On a whim I picked up a “Staff Pick” at my friendly local comic/game shop. Pax Romana by Jonathan Hickman is very, very good. Only the first issue is shipping, but if you see it – get it. Sci-fi, religion, alternate history, genetic tampering, stuff blowing up real good.
It seems like one major point of conflict over evolution and faith is the idea of randomness. The term has many connotations, but the most common in this case is equivalence with a lack of purpose or guidance. Naturalists point to the randomness of nature as evidence against a rational God who guides His creation. Theists argue that any randomness is localized or illusory and that each creature is an act of special creation, no randomness.
My objection is over the idea of randomness itself. What we do not understand, we tend to call “random”, “chaotic” or “accidental”. I’m not a Deist, but I do believe that God generally lets His design run it’s course. Intervention isn’t necessary because it was perfectly designed in the first place. That’s not to say that He doesn’t intervene at times, just that it wasn’t required by the design. What appears random to us is really just beyond our comprehension. The roll of a die can be calculated according to the laws of physics given near perfect knowledge – without knowledge of physics and mechanics it would be impossible. Is it therefore random?
Perhaps it comes down to time and our place in the flow of it. I had a professor once who challenged my statement that God is outside of Time. I’m not sure that he was serious, but it did make me think about the implications and meaning of such a statement. I guess I don’t believe in randomness, just limits in our ability to see causes and consequences.
Also, I always hated studying probability theory. I suppose in some ways it was/is interesting, but I just couldn’t ever wrap my head around it.
So just this morning I tuned in to Just Thinking and wouldn’t you know it’s Stuart McAllister doing a series on “Naturalism”.
Now, I only heard part 3 of this 4 part series, but it was certainly difficult for me to separate Stuart’s obvious challenge to Naturalism from an attack on the principles of Evolutionary Theory. I will only say that I feel even more that we need to be clear about challenging and refuting Naturalism and Materialism without rejecting good science. God is not threatened by discovery of truth, why should we fear reason? We should certainly challenge ideas that go beyond the evidence, but let’s be careful not to create ludicrous or foolish explanations for ideas that are not, in themselves, anti-Christian.
Stuart did make a very cool point about religion and violence: 130 million people (at minimum) were killed in the 20th century by or in the name of Atheistic regimes. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, the Khmer Rouge, and on it goes. Religious conflict has never come close to that level of killing, so what do we make of the claims that religion causes all conflict?
Benjamin Warfield:
We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, more loyal to follow it, whithersoever it leads.
Stephen Jay Gould: (quoted by Collins in The Language of God)
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpeenth millionth time: Science simply cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerny [Gould's third-grade teacher] and have their knuckles rapped for it… Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example). Forget philosophy for a moment; the simple empirics of the past hundred years should suffice. Darwin himself was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), but the great American botanist Asa Gray, who favored natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian. Move forward 50 years: Charles D. Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess Shale Fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct the history of life according to His plans and purposes. Move on another 50 years to the two greatest evolutionists of our generation: G. G. Simpson was a humanistic agnostic, Theodosius Dobzhansky, a believing Russian Orthodox. Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism.
I just finished The Language of God by Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. It was a refreshing viewpoint, as I have long struggled with the apparent conflicts between Biology, Geology and faith. Collins takes the approach that faith and science need not be opponents, that the conflict is perpetuated by extremists on both sides.
Collins’ theology at times seems a bit too liberal for me, though I agree on the crux (sorry) of the argument. The principles of theistic evolution, or as Collins calls it “BioLogos” are these:
1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 Billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got underway, no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
I still need to chew some of this over, but it seems like a very clear and defensible position on biology and the nature of life on earth.
A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski