Random stuff on evolution

I've been listening and reading to lots of Christian views on evolution recently. There are two things that frustrate me about most of them.

Firstly, that they seem to focus on whether generic theism is compatible with evolution. Unfortunately that is comparitively easy compared to the question about whether evolution is compatible with the teaching of the Bible. In my opinion, Alvin Plantinga in this excellent series of articles from 1991 asks the best questions and comes up with the best answers.

I have a soft spot for Alvin, after reading just a few pages of his writing helped me a massive amount when I was doubting the reality of God more than any point in my Christian life. He has helped me a lot again, not least in arguing that there is nothing wrong with being an agnostic on the question:

"Hasker apparently believes that if I reject [The Theory of Common Ancestery] as improbable, then (if I am proceeding properly) I must be prepared to suggest and endorse some other view of the same specificity or same logical strength as TCA. Now at first glance, anyway, that seems wrong. I think Cardinal X will be the next Pope; you think that is unlikely, but don't have a candidate of your own; there is no one such that you think it is more likely than not that he will be the next pope. Is there something wrong with your procedure? I think not."

My favourite quotation from all my reading so far has been from him too:

"accepting the view that evolution is certain is itself adaptive for life in graduate school and academia generally."

Nice.

The second thing that frustrates me is how often Christians retreat to something very similar to the non-overlapping Magesteria Dawkins criticises in The God Delusion. Many Christian responses to evolution seem to fit right into the nature/grace dualism, Schaeffer, and before him, Bavinck criticised (HT Leithart):

“The sharpness of this contrast between natural and supernatural runs the grave risk of dualistically separating (supernatural) revelation from creation and nature. Special revelation should never be separated from its organic connection to history, the world, and humanity. Stated theologically, the religious antithesis should be between grace and sin and not between grace and nature.” On nature/grace premises, “What is distinctively Christian is . . . identified with and restricted to the ecclesiastical; for the world to be influenced in a Christian direction it needs to submit to the domination of the church. The nature/grace dualism also fuels the opposite of world dominaton. . . . Special revelation is not seen as entering into the fabric of the world and humanity but as floating outside and above it....

The Reformation revolted against this worldview. . . . The reality of the incarnation militates against any nature/grace dualism; the gospel is not hostile to the world as creation but to the world under the dominion of sin, the alien element that has insinuated itself into the world. Revelation and creation are not opposed to each other, for creation itself is a revelation. . . . The Reformation sought a Christianity that was hostile, not to nature but only to sin, and had a reforming and sanctifying effect upon natural life as a whole, including the world of culture, society, and politics. In the Reformation the adage came into its own: nature commends grace; grace emends nature.”

Evolution and the Bible - preliminary thoughts

Listening to: Sufjan Stevens: Illonois

I'm involved in a continuing discussion with a colleague who is also studying a Biology degree. I am bit at sea in our discussions, and as such probably confirming all her worst suspicions about Christians - although she is a very nice person, so maybe she's being more charitable to me than I deserve. Among other things it has forced me to think over what I actually believe about the Creation Narrative and Evolution - a question I've put on the back burner for years.

I would greatly appreciate criticisms on this marking post for my thinking at the moment, and pointers for other directions to consider. Please don't give it any weight in your own thinking on this matter.

With thanks in anticipation, here are my thoughts so far:

1. Richard Dawkins is right to criticise Christians who close their eyes to the world and do not see the beauty and challenges that science reveals.
2. Richard Dawkins is right to criticise the concept of Non-overlapping magisteria. There is overlap because God is the Creator and still creating. However, there there is not complete overlap between Biblical knowledge and Scientific knowledge. It is best to speak of partially overlapping magisteria which inform one another over their whole range of knowledge. Christianity is rooted in God's historical acts, but science proceeds on the basis of Christian presuppositions (leaning on Polanyi, Newbigin, Torrance, Gunton, Lewis and Plantinga).
3. Quantum theory and postmodernism teach that the answers you get are determined by the questions you ask. There is truth, although only partial truth in this. The theory of Evolution is the answer to the question "how could life have developed in a world where God is uninvolved?" Having said that, it is difficult to know how science could answer the simpler question: "how has life developed?".
4. The philosophy put forward by popularisers of science seems unable to deal with 'the one and the many'. Often it seems to drift to 'the one' and put forward some kind of pantheism where there is no distinction between humans and animals, and our purpose is derived entirely from the whole. Less palatabley it emphasises 'the many' and suggests we are all out for ourselves, each trying to enjoy life while it lasts with no purpose outside of our own existence. Trinitarian Christian theology is much better at doing justice to both the one and the many and relating them together (no doubt Colin Gunton would say something better).
5. Evolution explains how life develops but doesn't explain how life began.
6. The distinction between macro and micro evolution is not in the Bible and not in science.
7. The biggest problem I can see with an old earth from a Biblical point of view is that the Bible seems to teach as foundational that the universe was not always marked by death and decay.
8. I just don't understand how Intelligent Design is any different from the God of the Gaps.
9. John Walton is a gifted speaker. I think he is right that Genesis is more concerned with the creating of function than creating of material, but it would be wrong to say that it is only concerned with the creating of function. Which then leaves the question of what Genesis is saying about the creating of material (not 'how much it is saying about the creating of material').
10. Naturalistic evolution is self-refuting (as Lewis and Plantinga have argued).
11. What does it mean to "know nothing except Christ crucified" in this discussion?

Newbigin on Science

Further to my ambitious recent post about TF Torrance on science, here is a quote from Lesslie Newbigin which has some overlap:

Like all visions of ultimate truth, science is necessarily involved in a circular argument. It has to assume from the beginning the truth of what it seeks to prove. It begins from the conviction that the universe is acessible to rational understanding, it refuses to accept as final evidence that which seems to contradict this faith, and it seeks with a passion which is one of the glories of human history to prove that the faith is true.

(p.48, The Gospel in a pluralist society)

Contingent Rationality and Science

[I'm not sure that I fully understand Torrance fully, so please point out any errors in my interpretation.]

"Natural science tacitly assumes the contingence, as well as the orderliness, of the universe. If there were no order immanent in the universe, if there were chaos and not a cosmos, the universe would not be accessible to scientific knowledge; if the universe were not characterized by contingence, the laws of nature would be derived from it immediately and necessarily through logico-deductive processes without experimental questioning of nature to induce it to yield its secrets - which would make empirical science quite pointless. It is through relying on the indissoluble bond between contingence and order in the universe that natural science has come to operate with the distinctive interconnection between experiment and theory which has characterized our greatest advances in knowledge of the physical world. Yet we cannot prove that there is order in the universe, for we have to assume it in order even to attempt proof of it; while genuine contingence is something that natural science on its own cannot come up with, but is rather something that natural science, through its ways of determining regularities in nature and formulating universal laws, is always on the point of resolving away. Quite evidently science must assume conceptions and principles that are themselves not logically derivable, explainable, or provable, but without which it could not function. Contingence and order are assumptions of that kind"

(pp. 26-27, Divine and Contingent Order)

How can you know that there is an order to the universe? How can you assume that it is understandable?

We assume order all the time. Inductive reasoning is based on it, and science is just the most refined example of this. But it is not provable, as David Hume and others have shown. In faith scientists commit to trying to understand the order of the world, without being able to prove that order exists to understand. However, Christianity provides the support for believing in an ordered universe because it believes the universe was created by God who is reliable, rational and loving.

Why do we use experiments to understand the order in the universe?

Scientists in faith believe that the way to understand the world is empirical research. Their whole enterprise is founded on this commitment. Why not assume that the world must be a certain way? Why not assume that the order of the universe is necessarily X? That was what the Greeks tended to do and that was why they also tended to think that "its regularities and laws can be discovered by pure a priori thought alone" (p. 31, ibid). However, if the universe is contingent then we cannot use reason alone to understand it. If it is contingent we expect it to constantly challenge our attempts to understand it, and so we perform endless experiments to understand from nature what its laws are. However, again it is Christianity that provides the support for believing in a contingent universe. In opposition to prevailing Greek thought and on the authority of the Bible it rejected the idea that the universe (and God) had to be a certain way. It insisted on the freedom of the personal Creator, and so gave the foundations for assuming that the way to understand nature is endless experiments.

To quote Torrance again:

"It is through being correlated to the endless possibilities of the Creator, that the universe is endowed with innate power constantly to surprise us in its manifestation of unexpected features and structures which nevertheless always turn out to be consistent with its other features and structures. What else is that but a manifestation of its contingent intelligibility and indeed its objective reality over which we have no control? This intelligibility of the created universe, its intrinsic orderliness, consistency, and reliability, is the ground of our confidence in scientific inquiry, but it is the contingent nature of that intelligibility which makes the universe attract and challenge the most arduous and unremitting scientific effort, and gives discovery its immense excitement" (p. 40, ibid).

Modern science flourished in Western Europe, to a degree not seen in other cultures where it existed but did not flourish, because of the Biblical teaching about our Creator. The biblical worldview has now been largely cut away but that was the origin of the foundations it is now built on.