When Christians concede that the secular view of how we arrived here is correct, they give up an enormous amount of ground to a culture that denies God’s relevance to the world.
You say: "In particular, the idea that evolution is settled science makes belief in God superfluous or intellectually suspect. When Christians essentially concede that the secular view of how we arrived here is correct, they give up an enormous amount of argumentative ground to a culture that denies God’s relevance to the world."
Hmmm.... my view is that every molecule in the Universe depends on God, "upheld by the word of his power", so I don't see that evolution makes God superfluous. And I worry about anybody overly relying on these gaps and creating a "God of the gaps" phenomenon, where our God gets smaller and smaller the more we fill in those gaps with scientific knowledge. If in fact God is over all things, natural processes and natural gaps, then he never shrinks. Yet I can sympathize that some gaps are nonetheless impressive, including: origin of the universe, origin of life, origin of intelligence/rationality (which should probably include beauty, morality, and reason), and the origin of resurrection. These I think importantly help us recognize the omnipotence of the Creator, yet, on the other hand, I think that thunderstorms also do that (which we can more or less explain naturally).
Notably, Keller's book, "Making Sense of God" invites skeptical people into theistic and Christian consideration based on human existential ideas, not scientific gaps. One way that I think this is valuable is because it takes on the task of meaning-making, which I think would lead someone beyond the binary of atheism vs theism (many folks are more agnostic now anyways, because they think there is a Creator or higher power, but they don't have any stake in specifics). Meaning-making opens more doors to consider who the God is and what the means for us.
Thanks for this comment! I agree that God is necessary to explain many other facets of the universe, even if evolution were true - so theistic evolution alone doesn't make God superfluous. But apart from an Intelligent Design-accepting version of evolution, acceptance of evolution grants that specified complexity or teleological order can arise without mind. This is the step that, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads to materialism.
On the other hand, you grant that there are some gaps in the explanation of the universe. My point is that the arrival of living things and distinct kinds is one of the gaps. As I will argue in my upcoming post on methodological naturalism, the requirement that nature is continuous and lacks gaps only applies to our observation of the present and ongoing work of nature. What might be called "historical science" involves explanation of things past, in which extrapolate backward the workings of nature, but we cannot rule out divine intervention, and we sometimes need to appeal to it. But more on that argument later!
I agree that the existential and moral perspectives are a good place to rest apologetically. But I don't think we need to concede biology either! I have seen that be the case with Jordan Peterson's work, for instance. He has had a much wider reach than the Intelligent Design theorists - but even his thinking has to point to a teleological version of evolution, which he has yet to flesh out.
One point I want to bring up in this discussion: I do think it’s important to engage with mainstream science’s responses to the ID crowd. Many of which strike me as generally persuasive and sincere.
I’m not firmly committed here but I generally lean towards something like theistic evolution. And the reason is that, while I’m sure there is groupthink involved and a lot of people are metaphysically committed to evolution above and beyond its scientific merit, my sense, as a non-scientist, is that it does have its fair share of merit. There are areas in science where ideology is clearly dominating the science, and evolution just doesn’t feel that way from what I can observe.
Contrast ID with something like Fine-Tuning. Fine-Tuning is a devastatingly powerful argument, and I can see this, even as a non-scientist, by the fact that the two naturalist responses to it are exceptionally and obviously feeble: the Anthropic Principle and the Multiverse.
In my estimation, ID arguments can be used to support Fine-Tuning even if something like theistic evolution is generally true.
Hey, I have always found fine-tuning to be convincing, the multi verse theory doesn't impress me one bit, but I didn't know it was so easy to dismantle the anthropic principle?
Welcome, Yaacov! Really excited to have an inter-religious element to the discussion here.
If I’m right, the anthropic principle says, if things weren’t perfectly fine-tuned, not only for intelligent life but for scientific discovery from the vantage point of earth, then we wouldn’t be here to talk about it or discover it. Hence, it is no surprise that everything is so fine-tuned.
But we don’t measure probabilities that way. “Given that I won the lottery, it’s no surprise that I won the lottery.” Yes, given that I won the lottery, the probability of my being the lottery winner goes to 1. But the probability that that would happen is still astronomically small.
