I don’t generally get into the Creationist/Evolutionist controversy. This is not because I don’t have opinions (or beliefs) on the subject, but because I don’t feel I have the necessary knowledge to contribute to the discussion. If I hear an intelligent Creationist, he sounds convincing to me. If I hear an intelligent Theistic Evolutionist, he makes sense to me too. (Atheistic Evolutionists won’t get a very sympathetic hearing from me. Sorry.) I am not a scientist nor the son of a scientist; it’s a fight I’m just not equipped to jump into myself.
But I have some observations about what a critic might call the meta-narrative. I mean the entire historical drama of the conflict between faith and science, which began in the Enlightenment and reached critical mass with Darwin.
It seems to me that, for people who are supposed to have all the answers, the Scientific Naturalists sure fail in their predictions a lot.
My understanding is that Darwin’s first disciples expected Everything About Life to get explained pretty quickly. After all, the very Theory of Evolution teaches that complexity grew out of simplicity. So the deeper into nature you delved, the more primitive and easy to understand should be the things you found.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. The vaunted Human Genome Project, completed in 2000, seems to me a prime example. What everybody expected, once the human genetic code was sequenced, was that we’d find the gene for dwarfism, and the gene for multiple sclerosis, and the “gay” gene, and that a little splicing would fix all the problems (except for the gay gene, of course. That would be inappropriate).
But it didn’t work out that way.
Studies over the past decade have revealed that the complexity of the genome, and indeed almost every aspect of human biology, is far greater than was previously thought. It has been relatively straightforward, for example, to identify the 20,000 or so protein-coding genes, which make up around 1.5 percent of the genome. But knowing this, researchers note, does not necessarily explain what those genes do, given that many genes code for multiple forms of a protein, each of which could have a different role in a variety of biological processes. “The total sequence was needed, I think, to allow us to see that our one gene-one protein model of genetics was much too simplistic,” wrote one respondent.
In other words (as I understand it), the deeper you go, the more complicated it gets, rather than simpler. It’s like the Tardis, or the stable in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle—bigger inside than outside. Almost like, oh, I don’t know… a miracle.
Doesn’t prove there’s a God, of course.
But I think it proves that some scientists base their expectations on their own kind of faith. A faith whose track record isn’t all that great.
i applaud your reticence to weigh in on the debate, given that most Creationists that do (on internet forums and such)tend not make a good argument for there being intelligent Creationists, let alone an Intelligent Creator. The ‘scientists’ are no better…
But, what i will do is add the 4 easy steps to the Theory of Evolution which i’m sure most people could agree with…
1. Differences exist between individuals within a species
2. Organisms preoduce more offspring than an environment can support.
3. Competition exists between individuals (for food, shelter, etc.)
4. Those organisms whose traits better suit them to their environment are more likely to reproduce and pass those trait onto successive generations.
You can see when this process is applied over millions of years that one species can change into another.
I realise there are issues among Creationists with the ‘millions and millions of years’ part, but that argument is with Sir Charles Lyell and not Darwin…
If evolution is being used for an explanation of all of life from molecules to man then, yes, one has to accept it by faith. As Al says, “You can see… ” No, I can’t. I don’t have that kind of faith. Adherents of this type of evolution can show you charts of the flow of evolution from a single cell to man. But ask them how life began, and they can’t tell you; they can only guess. So according to them, evolution is a fact that includes at least one enormous miracle.
But if by evolution one means change in organisms or populations over time then I believe in evolution because there are chihuahuas. But chihuahuas are still dogs.
Evolution has its limits.
Christians can get in over their heads real quick. (Like I just have. I’ve shot my wad.) That is because we arguing the tenets of their faith, which of course we can’t comprehend. We must maintain a belief in what God has revealed to us. However life happened and got to this point does not contradict what God revealed to us in his Word.
Think then about the narrative of theistic evolution:
a god creates matter and energy (and the Sea of Dirac).
This god then uses suffering, pain, death, rape, theft, murder, etc., to eventually make Man.
Then this god creates a moral code that is not only different from the one that applies to this god, but *antithetical* to that one, an arbitrary moral code that works against evolution. Then this god considers humanity guilty of breaking this arbitrary moral code, and instead being like him. He then sends his only begotten son to die on the cross to pay for the arbitrary guilt of humans breaking the arbitrary moral code for no reason at all, whatsoever, pointlessly.
That is the narrative theistic evolutionists would have if they thought it through.
al, where did the traits come from? How are they coded for? How does programming code (along with compression, module re-use and error correction) arise from nothing? What about irreducibly complex cellular mechanisms? Proteins aren’t the genetic code, they are just the image files (as it were). The code is in the introns, and in other parts of the cell that aren’t even proteins.
This was all predicted ahead of time by those who don’t buy into the neo-Darwinian synthesis and philosophical materialism.
i agree that a belief in evolution (and, although i never mentioned it, the spontaneous emergence of life) requires a measure of faith… when science is a system of statements based on direct experience, how does this apply to anything before the evolution of humans and our observations?
Phil, perhaps i should have said, “you can imagine”?
your chihuahua example is a good one and i would perhaps suggest that time is the only limitation on that one… in another 10 million years chihuahuas may indeed become their own species…
Steve, i’m not a scientist let alone an evolutionary bioligist, i just came across those four easy steps to understanding the theory of evolution and found them incredibly helpful. By those traits, it means the differences which exist among individuals. Where they came from? What came first, the Creator or the Crocoduck?
My personal beliefs actually don’t include an origin of Life on this planet, really, i’m lucky to believe that Life exists at all… i’d like to think that scientists will discover that the origin of Life on Earth was Mars, which will allow them to stop worrying about it until such time as we can get there and check out the Martian fossil record…
next time, i’ll discuss the fossil record…
James Le Fanu’s book Why Us? is an interesting discussion of science that shows materialism/reductionism not working. The book is from a major secular publisher (Pantheon) and the author is a British science journalist.
Yes, the philosophical questions are large. Science is not merely statements made from observations; it is conclusions draws from the interpretations of those observations. There was a time no long ago when we thought all bacteria were bad, but that was because we had not thought to look for healthy bacteria, and when someone thought to do that we found many kinds of good bacteria all around us.
There was also a time when we thought symbiotic relationships would be rare, because for two organism to evolve while maintaining a type of codependency on each other would be difficult, but now we see many symbiotic relationships. I don’t think either of these makes strong Darwinian science. From what I remember of Darwin’s writing, he was trying to write God out of the picture of life’s origin, not merely state his observations.
Al, it was good to read your response. You wrote with honesty and forbearance. I think I understand those who support a broad view of evolution (from a molecular level) a little better. But in the end, no, I can’t even imagine.
What gets me is the way that government schools teach kids that they are merely the product of time and matter and chance, that they have no creator and therefore no purpose – then they act surprised when those kids want to take drugs.
Bad philosophy undermines itself.
In related news, Stephen Hawking says the laws of physics make God redundant. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
So praise be the name of Gravity, from which all blessed flow. For Gravity we exist, and from it we have our being. Hallelujah!
I’m convinced that evolution is the best explanation for the fossil record and the development of species. What remains mysterious to me is how the ball got rolling before DNA or RNA had developed. Evolutionary pressure can’t explain the development of RNA, because you have to have a genetic mechanism for propagating characteristics before survival-of-the-fittest-offspring selective pressure can begin to operate. There are people working on theories of how a kind of proto-genetic selective pressure could have produced the first RNA, but the work is in its infancy. I don’t claim that this ambiguity or lacuna in our knowledge should persuade anyone to believe in God, but I do claim that there’s good reason to be a little less smug about what evolution’s all-encompassing power of explanation.