Randomness and Design

I found this quote quite helpful in untangling a word that gets used in discussions about evolution:

“The word “random” as used in science does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means uncorrelated. My children like to observe the license plates of the cars that pass us on the highway, to see which states they are from. The sequence of states exhibits a degree of randomness: a car from Kentucky, then New Jersey, then Florida, and so on—because the cars are uncorrelated: Knowing where one car comes from tells us nothing about where the next one comes from. And yet, each car comes to that place at that time for a reason. Each trip is planned, each guided by some map and schedule. Each driver’s trip fits into the story of his life in some intelligible way, though the story of these drivers’ lives are not usually closely correlated with the other drivers’ lives.”

–from Stephen M. Barr, “The Design of Evolution,” First Things, October, 2005

The Father of Intelligent Design

Yesterday I spent the morning with Phillip Johnson, the retired Berkeley law professor who, more than anyone else, fathered Intelligent Design. He is unrepentant. Johnson is as convinced as ever that evolution is a hoax, a demonstration that if you will not consider evidence for God-as-creator, you will predictably find no God in creation.

I like Johnson, not so much for his thinking as for how he communicates it. He enjoys an argument, but he likes to be friends with those he argues against. I detect no rancor. He has fond memories of hammer-and-tongs annual debates with William Provine, the Cornell historian of science, which usually concluded with beer and talk at a local tavern.

Over the last decade Johnson has suffered from two strokes and (most recently) an operation that went wrong and put him in the ICU for nearly two months. He told me when he woke up in the rehab hospital, he just wanted to die as quickly as possible. He couldn’t face another round of rehab.

But he did. He’s struggled to mend, with the tremendous help and encouragement of his wife Kathie. He says he has learned a lot of humility, and with it more sympathy for others.

He’s grateful for his resurrection (his word) not only because of how he has grown, but also because he otherwise would not have seen the 49ers’ tremendous season. With a glint in his eye, he predicted more good seasons to come. Which suggests that, in all likelihood, he’ll be arguing yet awhile.

Yet, Johnson said, “Convincing the world no longer seems so important to me. I’m 71 years old. I feel a lot closer to death. I can almost step across the boundary from this life to the next. If my Christian faith is correct, I will soon hear answers from the most authoritative source available.”

How Do You Like Your Octopus?

Lots and lots of cool stuff can be found on the internet, such that one could spend all day, every day searching it out. I sometimes suspect that David Graham does so, but I think he has a real job as a doctor. Anyway, of all the cool things, David came up with this quite amazing video of an octopus and its camouflage, which I highly recommend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB4N8_PUFc0&feature=youtu.be

How do you respond to such wonders? Or to the amazing processes of orchid pollenization, which I learned about last evening from an eminent geologist who has extended his scientific interests to Costa Rican orchids? Evolutionary biologists try to envision the step by step process by which such wonders came to be, through material processes over millions of years. Young-earth creationists imagine God doing it almost instantly, like a magician. They say that random processes could never invent such complex things, and that God and random material processes are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

That’s very debatable–doesn’t God cause the clouds to rain? and coins to come down heads or tails?–but whichever side you take, all theists worthy of their theism will see the wonders of God rampant and worthy of praise. I defy anybody to watch that octopus and insist that it is pointless.

 

 

Creation or Evolution?

I’ve just finished a book I’d highly recommend: Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? by Denis Alexander. Alexander is a biochemist heading the Faraday Institute at Cambridge. I interviewed him back in July, somewhat embarrassed that I had only read bits of his writing. (But not embarrassed enough to skip the interview.)

He writes as an unapologetic evangelical with a robust view of the sovereignty of God, and as a convinced (and practicing) evolutionist. He begins with a strong statement of God the creator, a view from Scripture. Then he gives a careful and thorough layman’s explanation of genetics and how an evolutionary biologist sees the genome evolving over millions of years. It’s a serious treatment, which stretched me considerably. (I’m sure a biologist would find it mundane.) It helped me understand to some degree the complex knowledge that binds together evolutionary theory with a thousand strands; and it also helped me comprehend to some degree the plausibility of the theory. The creativity is in the details, and what seems impossible in the large (the self-assembling 747) begins to look quite realistic in the small.

