I’ve been working this week on a post about why I oppose theistic evolution, for scientific and philosophical reasons. It’s looking like it will turn into a three-part series, coming out three different days next week. What are your questions about the scientific, philosophical, and even biblical case for or against theistic evolution?
My growing personal collection of books on the philosophy of nature, evolution, and intelligent design.
Thanks for the recommendation! When we lived across the street from Crossway, I picked up a copy from their warehouse. Turned out it was just a cover pasted on a copy of Gentry and Wellum's "Kingdom Through Covenant"! Need to get me a real copy.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on the recent push for the idea that there was a separate gene pool from Adam and Eve which originated prior and later blended with the Adamic line to form the human race. (Full disclosure: I don’t buy it)
Intriguing. I feel inclined to stay away from the human origins discussion in this post, because it depends on the prior question of the possibility of biological evolution to create new biological kinds and genetic information!
I will say, I'm generally open to less literal readings of the early chapters of Genesis, but I don't follow this to the theistic evolution side b/c I don't think the evidence points there. I haven't looked at the scientific evidence on human origins as much, but I might get there in the future.
Most of these discussions tenuously delineate between natural and special acts of creation. In more close examination of Genesis, we see that God's word goes forth to bring about many aspects of creation in a process oriented way (e.g. 1:24 “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.”), where the earth is the one bringing forth the animals. So the edicts and the processes are difficult to separate.
But really, my questions are:
- Do we even agree on what "theistic evolution" means?
- What's at stake in this evaluation? (My main bent has been to mitigate concerns around Christians having to have a specific orthodox view on "evolution" in order to avoid turning away earnest Christians in the sciences who aren't actually believing grave heresies.)
David, thanks for raising these concerns! On the first point, I agree that Christians should avoid the extreme form of creationism, which would be occasionalism: There is no such thing as nature, natural causality, or natural laws, and everything that happens and comes to be is a direct act of God. Less extreme would be overlooking possibilities of biological change and thinking that everything we see is as it was at creation, or that anything new had to be an act of special creation. But on the other hand, the limits of natural selection and biological evolution are a lot narrower than people think, as I will argue!
I'll try to be clear about theistic evolution - I'm primarily thinking about universal common ancestry and unguided natural selection. I do need to distinguish between theistic evolutionists who think divine design is not apparent and God did not intervene in nature, and those who think evolution would have had to be closely guided by God. All are very different positions.
And on the last point, this is one I really care about as well. In fact, I'm glad there are sectors of the church that support theistic evolution so that some of those scientists feel comfortable combining faith in Christ with their scientific work. I have a substantive disagreement on the science, and I think the real error on the traditional side would be denying the validity of scientific practice, but not denying evolution (as common ancestry and unguided process). But I'll do my best to deal with those in the posts!
I’ve come to be convinced of animal death before the Fall which today would scare most conservative Christians in our circles because of the evolutionary implications. Although, many orthodox Reformed theologians have at least considered this possibility (Bavinck and Calvin for one). But I don’t believe in theistic evolution for probably some of the same reasons you will lay out next week. I’d interested in hearing you touch on prelapsarian death and why a knee jerk reaction against evolution has colored evangelical discussions on this.
Nate, thanks for this! I wasn't planning to touch on this, but maybe I'll find a way to work it in, or address the biblical material more directly elsewhere. Much of the solid evidence against evolution involves fossils of things that died long before the fall, on any theological account. At a certain point, I simply ceased to worry about the question of death before the fall, but I could definitely say more about why.
I think there are fundamentally three reasons why (being raised Old Earth), I came to a view like Theistic Evolution.
1) During college I got interested enough to dive into the biochemistry of life and genetic expression. Doing so quickly made it clear that the scientific basis for evolutionary theory is extraordinarily, overwhelmingly strong. The copes I had learned as a child (distinguishing macro and micro evolution for example) were incoherent, genetic transformations provide clear methods and direct evidence of chains of descent, and the proposed counter arguments (like irreducible complexity) were easily dispatched. Further, the now understood genetic basis for transmission of information inevitably and essentially implies consistent evolution with no barriers that would keep it within palatable Aristotelian categories (which is I think the actual important philosophical revolution of evolution, and the point we desperately need to make progress on).
