Before you laugh: This idea is surprisingly hard to disprove — at least on secular assumptions. One M.I.T. scientist and author of the book, “The Simulation Hypothesis,” recalls playing a virtual reality game and forgetting he was alone “in an empty room with a headset on.” The game was just so realistic, it became his reality.

If it’s that easy to get lost in a simulation we’ve designed with our limited technology — or so goes the thinking — what must it be like in a simulation designed by an advanced race? We could live our entire lives in such a simulation, and never know it.

And what would be the purpose of such a virtual-reality reality? The answer in “The Matrix” was sentient robotic overlords who kept us distracted so they could use humans to generate energy to survive. Believe it or not, some who seriously argue for the simulation hypothesis have similarly outlandish guesses as to the identity and intent of the programmers.

Some suggest a race of extraterrestrial beings running a kind of experiment on us. Rich Terrile of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory thinks the programmers could be us — that is, future, highly-advanced (read: further evolved) humans who have decided to create a simulation of an earlier stage of their own civilization.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that these advanced beings controlling our reality quickly get deified.

If the simulation hypothesis turns out to be true, says Terrile, that means “there’s a creator, an architect — someone who designed the world.” He even recognizes he’s wrapping ancient religious ideas — specifically Eastern Monism — in “mathematics and science rather than just faith.” But he’s fine with that.

Taking the simulation hypothesis seriously forces us to deal with serious questions. For instance, could our own minds and everything we know and love be mere created computer code designed to trick itself into believing it can think? And if all of this is a simulation, does anything matter at all?

According to Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb, such thinking could lead to massive social unrest. After all, if the world is just a computer program, it would “relieve us from being accountable for any of our actions.” And if our world is the creation of an advanced race, where did they come from? Much like the theory that says life on earth was seeded by extraterrestrials, the simulation hypothesis just moves the origin of intelligent life back a step. But it doesn’t ever explain it.

Of course, there’s a much more direct way of answering these ultimate questions. What if the improbable design of the universe, our planet, bodies, and minds were, in fact, created by an advanced Being, who instead of programming a supercomputer, called everything into existence by His Word. What if this Creator is a moral being, and so we are morally accountable to Him?

Apparently, for a few of the world’s top scientists, that’s just too much of a stretch ... too unlikely, and who wants to be morally accountable anyway? And so, instead, they prefer The Matrix.

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Resource:

“Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say,” by Dan Falk, NBC News, July 6, 2019