I can’t begin to convey what he says. You have to read it for yourself.

I was struck by the level of detail that scientists have already drawn from genomic studies, only a few decades after we first grasped what DNA is. One small example: approximately 1,000 genes have been detected enabling a mammal’s sense of smell. All or nearly all of these can be found in human DNA (which is largely identical to any other mammal’s) but 60% have been “switched off” by mutations. They are there as genetic fossils. By contrast, mice have “switched off” only 20%. Eighty percent of their smelling genes remain functional, which is why mice smell so much better than we do. One presumes that humans are not nearly so dependent on smell for survival, so our mutations have piled up. For mice, poor senses of smell get weeded out.

One might possibly explain these facts by other theories, but evolution surely is an excellent fit. And there are many, many, many such particular examples.

Alexander goes on to cover everything that somebody worried about evolution and creation could be interested in. He is a thoughtful and careful student of Scripture, and it shows in his thorough treatment of Genesis and other important texts. He takes up Adam and Eve, the Fall, questions about God’s responsibility for natural evil (the tooth and claw critique of creation), and the biblical understanding of death. He critiques Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design.

Some of this is undoubtedly subject to counter-critique. Alexander obviously is extremely knowledgeable on multiple fronts, and he is generally charitable. (Not so much in his criticisms of ID.) But a detailed argument will always be answered, and for lay people like me it is hard to assess the quality of the arguments.

What I particularly like is the foundation of Alexander’s thinking: that God made the universe, and the task of science is to figure out how. He takes Christian delight in his conviction that his own and others’ scientific work has revealed a great deal of the magnificent “how” of God’s work. But in his chapter on the origins of life—i.e., the first cell—he is not bothered in the least by the admission of ignorance, that “at present we have very little idea as to where the DNA does come from.”

“I would like to suggest that theologically it doesn’t matter two hoots whether we ever manage to understand the origins of life scientifically or not. The simple reason is that God’s work in creation is not dependent upon whether we understand it or not.”

In that chapter he gives a great deal of information about the state of research into the origins of life. Alexander obviously does think that eventually, maybe in fifty years, scientists will be able to offer a credible story of how God brought life into being. But he doesn’t think for a moment the story will reveal “blind, materialistic, naturalistic forces” at work.

“These are God’s chemicals, God’s materials, that are being talked about here. A mystery bigger than the origin of life is why Christians should ascribe pagan-sounding characteristics to God’s world. Is this God’s world or isn’t it? … To confidently proclaim that the precious materials God has so carefully brought into being in the dying moments of exploding stars do not have the potentiality to bring about life, seems to me… insulting [to God]. Christianity, in a sense, is a very materialistic religion. We believe that all the materials of the universe without exception are God’s materials. ‘Who are you, oh man’, to tell God what potentialities are or are not built into his materials? All we’ll ever come up with anyway, if ever, is a detailed step-by-step description as to how God did it.”

That seems to be a very strong idea of God’s creation and of science’s role in exploring it.

The Direction of Evolution

I had a fascinating and hugely enjoyable interview–several hours worth–with Simon Conway Morris, an outstanding paleontologist at Cambridge. Conway Morris did some of the main work on the Burgess fossils that Steven Jay Gould wrote about in Wonderful Life. Gould was celebrating the randomness of evolution, the sense he gained from the fossil record that evolution was throwing out new life forms in a splendid and arbitrary abundance–and that it was purely accidental which ones survived. Famously Gould suggested that if the tape of evolution were run again a thousand times, it would come up with a thousand different results.

Conway Morris takes a very different view. He thinks there is an inevitability in evolution–that life must go in certain directions because those are the only possibilities–and that those possibilities are actually quite narrowly limited. I won’t try to describe these views any further now, because it’s complicated, but this view naturally brings a very different macro view of evolution.

Conway Morris is a Christian, who came to a serious intellectual commitment while he was in graduate school studying the Burgess fossils. At that time he began to read C.S. Lewis and went on to Chesteron, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and others of that “Inklings” circle and their influences. (I know, I know, neither Chesterton nor Sayers were Inklings–we need a word for this loose circle of associates and influences.) Conway Morris is a voracious reader and a fascinating talker. The good news is that he is currently writing a book that will sum up the history of evolution as he understands it. I can hardly wait to read it.