So I see Thomas’s point: Naturalists really have no good response to fine-tuning, whereas they have all sorts of attempts to respond to Intelligent Design arguments. But are their responses to ID really any better? Is the probability of the evolution of life really any higher than of fine-tuning? But more on that in a future post.
People need to investigate the difference between the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle and should not say "The Anthropic Principle" if they want clarity. Stephen Hawking rejected both. Neither is impressive.
Oh I understood it (probably incorrectly) differently. I always thought the argument was that we only see our existence as meaningful because we exist. Meaning we see order and purpose in our existence because it is us, but there is nothing objectively meaningful or purposeful about our existence. So even if there was only a minute chance of it occurring there was also a minute chance of plenty of other random scenarios from occurring.
Spouting Thomas, welcome! I would be interested to look more at the mainstream response, though I am familiar with some of it. Michael Behe does a review of responses to his work in his Darwin Devolves, and I am not persuaded that the mainstream science crowd has reckoned with the problems for evolution generally. However, there are about 1/3 of contemporary biologists who do not believe that Neo-Darwinism (random mutation + natural selection) is a sufficient mechanism for the evolution of new kinds of organism. Andreas Wagner's Arrival of the Fittest is a great place to read about that. "Darwinism can explain the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest."
I should emphasize that Intelligent Design arguments are entirely compatible with a version of evolution which is teleologically and/or divinely guided and designed. I just think the evidence points to clear limits on biological kinds and limited ranges of variation and speciation within them.
I think fine-tuning is indeed devastatingly powerful, and good point that the mainstream responses basically concede this - lapsing into science fiction. However, evolutionary just-so stories are not in any way superior. Read Dembski, Denton, Behe, and Meyer - evolution doesn't look so good afterward. If evolution occurred, it would have to include so much divine interference and design that the "evolution" part ceases to have any explanatory power. EXCEPT, as we'll see in the next post, at the lowest levels of biological taxonomy (genus and species).
But I look forward to further interaction. I would love to see your response to the more evidential post coming up, and then the one on methodological naturalism!
Joel -- thanks for your thoughtful response. I've noticed references to you from Aaron Renn and your comments there and started reading your material, which I enjoy. I haven't had much bandwidth to comment on Substack lately but will take a closer look at your next two posts when I can.
Let me try to summarize what I'm getting at a little better. And understand that paleobiology is an area about which I admit great ignorance and only check in on developments once in a great while, and then only at a surface level.
Both Fine-Tuning and ID make arguments that seem plausible enough. But the atheistic responses to Fine-Tuning come across as the rhetorical equivalent of throwing your gun at an enemy after running out of ammo. The criticisms of ID come across as well, an actual return of fire, and a potentially lethal one at that.
I recently listened to the Meyer / Rogan interview and decided to look up some negative reviews of his books, and I was directed to this book on the Cambrian Explosion from I think a more conventional Darwinist perspective, and encountered this positive review of it on Amazon (hopefully that link works):
Now, this sounds like a work of great detail, composed by domain experts on the Cambrian Explosion, that can't be dismissed lightly.
Meanwhile in response to Behe there is this article criticizing his most recent book (you might remember Swamidass here as an Evangelical himself and the author of The Genealogical Adam).
So I suppose my sense at this time is that ID is good at proposing some broad philosophical arguments and specific examples that sound persuasive, but the anti-ID side has a lot of domain experts that are very deep in the specific information available, and they are unpersuaded by ID's arguments, and not simply for ideological/career reasons. Instead, they find that ID is cherry-picking and misrepresenting the data, and their arguments also sound persuasive.
To really make the case for ID, it seems to me the substance of these sorts of criticisms needs to be addressed.
You really need to carry the conversation farther. Swamidass gave a bad review of Behe's book Darwin Devolves? OK. And what was Behe's response to that? Swamidass looks very bad when you follow the conversation.
Someone still wants to argue that the Cambrian Explosion is no big problem? Not surprising. Giving up a materialist atheist worldview is not easy. Someone gave the materialist book good reviews on Amazon? Astonishing!
You need to get into the technical details and follow rebuttals back and forth until no one is saying anything new. Then you can decide what to think of the conversation as a whole. Finding a good or bad book review is easy.
Thanks for the link. I'll start to study it. I basically agree with your last paragraph, and that's what I was trying to communicate, in much more rambling fashion.
I don't have good mastery of the details here, and I'm not firmly committed to either side, so I'm not the ideal person to be pushing back against ID. I agree the book reviews don't prove anything, but I'm trying to illustrate my sense that, at least on the surface, the anti-ID side has serious enough arguments that it can't just be dismissed as a desperate urge to hold onto atheistic materialism. And it can't be dismissed just by reading the ID proponents without evaluating anti-ID's own response.
By contrast, if you were to read favorable book reviews for a book like, say, "White Fragility", you're probably not going to be left with the impression that there any serious arguments there (and indeed, I've done this exercise, too). Though there's still value in someone like Shenvi taking the time to study that stuff and take it apart.
I'm not sure why you privilege geological science and critique evolutionary science. They are intimately intertwined. Setting the "fundamentalists" in the creation science movement to one side, the "science" of earth history is not as airtight as many seem to think. I got my B.S. in geology from Mizzou, concentrating on geological history & paleontology. I began questioning the assumptions behind radiometric dating methodologies and the way the geological column has been constructed in my senior year. I am more skeptical today than I was 40 years ago.
Jeff, I'm open to learning more - I haven't thought about that in a while, since I watched a series of films on the subject as a teenager. I remember being persuaded about the age of the universe generally and the earth more from its consistency with the Big Bang, red light-shift, and generally, the discourse on fine-tuning, the Big Bang, and Intelligent Design, all of which points to a creator and designer but in terms of an old earth and universe.
I would differentiate the issues of the age of the earth and universe from evolutionary science because of their different significance as far as worldview goes. On one view, matter and chance alone suffice to explain beings of radical complexity and apparent design; on the other view, irreducible and specified complexity demands an explanation in terms of teleology and intelligence. I think that that is the big worldview divide, not the age of the earth.
But I'm open to dig into (no pun intended) the evidence on geological dating, and such! Did not know you had the geology & paleontology background.
Reviewing BioLogos, your definition of evolution rings true with what the "Evolutionary Creationists"
believe (https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-evolutionary-creation), which I think is more or less the same as Theistic Evolution, though more explicitly Christian.
You say: "In particular, the idea that evolution is settled science makes belief in God superfluous or intellectually suspect. When Christians essentially concede that the secular view of how we arrived here is correct, they give up an enormous amount of argumentative ground to a culture that denies God’s relevance to the world."
Hmmm.... my view is that every molecule in the Universe depends on God, "upheld by the word of his power", so I don't see that evolution makes God superfluous. And I worry about anybody overly relying on these gaps and creating a "God of the gaps" phenomenon, where our God gets smaller and smaller the more we fill in those gaps with scientific knowledge. If in fact God is over all things, natural processes and natural gaps, then he never shrinks. Yet I can sympathize that some gaps are nonetheless impressive, including: origin of the universe, origin of life, origin of intelligence/rationality (which should probably include beauty, morality, and reason), and the origin of resurrection. These I think importantly help us recognize the omnipotence of the Creator, yet, on the other hand, I think that thunderstorms also do that (which we can more or less explain naturally).
Notably, Keller's book, "Making Sense of God" invites skeptical people into theistic and Christian consideration based on human existential ideas, not scientific gaps. One way that I think this is valuable is because it takes on the task of meaning-making, which I think would lead someone beyond the binary of atheism vs theism (many folks are more agnostic now anyways, because they think there is a Creator or higher power, but they don't have any stake in specifics). Meaning-making opens more doors to consider who the God is and what the means for us.
David,
Thanks for this comment! I agree that God is necessary to explain many other facets of the universe, even if evolution were true - so theistic evolution alone doesn't make God superfluous. But apart from an Intelligent Design-accepting version of evolution, acceptance of evolution grants that specified complexity or teleological order can arise without mind. This is the step that, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads to materialism.
On the other hand, you grant that there are some gaps in the explanation of the universe. My point is that the arrival of living things and distinct kinds is one of the gaps. As I will argue in my upcoming post on methodological naturalism, the requirement that nature is continuous and lacks gaps only applies to our observation of the present and ongoing work of nature. What might be called "historical science" involves explanation of things past, in which extrapolate backward the workings of nature, but we cannot rule out divine intervention, and we sometimes need to appeal to it. But more on that argument later!
I agree that the existential and moral perspectives are a good place to rest apologetically. But I don't think we need to concede biology either! I have seen that be the case with Jordan Peterson's work, for instance. He has had a much wider reach than the Intelligent Design theorists - but even his thinking has to point to a teleological version of evolution, which he has yet to flesh out.
One point I want to bring up in this discussion: I do think it’s important to engage with mainstream science’s responses to the ID crowd. Many of which strike me as generally persuasive and sincere.
I’m not firmly committed here but I generally lean towards something like theistic evolution. And the reason is that, while I’m sure there is groupthink involved and a lot of people are metaphysically committed to evolution above and beyond its scientific merit, my sense, as a non-scientist, is that it does have its fair share of merit. There are areas in science where ideology is clearly dominating the science, and evolution just doesn’t feel that way from what I can observe.
Contrast ID with something like Fine-Tuning. Fine-Tuning is a devastatingly powerful argument, and I can see this, even as a non-scientist, by the fact that the two naturalist responses to it are exceptionally and obviously feeble: the Anthropic Principle and the Multiverse.
In my estimation, ID arguments can be used to support Fine-Tuning even if something like theistic evolution is generally true.
Hey, I have always found fine-tuning to be convincing, the multi verse theory doesn't impress me one bit, but I didn't know it was so easy to dismantle the anthropic principle?
Welcome, Yaacov! Really excited to have an inter-religious element to the discussion here.
If I’m right, the anthropic principle says, if things weren’t perfectly fine-tuned, not only for intelligent life but for scientific discovery from the vantage point of earth, then we wouldn’t be here to talk about it or discover it. Hence, it is no surprise that everything is so fine-tuned.
But we don’t measure probabilities that way. “Given that I won the lottery, it’s no surprise that I won the lottery.” Yes, given that I won the lottery, the probability of my being the lottery winner goes to 1. But the probability that that would happen is still astronomically small.
So I see Thomas’s point: Naturalists really have no good response to fine-tuning, whereas they have all sorts of attempts to respond to Intelligent Design arguments. But are their responses to ID really any better? Is the probability of the evolution of life really any higher than of fine-tuning? But more on that in a future post.
People need to investigate the difference between the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle and should not say "The Anthropic Principle" if they want clarity. Stephen Hawking rejected both. Neither is impressive.
Oh I understood it (probably incorrectly) differently. I always thought the argument was that we only see our existence as meaningful because we exist. Meaning we see order and purpose in our existence because it is us, but there is nothing objectively meaningful or purposeful about our existence. So even if there was only a minute chance of it occurring there was also a minute chance of plenty of other random scenarios from occurring.
Spouting Thomas, welcome! I would be interested to look more at the mainstream response, though I am familiar with some of it. Michael Behe does a review of responses to his work in his Darwin Devolves, and I am not persuaded that the mainstream science crowd has reckoned with the problems for evolution generally. However, there are about 1/3 of contemporary biologists who do not believe that Neo-Darwinism (random mutation + natural selection) is a sufficient mechanism for the evolution of new kinds of organism. Andreas Wagner's Arrival of the Fittest is a great place to read about that. "Darwinism can explain the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest."
I should emphasize that Intelligent Design arguments are entirely compatible with a version of evolution which is teleologically and/or divinely guided and designed. I just think the evidence points to clear limits on biological kinds and limited ranges of variation and speciation within them.
I think fine-tuning is indeed devastatingly powerful, and good point that the mainstream responses basically concede this - lapsing into science fiction. However, evolutionary just-so stories are not in any way superior. Read Dembski, Denton, Behe, and Meyer - evolution doesn't look so good afterward. If evolution occurred, it would have to include so much divine interference and design that the "evolution" part ceases to have any explanatory power. EXCEPT, as we'll see in the next post, at the lowest levels of biological taxonomy (genus and species).
But I look forward to further interaction. I would love to see your response to the more evidential post coming up, and then the one on methodological naturalism!
Joel -- thanks for your thoughtful response. I've noticed references to you from Aaron Renn and your comments there and started reading your material, which I enjoy. I haven't had much bandwidth to comment on Substack lately but will take a closer look at your next two posts when I can.