2) I was very much persuaded by Khun that the proper point of analysis of a scientific paradigm is its productivity and explanatory power. On that point gene evolution is the essential paradigm of all of the biological sciences and it has been enormously productive in studying and resolving problems across those sciences. It has also been powerfully productive in generating interventions across medicine and biological engineering. While the present paradigm is not free of unsolved problems (biology is fiendishly complicated, and I think the present theories about the origin of genetic systems are immature or unsatisfactory), I do not think we are anywhere close to a paradigmatic revolution (and no creation adjacent paradigm exists in anything within a light year of plausibility). In a real sense then, insisting on evolution's falsity necessarily implies alienating (specifically failing to speak the language of an making an alien of) the entire community invested in that paradigm.
3) I came to believe that we don't, as Christians, have that important of a reason for remaining committed to a pre-evolutionary framework to understand the world. The largest change by far is that an evolutionary understanding requires us to give up a Aristotelian-fixity with regard to species in biology (which I think completes a underappreciated chemical and physical revolution in that sense before). This is especially a problem with regard to human persons, and particularly our commitment to Christ's paradigmatic humanity. But that problem seems to be inevitable anyway on an inarguable genetic basis (i.e. once we are going to think about women as something other than incomplete males, the universality of Christ's humanity is going to need a fuller conception). So I'd rather rip the Band-Aid off and start working on building a new paradigm for thinking about natural kinds beyond Aristotle. As for Genesis, I became convinced that the Biblical text doesn't support the kind of deductive scaffolding people want it to, and that it isn't appropriate to be using it to answer those kinds of questions.
By fixed species I'm also including the teleological biological sense (i.e. biological systems have ends appropriate to themselves).
I do think final causes can be recovered, but I think the right way to think about them on an evolutionary framework is as being fundamentally systemic (i.e. about ecosystems or about the orderly expressions of physical laws).
Paul, great to see you here! Could you point me to more on this: "Genetic transformations provide clear methods and direct evidence of chains of descent." And this: "The genetic basis for transmission of information inevitably and essentially implies consistent evolution with no barriers..."
My next post will talk more about Behe, so I'm on board with irreducible complexity. But his Darwin Devolves, which I'll discuss, really calls into question the ability of Darwinian evolution to create genetic information. Mutation and variation involve the loss of genetic information.
He also finds the line beyond which Neo-Darwinian evolution can't go - according to current taxonomy, the level of "family." All evolution and speciation occur at species and genus level. That's his view. That means that the natural kinds would be at the level of family. I don't think there's been a lot of formulating a neo-Aristotelian view that accounts for this admitted amount of evolution. That's what I'll try to do!
As prologue for answering your first two questions, let me lay out a simple picture of the genetic consensus as I understand it.
So a simple version of the central dogma of biology's present paradigm is that an organisms genome (its DNA) contains an enormously long string (in computer science terms) of information, only part of which is encodes genes to build proteins (which are folded chains of amino acids whose 3D shapes and chemical interactions at their surface boundary give rise to cell-behavior). Other sections of the DNA code (which can be chemical interacted with by different, usually RNA, molecules) govern details like what proteins get built and how frequently. This process (and therefore the information within the DNA) is most of what makes a given organism what it is, and its moment to moment progressions is entirely governed by essentially stochastic processes of the electrical charge at the surfaces of these large biological molecules (i.e. all our proteins, RNA, DNA, ect.).
So for the first point (direct evidence of chains of descent), one of those stochastic processes is DNA replication. We can use statistical tools to measure the frequency of different kinds of replication errors in DNA (modulus genome methods for repairing errors). Coding regions of the genome generally experience selection pressure, but their are significant chunks of the Eukaryotic Genome that essentially do nothing. So mutations in those regions occur at known rates and are then passed to offspring. This allows you to look at the genomes of two different organisms and calculate how long ago they had a common ancestor. The example might be comparing five versions of Hamlet (each the result of some number of transcriptions). If you know that every three transcriptions you'll see a missed letter (and every 5 a shifted letter, every 9 a repeated word, ect.) you can compare your versions to map out the history of the transcription process. By transcribing the DNA of many different organisms then, you can trace out a tree of relationship by age and connection (as well as estimating the specific protein changes that are driving different evolution).