In Oxford

I’m in Oxford, England, doing interviews for a prospective book on faith and science, with a particular emphasis on questions of evolution. Yesterday I had the interesting experience of looking at my watch during an interview and realizing it was past midnight. Only once, as far as I can remember, have I ever before gone past midnight in an interview, and that was with the rocker Larry Norman, many years ago.

This time it was Ard Louis, a physics professor at the university. I can only plead exhilaration. Ard is a fascinating person to talk to. He’s very young to hold such an exalted position–in his thirties, I would guess. He grew up in Gabon of Dutch missionary parents, went to missionary boarding schools in Gabon and Ivory Coast where he was taught six day creationism, and eventually found his way to Cornell for graduate school. He’s wonderful to talk to, remarkably committed to helping and encouraging graduate students and international students, and rather bright.

In the last decade he has been doing a lot of talks on faith and science–if you google his name I think you’ll find some. He’s also got some stimulating essays on the Biologos website.

He commented that for Christians concerned about science undermining biblical interpretation, evolution really isn’t the big problem. The difficulty is geology with its absolute assurance of the ancient age of the earth–and also anthropology, with its discovery that human beings have existed as hunter gatherers for a lot more than 10,000 years. And also astronomy, with its ways of measuring the age of the universe. Thinking within that context, questions about evolution are interesting, but secondary.

I thought that helped put evolution debates into context. It’s not really biology that young earth creationists are quarreling with. It’s several disciplines. In fact the largest question is: what do we do with science, when it appears to contradict our understanding of Scripture?

Random Purpose

The latest Christianity Today (June, 2011) features a cover story on the controversy over Adam. From the point of view of evolutionary genetics, the beginning point of the human race appears to be a population of at least several thousand. How to square that with the biblical record of Adam and Eve as the first parents? This raises many familiar issues of faith and science in a slightly new garb.

One line in the sand is mentioned in the CT editorial. “In Darwinian thought, pure randomness was the engine of evolution. But randomness denies the divine Reason (the Logos in the language of John’s Gospel) behind the creative process. Christians must root for intelligence over chance.”

I want to point out that this “bright line” is actually rather fuzzy, because nothing is purely random. First, randomness is always constrained by the physical universe. The structure of the atom is clearly not random, nor are the physical constants of time, space, gravity and energy that earth labors under. If genetic mutations are randomly generated, it is only within a very narrow range of possibilities. And how those random mutations are culled for survival and for usefulness, and incorporated into the organism, is anything but random. If God made the physical cosmos, and holds it together still, how can these constraints be said to be anything but his intelligence?

Secondly, randomness is often a tool of intelligence. If I am a pollster, I generate a random sample of possible voters in order to understand the sentiments of the average voter.  If I am a scientist, I may use random sampling in order to compute the results of my experiment. If I am developing a new breed of wheat, I may randomly cross every variety in my seed bank in order to select for the hardiest. If I am an inventor, I may generate a random spectrum of design possibilities in order to select the best one. If I seek adventure, I may spin the globe and put my finger down at random. In all these examples, and many more, randomness is used in service of purpose. Clearly, intelligence is the governing agent, and randomness is an integral and essential part of the process used by that intelligence.

Where did that bright line go?

What Evolution Tells Us—and What It Doesn’t

Part 4 of a series on Deeper Than Darwin by John F. Haught

“General Revelation” is the classic name for what we learn about life and God from nature. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” according to Psalm 19. Such information is “general,” speaking to everyone in a universal vocabulary.

Science should extend general revelation. The more we know about the creation, the more we should praise its creator. Indeed, many great scientists have thought so. But today some would say just the opposite: that science has made belief impossible. In Darwin’s world, we find no divine design, only random events laden with cruelty, waste and death. In fact, death is inescapably part of the process of creating new species.

In Deeper Than Darwin, John Haught aims to show evolution as compatible with belief in God. Further, he wants to demonstrate how evolution can enrich our understanding of God’s nature.

To do that, he first has to establish an important philosophical point: that physical explanations do not exclude other explanations. Rather, we can bring different levels of reading to the same phenomenon. A watch, for example, can be described as a marvel of gears and springs, but the story it has to tell as the hour approaches midnight is hardly exhausted by engineering.

