Evolution as part of God's design
I have no reason to believe that evolution did not happen. You could say that I recognize that evolution is part of God's design.
Physicist Stephen Barr recently wrote,
It may come as a surprise, but even the leading Intelligent Design advocates believe that the Earth is billions of years old, that the fossil record reveals a story of life on Earth evolving over billions of years, and that we and other animals are descendants of a common ancestor or ancestors.
Where Intelligent Design advocates disagree with most scientists is in the mechanism of evolution. Another way of putting it is that they disagree with scientists regarding the natural mechanism for producing complex biological structure.
Most scientists believe neo-Darwinism is the correct theory of how biological structure forms. Biological structure is characterized by complexity and functional interdependence of parts. Neo-Darwinism proposes a natural mechanism for producing this complex biological structure: it is the combination of random genetic mutations and the winnowing process called natural selection. The claim is that this mechanism works even if the genetic mutations that fuel it are statistically random, in other words, if the genetic mutations are done by blind chance.
The question for science is whether the neo-Darwinian account of evolution is sufficient to explain all instances of biological complexity. Many scientists are confident that it is—which can be considered odd, given that (apart from speculation) little is known about the steps by which some complex structures actually evolved.
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Intelligent Design theorists believe that the neo-Darwinism account is insufficient. They argue that there are certain biological structures that could not arise in a single big step, which would be prohibitively improbable, or even by a series of little steps, since these structures are “irreducibly complex.” (“Irreducible” here means that every element of the structure must be in place for it to function at all. Michael Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap, which can’t catch any mice until all the parts are there.)
I'm not convinced that Intelligent Design advocates have got it right. For one, I'm not sure how one would test their hypothesis, whereas it may be possible to test neo-Darwinism. Imagine that experimental results show that, under certain circumstances, some strain of bacteria evolves over thousands of generations some new feature of the kind that Intelligent Design theorists would recognize as irreducibly complex. This would suggest very strongly that neo-Darwinism was true.
Now don't go thinking I'm an atheist. Acceptance of neo-Darwinism is in no sense rejection of Christian truth. The Catholics will at least back me up--the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 says "The gist of the theory of evolution as a scientific hypothesis . . . is in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe; for Scripture does not tell us in what form the present species of plants and of animals were originally created by God."
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On the subject of an intelligent designer, I would say that the intelligent design is in the laws of the universe. The order of the universe is more beautiful and subtle than anyone had previously thought. It is precisely the intelligible structure of the world, which natural science has elucidated with such spectacular success, that points to its being the product of intelligence (I suggest you read some books by Paul Davies if you want to read more about this).
The orderliness we observe in nature can arise spontaneously from mere chaos. Since ancient times this fact has been seen as evidence for a cosmic designer. Analysis of examples of order arising from chaos (randomness if you want) reveals that the orderly structures found in things (such as the solar system) are manifestations of a more impressive orderliness at the level of fundamental laws. These laws are written or designed into the universe, which suggests a writer or designer.
Richard Dawkins called the universe “a blind watchmaker." If it is, one could call it profoundly miraculous, for it is much more fantastic to design a watchmaker than a watch. We shouldn't pit evolution against design, if we recognize that evolution is part of God’s design.
Physicist Stephen Barr recently wrote,
There are two fundamentally different battles raging in the current debates about evolution. The first pits nearly the entire scientific community against creationists, who believe that they are upholding the veracity of Scripture by denying that evolution happened at all.
The second battle concerns not the fact of evolution but the standard neo-Darwinian explanation of it, and the issues at stake are primarily philosophical and scientific. Leading the charge in this second fight is the Intelligent Design movement.
It may come as a surprise, but even the leading Intelligent Design advocates believe that the Earth is billions of years old, that the fossil record reveals a story of life on Earth evolving over billions of years, and that we and other animals are descendants of a common ancestor or ancestors.
Where Intelligent Design advocates disagree with most scientists is in the mechanism of evolution. Another way of putting it is that they disagree with scientists regarding the natural mechanism for producing complex biological structure.
Most scientists believe neo-Darwinism is the correct theory of how biological structure forms. Biological structure is characterized by complexity and functional interdependence of parts. Neo-Darwinism proposes a natural mechanism for producing this complex biological structure: it is the combination of random genetic mutations and the winnowing process called natural selection. The claim is that this mechanism works even if the genetic mutations that fuel it are statistically random, in other words, if the genetic mutations are done by blind chance.