For the second point, the statistical nature of replication ensures that from one generation to the next organisms are always changing genetically (this is genetic drift). Since that information is most of what constitutes an organism, this process causes species to change in a sort of random-walk along each possible genetic direction from their origin (well they can do so, how many paths get followed depends on population size). Step sizes along those random walk paths are governed by 1) the kinds of possible genetic code transformations, and 2) the phenological outcomes of those transformations. For 1) the scope of possibilities is large, though rarer the larger the change, and 2 given that the code controls itself and everything from slight low level changes to huge body plan transformations is subject to it means that organisms can change in large ways.
Cells absolutely can create genetic information, though it pays to be precise here with terminology. If you have a gene 800 base pairs long that gets accidentally copied, it is now 1600 base pairs long which is new information. Or if you had a specific code ATTCTGC and your third T becomes an A, you now have a new code (which might, depending on where it is in the DNA code for a different amino acid in a protein, which will give that protein new properties). A mutation can also break a gene (which is a transformation of genetic information that results in a loss of phenotypic information), or delete a gene (straightforwardly a loss of genetic information), though these things are not necessarily (though they usually are) bad.
Similarly irreducible complexity is not an objection because what matters to an organism is does a path exist (at all), not just does a path exist by monotonic accretion (i.e. you can first build something more complicated that is not irreducibly complex, which is later simplified).
Categories like family don't really have a present biological motivation (I'd argue we are actually presently slowly beginning a taxonomic revolution driven by genetic measures actually being able to build out a more coherent division of organisms). The difference between a whale and a hippo isn't that large on a genetic basis (in fact Eukaryotes in general are not that different from each other) and a transition from some common starting point ending in both outcomes would not require any huge genetic revolutions (i.e. as opposed to the acquisition of multicellularity or the development of cellular organelles).
I really do recommend you read the Making of the Fittest I recommended to you when I was in Wheaton if you haven't already. Even better might be trying to learn directly from studying the relevant biology yourself (instead of at third hand). I think Genetics: A Conceptual Approach by Benjamin Pierce seems pretty good on this point.
You are missing one book. :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Theistic-Evolution-Scientific-Philosophical-Theological/dp/1433585138
Thanks for the recommendation! When we lived across the street from Crossway, I picked up a copy from their warehouse. Turned out it was just a cover pasted on a copy of Gentry and Wellum's "Kingdom Through Covenant"! Need to get me a real copy.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on the recent push for the idea that there was a separate gene pool from Adam and Eve which originated prior and later blended with the Adamic line to form the human race. (Full disclosure: I don’t buy it)
Intriguing. I feel inclined to stay away from the human origins discussion in this post, because it depends on the prior question of the possibility of biological evolution to create new biological kinds and genetic information!
I will say, I'm generally open to less literal readings of the early chapters of Genesis, but I don't follow this to the theistic evolution side b/c I don't think the evidence points there. I haven't looked at the scientific evidence on human origins as much, but I might get there in the future.
Most of these discussions tenuously delineate between natural and special acts of creation. In more close examination of Genesis, we see that God's word goes forth to bring about many aspects of creation in a process oriented way (e.g. 1:24 “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.”), where the earth is the one bringing forth the animals. So the edicts and the processes are difficult to separate.
But really, my questions are:
- Do we even agree on what "theistic evolution" means?
- What's at stake in this evaluation? (My main bent has been to mitigate concerns around Christians having to have a specific orthodox view on "evolution" in order to avoid turning away earnest Christians in the sciences who aren't actually believing grave heresies.)
David, thanks for raising these concerns! On the first point, I agree that Christians should avoid the extreme form of creationism, which would be occasionalism: There is no such thing as nature, natural causality, or natural laws, and everything that happens and comes to be is a direct act of God. Less extreme would be overlooking possibilities of biological change and thinking that everything we see is as it was at creation, or that anything new had to be an act of special creation. But on the other hand, the limits of natural selection and biological evolution are a lot narrower than people think, as I will argue!
I'll try to be clear about theistic evolution - I'm primarily thinking about universal common ancestry and unguided natural selection. I do need to distinguish between theistic evolutionists who think divine design is not apparent and God did not intervene in nature, and those who think evolution would have had to be closely guided by God. All are very different positions.
And on the last point, this is one I really care about as well. In fact, I'm glad there are sectors of the church that support theistic evolution so that some of those scientists feel comfortable combining faith in Christ with their scientific work. I have a substantive disagreement on the science, and I think the real error on the traditional side would be denying the validity of scientific practice, but not denying evolution (as common ancestry and unguided process). But I'll do my best to deal with those in the posts!
I’ve come to be convinced of animal death before the Fall which today would scare most conservative Christians in our circles because of the evolutionary implications. Although, many orthodox Reformed theologians have at least considered this possibility (Bavinck and Calvin for one). But I don’t believe in theistic evolution for probably some of the same reasons you will lay out next week. I’d interested in hearing you touch on prelapsarian death and why a knee jerk reaction against evolution has colored evangelical discussions on this.
Nate, thanks for this! I wasn't planning to touch on this, but maybe I'll find a way to work it in, or address the biblical material more directly elsewhere. Much of the solid evidence against evolution involves fossils of things that died long before the fall, on any theological account. At a certain point, I simply ceased to worry about the question of death before the fall, but I could definitely say more about why.
I think there are fundamentally three reasons why (being raised Old Earth), I came to a view like Theistic Evolution.
1) During college I got interested enough to dive into the biochemistry of life and genetic expression. Doing so quickly made it clear that the scientific basis for evolutionary theory is extraordinarily, overwhelmingly strong. The copes I had learned as a child (distinguishing macro and micro evolution for example) were incoherent, genetic transformations provide clear methods and direct evidence of chains of descent, and the proposed counter arguments (like irreducible complexity) were easily dispatched. Further, the now understood genetic basis for transmission of information inevitably and essentially implies consistent evolution with no barriers that would keep it within palatable Aristotelian categories (which is I think the actual important philosophical revolution of evolution, and the point we desperately need to make progress on).
2) I was very much persuaded by Khun that the proper point of analysis of a scientific paradigm is its productivity and explanatory power. On that point gene evolution is the essential paradigm of all of the biological sciences and it has been enormously productive in studying and resolving problems across those sciences. It has also been powerfully productive in generating interventions across medicine and biological engineering. While the present paradigm is not free of unsolved problems (biology is fiendishly complicated, and I think the present theories about the origin of genetic systems are immature or unsatisfactory), I do not think we are anywhere close to a paradigmatic revolution (and no creation adjacent paradigm exists in anything within a light year of plausibility). In a real sense then, insisting on evolution's falsity necessarily implies alienating (specifically failing to speak the language of an making an alien of) the entire community invested in that paradigm.
3) I came to believe that we don't, as Christians, have that important of a reason for remaining committed to a pre-evolutionary framework to understand the world. The largest change by far is that an evolutionary understanding requires us to give up a Aristotelian-fixity with regard to species in biology (which I think completes a underappreciated chemical and physical revolution in that sense before). This is especially a problem with regard to human persons, and particularly our commitment to Christ's paradigmatic humanity. But that problem seems to be inevitable anyway on an inarguable genetic basis (i.e. once we are going to think about women as something other than incomplete males, the universality of Christ's humanity is going to need a fuller conception). So I'd rather rip the Band-Aid off and start working on building a new paradigm for thinking about natural kinds beyond Aristotle. As for Genesis, I became convinced that the Biblical text doesn't support the kind of deductive scaffolding people want it to, and that it isn't appropriate to be using it to answer those kinds of questions.
By fixed species I'm also including the teleological biological sense (i.e. biological systems have ends appropriate to themselves).
I do think final causes can be recovered, but I think the right way to think about them on an evolutionary framework is as being fundamentally systemic (i.e. about ecosystems or about the orderly expressions of physical laws).
Paul, great to see you here! Could you point me to more on this: "Genetic transformations provide clear methods and direct evidence of chains of descent." And this: "The genetic basis for transmission of information inevitably and essentially implies consistent evolution with no barriers..."
My next post will talk more about Behe, so I'm on board with irreducible complexity. But his Darwin Devolves, which I'll discuss, really calls into question the ability of Darwinian evolution to create genetic information. Mutation and variation involve the loss of genetic information.
He also finds the line beyond which Neo-Darwinian evolution can't go - according to current taxonomy, the level of "family." All evolution and speciation occur at species and genus level. That's his view. That means that the natural kinds would be at the level of family. I don't think there's been a lot of formulating a neo-Aristotelian view that accounts for this admitted amount of evolution. That's what I'll try to do!
Keep pushing back though. Where am I going wrong?
As prologue for answering your first two questions, let me lay out a simple picture of the genetic consensus as I understand it.
So a simple version of the central dogma of biology's present paradigm is that an organisms genome (its DNA) contains an enormously long string (in computer science terms) of information, only part of which is encodes genes to build proteins (which are folded chains of amino acids whose 3D shapes and chemical interactions at their surface boundary give rise to cell-behavior). Other sections of the DNA code (which can be chemical interacted with by different, usually RNA, molecules) govern details like what proteins get built and how frequently. This process (and therefore the information within the DNA) is most of what makes a given organism what it is, and its moment to moment progressions is entirely governed by essentially stochastic processes of the electrical charge at the surfaces of these large biological molecules (i.e. all our proteins, RNA, DNA, ect.).
So for the first point (direct evidence of chains of descent), one of those stochastic processes is DNA replication. We can use statistical tools to measure the frequency of different kinds of replication errors in DNA (modulus genome methods for repairing errors). Coding regions of the genome generally experience selection pressure, but their are significant chunks of the Eukaryotic Genome that essentially do nothing. So mutations in those regions occur at known rates and are then passed to offspring. This allows you to look at the genomes of two different organisms and calculate how long ago they had a common ancestor. The example might be comparing five versions of Hamlet (each the result of some number of transcriptions). If you know that every three transcriptions you'll see a missed letter (and every 5 a shifted letter, every 9 a repeated word, ect.) you can compare your versions to map out the history of the transcription process. By transcribing the DNA of many different organisms then, you can trace out a tree of relationship by age and connection (as well as estimating the specific protein changes that are driving different evolution).
For the second point, the statistical nature of replication ensures that from one generation to the next organisms are always changing genetically (this is genetic drift). Since that information is most of what constitutes an organism, this process causes species to change in a sort of random-walk along each possible genetic direction from their origin (well they can do so, how many paths get followed depends on population size). Step sizes along those random walk paths are governed by 1) the kinds of possible genetic code transformations, and 2) the phenological outcomes of those transformations. For 1) the scope of possibilities is large, though rarer the larger the change, and 2 given that the code controls itself and everything from slight low level changes to huge body plan transformations is subject to it means that organisms can change in large ways.
Cells absolutely can create genetic information, though it pays to be precise here with terminology. If you have a gene 800 base pairs long that gets accidentally copied, it is now 1600 base pairs long which is new information. Or if you had a specific code ATTCTGC and your third T becomes an A, you now have a new code (which might, depending on where it is in the DNA code for a different amino acid in a protein, which will give that protein new properties). A mutation can also break a gene (which is a transformation of genetic information that results in a loss of phenotypic information), or delete a gene (straightforwardly a loss of genetic information), though these things are not necessarily (though they usually are) bad.
Similarly irreducible complexity is not an objection because what matters to an organism is does a path exist (at all), not just does a path exist by monotonic accretion (i.e. you can first build something more complicated that is not irreducibly complex, which is later simplified).
Categories like family don't really have a present biological motivation (I'd argue we are actually presently slowly beginning a taxonomic revolution driven by genetic measures actually being able to build out a more coherent division of organisms). The difference between a whale and a hippo isn't that large on a genetic basis (in fact Eukaryotes in general are not that different from each other) and a transition from some common starting point ending in both outcomes would not require any huge genetic revolutions (i.e. as opposed to the acquisition of multicellularity or the development of cellular organelles).
I really do recommend you read the Making of the Fittest I recommended to you when I was in Wheaton if you haven't already. Even better might be trying to learn directly from studying the relevant biology yourself (instead of at third hand). I think Genetics: A Conceptual Approach by Benjamin Pierce seems pretty good on this point.