Haught brings another level of reading to the story of evolution. First, he notices that it is a story, with an indisputable narrative quality. What is the meaning of the story? Haught suggests that we live in a world of promise—a world that is in process, whose ending is uncertain but promising of wonders even greater than what life has already produced.

But it is not a simple wonderful story. The idea of a changeless God designing a perfect world—the deistic ideal—does not fit the story as we now know it. Rather, a story of ageless time, blind change, “the dark and tragic depths of nature’s evolutionary creativity,” challenge us to see depth beyond our comprehension. Hauck understands this as a good thing. “If there is providential significance in the historical emergence of scientific method, perhaps it is that science prolongs the mind’s journey into the depths of nature, opening up plummetless ravines where we had previously expected to read ultimate reality directly beneath the surface. … It is essential to religious experience, after all, that ultimate reality be beyond our grasp. If we could grasp it, it would not be ultimate.” [86]

Perhaps this vision is not so far from what Psalm 19 discerns in nature—the vast, silent, awesome exuberance of the skies, so far beyond us.

With the discoveries of Newton, the physical universe seemed to become more manageable. We could plot the trajectories of the planets, and predict precisely where and when a solar eclipse might come. As a result, Haught suggests, religion sought its depth inwardly—in the mysteries of spirituality and psychology. But now our knowledge of evolution restores the balance, making us aware once again of the vertiginous mystery of the physical universe.

Haught is an elegant writer, and his thoughts on the depth and promise of the physical universe sound both inspiring and intriguing. Put in laymen’s language, though, I don’t think they amount to so much. “We are struck almost speechless by the world around us; there is a kind of terrifying majesty in it; and we do not know where and how its story will end.” It’s possible to make some religion out of that message, but it ends up resembling what the apostle Paul found worshiped on Mars Hill—“an unknown god.”

Reading Haught I found myself appreciating more deeply the value of Special Revelation—the knowledge that comes directly from God in his Word. Haught believes that what we call revelation is merely an eruption from the depth of nature. He sees it as a glimmer of human insight into ultimate reality, not an authoritative word given by God himself. Given that presupposition, he looks for science to correct the Bible or any other holy book.

Certainly there are problems in understanding how evolution and the Bible fit together. In the story of evolution as we know it, there is no Eden. The world was never peaceful and perfect, free from death and pain. Rather the upward curve has been constant and gradual, always accompanied by death, which culls those creatures less than fit for survival.

Nor does evolution tell a story of Adam and Eve. The human race also has risen incrementally. Evolution suggests no story of atonement, for it knows nothing of personal responsibility, law, sin, shame or redemption.

The absence of such information in the story of evolution does not suggest to me, as it does to Haught, that we must throw out large parts of the Bible’s story. One learns different things from different sources—some things from science, some things from music, some things from the Bible. On purely empirical grounds, I would insist that sin is as reliable a fact as can be, even if evolution knows nothing of it. The same with beauty and truth and love—equally missing from evolution as Darwin traces it. Evolution knows of populations, not individuals. It could never chastise Cain for killing his brother. Murder is part of evolution’s mechanism of change. It would be a good thing, if evolution knew anything about “good.”

“Good” is not part of evolution’s story. Nevertheless good exists.

Certainly there are areas where Darwinian evolution poses hard questions about the Bible’s realism. If we understand Adam and Eve to be genuinely historical individuals, when did they live and how do they fit into the evolution of the species? When and what was Eden? Because of the broad ugly ditch between biological science and biblical interpretation, such questions have been only slightly and tentatively discussed. If the ditch is to be bridged, a lot of hard thinking must go on.

How Did We Get Religion?

Part 3 in a series on John Haught’s Deeper Than Darwin

Evolutionary theorists have grown in confidence. At one time they were content to trace the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. But increasingly “deep Darwinists”—Haught gives a long list of prominent theorists–insist that evolutionary genetics explains not just the evolution of the species but everything about the species. Perhaps the strongest form of this confidence is seen when they explain religion.