The question for science is whether the neo-Darwinian account of evolution is sufficient to explain all instances of biological complexity. Many scientists are confident that it is—which can be considered odd, given that (apart from speculation) little is known about the steps by which some complex structures actually evolved.
-----
Intelligent Design theorists believe that the neo-Darwinism account is insufficient. They argue that there are certain biological structures that could not arise in a single big step, which would be prohibitively improbable, or even by a series of little steps, since these structures are “irreducibly complex.” (“Irreducible” here means that every element of the structure must be in place for it to function at all. Michael Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap, which can’t catch any mice until all the parts are there.)
I'm not convinced that Intelligent Design advocates have got it right. For one, I'm not sure how one would test their hypothesis, whereas it may be possible to test neo-Darwinism. Imagine that experimental results show that, under certain circumstances, some strain of bacteria evolves over thousands of generations some new feature of the kind that Intelligent Design theorists would recognize as irreducibly complex. This would suggest very strongly that neo-Darwinism was true.
Now don't go thinking I'm an atheist. Acceptance of neo-Darwinism is in no sense rejection of Christian truth. The Catholics will at least back me up--the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 says "The gist of the theory of evolution as a scientific hypothesis . . . is in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe; for Scripture does not tell us in what form the present species of plants and of animals were originally created by God."
-----
On the subject of an intelligent designer, I would say that the intelligent design is in the laws of the universe. The order of the universe is more beautiful and subtle than anyone had previously thought. It is precisely the intelligible structure of the world, which natural science has elucidated with such spectacular success, that points to its being the product of intelligence (I suggest you read some books by Paul Davies if you want to read more about this).
The orderliness we observe in nature can arise spontaneously from mere chaos. Since ancient times this fact has been seen as evidence for a cosmic designer. Analysis of examples of order arising from chaos (randomness if you want) reveals that the orderly structures found in things (such as the solar system) are manifestations of a more impressive orderliness at the level of fundamental laws. These laws are written or designed into the universe, which suggests a writer or designer.
Richard Dawkins called the universe “a blind watchmaker." If it is, one could call it profoundly miraculous, for it is much more fantastic to design a watchmaker than a watch. We shouldn't pit evolution against design, if we recognize that evolution is part of God’s design.
Labels: evolution, god, intelligent design, neo-Darwinism
posted by shane at 6:18 PM
2 Comments:
Testing Intelligent Design
Searching for design is a common practice in several disciplines. For instance, SETI researchers look for design in EM waves, forensic scientists try to determine whether certain events happened intentionally or were accidental by looking for tell-tale clues at potential crime scenes, and anthropologists look for clues of intelligence in our ancestors (e.g., painting, tool-making).
William Dembski has proposed a mathematical method for detecting design that involves searching for what he calls specified complexity. It works well for things like strings of numbers, but would be much more difficult for something like a flagellum because it involves assigning probabilities or looking for patterns. However, if more mathematicians working with biochemists took it up, it might prove to be a useful tool. We know design when we see it (like a cave painting), but this method would help us to quantify that so that we could distinguish between less obvious examples.
What if the bacteria you mention never evolved an irreducibly complex structure? Then neo-Darwinists are left with their just-so stories of what might have happened. Design can be quantified, so we can move beyond the just-so stories. By the way, even those who are most ardent against evolution, the old-Earth Creationists, believe that bacteria can evolve due to their sheer numbers and speed of reproduction.
An Issue of Mechanism?
You are correct, of course, that many Design theorists acknowledge the fact of evolution and only quibble with the mechanism in some cases (cases of irreducible complexity, which is not ubiquitous in biological systems). However, I think you gloss over just how significant this objection is-it is not just a minor disagreement, because it implies, at least at the moment, some sort of POOF. We know that naturalism abhors a poof, so this idea strikes at the very foundations of modern scientific thinking. This means that there is a lot more at stake than just a small part of evolutionary theory, which is itself a big enough idea to incorporate new caveats. Naturalism, on the other hand, is extremely limited in scope, so much so that it lacks the vocabulary to describe what Design theorists are suggesting. The issue is not as much about evolution as it is about the nature of scientific explanation itself. The legal battles (such as Kitzmiller v. Dover) typically involve testimony and judgements about what does and what does not count as science.
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