Let me try to summarize what I'm getting at a little better. And understand that paleobiology is an area about which I admit great ignorance and only check in on developments once in a great while, and then only at a surface level.
Both Fine-Tuning and ID make arguments that seem plausible enough. But the atheistic responses to Fine-Tuning come across as the rhetorical equivalent of throwing your gun at an enemy after running out of ammo. The criticisms of ID come across as well, an actual return of fire, and a potentially lethal one at that.
I recently listened to the Meyer / Rogan interview and decided to look up some negative reviews of his books, and I was directed to this book on the Cambrian Explosion from I think a more conventional Darwinist perspective, and encountered this positive review of it on Amazon (hopefully that link works):
https://www.amazon.com/review/R7EA3IH1TSZID/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1936221039
Now, this sounds like a work of great detail, composed by domain experts on the Cambrian Explosion, that can't be dismissed lightly.
Meanwhile in response to Behe there is this article criticizing his most recent book (you might remember Swamidass here as an Evangelical himself and the author of The Genealogical Adam).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaw4056
So I suppose my sense at this time is that ID is good at proposing some broad philosophical arguments and specific examples that sound persuasive, but the anti-ID side has a lot of domain experts that are very deep in the specific information available, and they are unpersuaded by ID's arguments, and not simply for ideological/career reasons. Instead, they find that ID is cherry-picking and misrepresenting the data, and their arguments also sound persuasive.
To really make the case for ID, it seems to me the substance of these sorts of criticisms needs to be addressed.
You really need to carry the conversation farther. Swamidass gave a bad review of Behe's book Darwin Devolves? OK. And what was Behe's response to that? Swamidass looks very bad when you follow the conversation.
https://darwindevolves.com/criticism/
Someone still wants to argue that the Cambrian Explosion is no big problem? Not surprising. Giving up a materialist atheist worldview is not easy. Someone gave the materialist book good reviews on Amazon? Astonishing!
You need to get into the technical details and follow rebuttals back and forth until no one is saying anything new. Then you can decide what to think of the conversation as a whole. Finding a good or bad book review is easy.
Thanks for the link. I'll start to study it. I basically agree with your last paragraph, and that's what I was trying to communicate, in much more rambling fashion.
I don't have good mastery of the details here, and I'm not firmly committed to either side, so I'm not the ideal person to be pushing back against ID. I agree the book reviews don't prove anything, but I'm trying to illustrate my sense that, at least on the surface, the anti-ID side has serious enough arguments that it can't just be dismissed as a desperate urge to hold onto atheistic materialism. And it can't be dismissed just by reading the ID proponents without evaluating anti-ID's own response.
By contrast, if you were to read favorable book reviews for a book like, say, "White Fragility", you're probably not going to be left with the impression that there any serious arguments there (and indeed, I've done this exercise, too). Though there's still value in someone like Shenvi taking the time to study that stuff and take it apart.
I'm not sure why you privilege geological science and critique evolutionary science. They are intimately intertwined. Setting the "fundamentalists" in the creation science movement to one side, the "science" of earth history is not as airtight as many seem to think. I got my B.S. in geology from Mizzou, concentrating on geological history & paleontology. I began questioning the assumptions behind radiometric dating methodologies and the way the geological column has been constructed in my senior year. I am more skeptical today than I was 40 years ago.
Jeff, I'm open to learning more - I haven't thought about that in a while, since I watched a series of films on the subject as a teenager. I remember being persuaded about the age of the universe generally and the earth more from its consistency with the Big Bang, red light-shift, and generally, the discourse on fine-tuning, the Big Bang, and Intelligent Design, all of which points to a creator and designer but in terms of an old earth and universe.
I would differentiate the issues of the age of the earth and universe from evolutionary science because of their different significance as far as worldview goes. On one view, matter and chance alone suffice to explain beings of radical complexity and apparent design; on the other view, irreducible and specified complexity demands an explanation in terms of teleology and intelligence. I think that that is the big worldview divide, not the age of the earth.
But I'm open to dig into (no pun intended) the evidence on geological dating, and such! Did not know you had the geology & paleontology background.