Religion has a long history of people who claim to see through it. Such thinkers as Nietsche, Marx and Freud believed (or hoped) that in the clear light of modern thought religion would be exposed as a superstitious fantasy. Evolutionists have a somewhat different take. Seeing the persistence and universality of religion, they conclude that it is not a cultural artifact that can be done away with. Rather, it must be a reflection of something in our genes.

Evolutionists believe that human brains were formed a few billion years ago when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. “The brain is less like a general-purpose computer than a Swiss army knife.” [Deeper Than Darwin, 104] The mental tools that helped hunter-gatherers survive on the savannah persist in a very different context. Religion thrives, these deep Darwinists suggest, because our ancestors had to be hyper-vigilant in seeing hidden predators. The same sensitivity that saw predators everywhere also perceived hidden agencies of all kinds. It was a small jump to seeing supernatural forces hidden behind nature at many points.

This fanciful and utterly untestable hypothesis about the roots of religion has taken hold, Haught says, because of a leap to metaphysical absolutism. The methodology of science calls scientists to focus only on physical causes. That’s hardly grounds, however, for the claim that only physical causes exist.  As John Polkinghorne puts it, methodology is not ontology.

But if you start with the assumption that genes are the fundamental cause of every behavior, it makes sense to dream up a just-so story about how and why genes produce religion. Because it has to be genetics. What else could it be? There is nothing else. By assuming that no gods exist, you prove that God does not exist.

Oddly, though, evolutionists conclude that though religion is false, it will not vanish. It is a fictional account of reality, full of imaginary gods, but it confers evolutionary advantage, and it is built into our nature. In fact, deep Darwinists must have a certain appreciation of religion, because they believe that without it, they would not be here. It enabled their survival. “It is a benign and adaptive lie, one that has served well in the cause of life.” [107]

Haught suggests a modern add-on to this account of the usefulness of religion. “By constructing mythic visions of eternal cosmic order, religions provided illusory but effective shields against the terrors of existence,” what Haught refers to as “the abyss of the world’s impersonality.” Religion gave “a reason to keep on living, to bear offspring and thus keep their genes from perishing.” [106] In other words, religion serves the function of bucking up people who could see no reason to go on living if they really understood how purposeless existence is. This is necessary for the survival of our species—of our genes.

“Happily for us, nature endowed our species in its infancy and adolescence with a glorious capacity for self-deception.” [110] Haught notes that those who cannot fool themselves into believing in religion will, by this account, be most prone to mental terror—and least fit for survival.

Haught is not one to insist that the evolutionary account of religion is wholly untrue. He notes the logical fallacy of “if functional, therefore untrue.” By that way of thinking, if science can show that religion serves some useful function in human survival, it follows that religion’s claims to truth are nonsense. No, Haught says, it is quite likely that religion is good for human survival on purely practical grounds. But that hardly proves that there is no God.

Haught is particularly helpful in pointing out that deep Darwinism has banished living creatures from its view. Borrowing from Michael Polanyi, he says that the fundamental quality of living things is “striving.” Amoebas strive to pursue and absorb food; squirrels strive to store acorns; plants strive to climb to the light. That is how we know the difference between living creatures and non-living objects-they strive to achieve something. But in deep Darwinism, the only striving-talk is in genes. The “selfish gene” strives to reproduce itself, and all other apparent striving is merely the expression of those genes’ will to survive. Such talk of selfish genes is nonsense, of course—as evolutionists will admit if they are pressed. Genes are complicated chemicals; they have no will, they do not strive.

But in banishing human or animal striving from the conversation, by insisting that human choice is an illusion, evolutionists are practically forced to talk about genes striving. Because if nothing strives, there is no story to tell. There is only an assemblage of chemicals in complex interrelationships. Life itself has been banished from the conversation.

In the end, if deep Darwinism governs the conversation about religion it governs the conversation about science also. As a persistent behavior, science (and all quests for knowledge) must be a remnant of our ancestors’ hunter-gatherer survival. And science, just as much as religion, therefore cannot make any truth claims. We know what science is—it is just a behavior useful to the reproduction of genes. Because deep Darwinism exposes everything as merely the survival-seeking of selfish genes. It even exposes the debunkers of religion.

Next: the strengths and  limitations of natural revelation.

Where Is God in the Evolutionary Story?

This is the second of a series on John Haught’s Deeper Than Darwin.

John Haught is not a biblical Christian. He reads nature and not the Bible to understand God, and so his conclusions will seem vague and sometimes wrong-headed to a Christian who trusts Scripture.

Nonetheless, as Scripture indicates, the created world does tell much about God. Haught is right to ask what our increased knowledge of that world tells about his nature. Centuries of human devotion to science must surely speak to theology. How could it be otherwise?

As I have mentioned, Haught fully accepts evolutionary biology. Evolution, he says, shows that reality is a story. The cosmos is not a steady state, but rather a changing and developing reality.  Adding to biology the discoveries of astrophysics beginning (literally) with the Big Bang, you gain a robust vision of the universe that is not what it once was, and will not be tomorrow what it is today. It is a tale in the making. Nothingness became particles and energy became stars and planets (and many other things), became life, became conscious life studying itself, creating art and worshiping God. And we are not done yet. We do not know what we will become.

This new knowledge should change our ideas about God, Haught says. Classical theology placed much emphasis on his unchangeable and timeless being (perhaps more a product of philosophy than Bible), and on his creativity making something out of nothing (light, darkness, land, sea, fish, plants, cattle, humans). These emphases seem to place us in a world that doesn’t change—because our God does not change, and his creativity is finished.

If we see reality as a story instead of a static world, we are led to think differently of God—as one whose creativity is ongoing. He is not the Deist God, setting everything into motion in perfect harmony, like an engineer creating a perfect world. He is a God of Promise, drawing us toward the future where he waits for us to arrive. “Biological evolution challenges theology to extend the sense of divine promise beyond the aspirations of Israel and the churches, beyond our human concern for the final outcome of human history out into the universe itself.” [Deeper than Darwin, 81]

Further, if evolution tells the story accurately, he is a God of freedom, for he has enabled the created order to find its own path to the future. “Isn’t it a tribute to God that the world is not just passive putty in the Creator’s hands, but instead an inherently active and self-creating process, one that can evolve and produce new life on its own?” [Deeper, 57] Haught says that God has allowed the world freedom to become itself. “Nature’s contingencies and evolution’s randomness are not indicative of a divine impotence, but of a God caring and self-effacing enough to wait for the genuine emergence of what is truly other than God, with all the risk, tragedy and adventure this patience entails.” [81] “Such a picture of God’s hiddenness and vulnerability may seem to be ‘foolishness’ in comparison with our conventional sense of divine power and wisdom.” [82]

At the same time, Haught recognizes that only a particular kind of universe produces such a story. Many people have written about the so-called cosmological principle—the observation that a great many physical constants have to be very precisely what they are in order for life to be possible. Haught adds what he calls a “narrative cosmological principle” [61].  A universe that produces the story of life—that evolves—must have three fundamental qualities: it must have stability, so that changes can be preserved; it must have novelty, so that innovations can enter the system, and it must have deep, deep time so that tiny random changes can be sifted into progress. “It is only because nature is already composed of the stuff of narrative that the evolution of life can occur at all.” [61] John Polkinghorne has made similar observations—that evolutionary theorists’ emphasis on purposeless and random change neglects to mention the very precise physical context within which those changes can amount to evolution.

Of course, this puts us back into a world that has God’s fingerprints on it.

One may complain that Haught’s vision of God is vague. A God of freedom, of unceasing creativity, of promise—that sounds good, but what exactly can we expect of such a God? Haught would accept that he is vague. He thinks religion must be vague, because it tries to express an infinite depth that is beyond our understanding.

To be fair, vagueness is probably all anyone can expect from the revelation of nature. Yet, Paul wrote, it is concrete enough for us to be held responsible for our response to it. (Romans 1:20,21)

I think the biggest reason Christians stumble over evolution is that they can’t see where God would fit. Evolutionary biology is a mechanical and statistical vision. Is it possible to imagine God’s presence in it?

Haught demonstrates that evolution does not obliterate the possibility of God, pace Dawkins and his allies. Rather, it stimulates fresh ideas about God’s nature as we observe how he goes about his work. These are certainly not anti-biblical ideas. There is plenty in the Bible that we might use to refine and extend them.

Next: the sociobiologists’ explanation of religion.