But there are other ways to judge whether evolution is repeatable in this way. One way is to understand how the process works, an understanding that, combined with some knowledge of physics, suggests that the tape of life would play out differently each time, even if started under identical conditions.
Like many biologists, Gould argues that evolution is “a contingent process.” The way natural selection molds a species depends on unpredictable changes in climate, on random physical events such as meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions, on the occurrence of rare and random mutations, and on which species happen to be lucky enough to survive a mass extinction. If, for example, a large meteor had not struck the Earth sixty-five million years ago, contributing to the extinction of the dinosaurs—and to the rise of the mammals they previously dominated—all mammals might still be small nocturnal insectivores, munching on crickets in the twilight. And there would be no humans. Based on this contingency, Gould concluded the evolution of humans was “a wildly improbable evolutionary event” and “a cosmic accident.”
But is evolution really “contingent”? That depends on what you mean by the word. Evolution is certainly unpredictable, because we don’t know exactly how the environment will change or what mutations will occur. But “unpredictable” is not identical to “not predetermined.” Most scientists are physical determinists, accepting that the behavior of matter, at least on the macro level (stuff that humans can perceive), is absolutely determined by the configuration and laws of the universe. We can’t always predict the weather, for instance, but that’s only because we can’t know everything about what affects climate, including temperature and winds at every spot on Earth. It’s possible that if we had perfect knowledge of such things—which now include the human behavior that contributes to global warming—we could accurately predict the weather years in advance (even with our present sophisticated instruments, we can barely predict it a day in advance). Likewise, it was certainly determined well in advance that the asteroid that snuffed out the dinosaurs would strike the Earth about sixty-five million years ago in the vicinity of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The point is that even if evolution is “contingent,” that doesn’t mean “it’s not determined in advance,” but only that “we don’t know enough to predict it.” It’s likely, then, that the course of evolution is determined by the laws of physics. And that might imply that those laws would, given identical starting conditions, always yield identical products—including humans.
But there’s still one hitch, and it’s an important one. It involves quantum mechanics, which tells us that on the microscopic level of particles like electrons or cosmic rays (mostly fast-moving neutrons), things are not determined, but are fundamentally and unpredictably indeterminate. If you took a lump of radioactive uranium, for instance, and could observe when each atom decayed, and then restarted the whole scenario with the same lump, you’d find that during the rerun different atoms would decay, and you’d never be able to predict which ones. (The ensemble of atoms, however, does obey statistical laws, so that the “half-life” of a radioactive element—the time needed for half the atoms to decay—is always the same.) Thus although a large group of atoms decays at a constant rate, it’s impossible to predict which atoms will go first and which later. Such statistical regularities but individual indeterminacy are characteristic of quantum mechanical phenomena, including radioactive decay.
The question of whether humans were inevitable, then, boils down to the question of whether evolution is repeatable and deterministic, and that can be further reduced to the question of whether evolution is affected by the genuine indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. And it most likely is—in two important ways. The first involves whether the Earth would exist in the first place if the Big Bang were repeated under the same starting conditions. The answer is almost certainly no. Rerunning the history of the universe would probably result in a general similarity to what we have now (perhaps similar numbers of stars and galaxies, for instance), but it’s very unlikely that the Earth and Sun would exist as the same objects they do now. If we can’t even repeat the appearance of our solar system after a replay of the Big Bang, then all bets are off: there’s no assurance that life as we know it would evolve. One might argue that life would still evolve on some planets in the universe, but there’s no guarantee that that kind of life would be humanoid—the “image of God.”
But there’s another part of evolution that’s also subject to the vagaries of quantum indeterminacy: mutations. Mutations are molecular changes in the DNA, many of them errors that occur when DNA replicates, which by changing the genetic code produce the new forms of genes that fuel evolution. And some factors that produce mutations, like X-rays, cosmic radiation, or even the simple errors in pairing of the DNA double helix, are probably affected by unpredictable quantum-level events.
What this means is that if life began all over again, even on our primitive Earth, the mutations that are evolution’s raw material would be different. And if the raw material of evolution differed, so would its products: all the species alive today. All it would take is a few different mutations occurring early in the history of life, for instance, and everything that followed might have been very different from what actually evolved.
The upshot is that if mutations are fundamentally indeterminate, a replay of evolution would likely give us an array of species very different from those we see today. And we couldn’t be sure at all that humans would be among them. The only way around this conclusion is to abandon naturalistic evolution and invoke a god supervising the process, making the right midcourse corrections to ensure that humans appeared.
Putting this together, if we replay the tape of either cosmic or biological evolution, we simply can’t make a rational and logical argument that the appearance of humanoids was inevitable—and we can make a good argument that it was not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or unscientific claims grounded in theology, like God-directed mutations.
In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can’t be tested, it can be ignored.
Theological Problems with Theistic Evolution
Does evolution pose further problems for theology? Yes, and big ones. There is no obvious explanation, for instance, why an omnipotent and loving God who directed evolution would lead it into so many dead ends. After all, over 99 percent of the species that ever lived went extinct without leaving descendants. The cruelty of natural selection, which involves endless wastage and pain, also demands explanation. Wouldn’t a loving and all-powerful God simply have produced all existing species de novo, as described in Genesis?
As we saw in the last chapter, the usual response is to transform the unpalatable necessities of evolution into virtues, as does the Catholic theologian John Haught:
The idea that secondary causes [natural selection], rather than direct divine intervention, can account for the evolution of life may even be said to enhance rather than diminish the doctrine of divine creativity. 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? If God can make things that make themselves, isn’t that better than a magician-deity who pulls all the strings, as theological “occasionalists” have supposed?
But one could easily make the opposite argument: that de novo creation is “better” because it avoids the suffering, waste, and extinction inherent in evolution. How does one weigh the value of creativity against the suffering of sentient creatures, including the several close relatives of modern humans, like Neanderthals, who went extinct?
Theistic evolution also comes in handy in theodicy, for you can use it, as does the evolutionist Francisco Ayala, to get God off the hook for all that “natural evil”:
The theory of evolution provided the solution to the remaining component of the problem of evil. As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life. They were not a result of deficient or malevolent design: the features of organisms were not designed by the Creator.
The flavor of special pleading is strong here, for surely God, were he really omnipotent, could have designed a world whose physical fabric lacked floods, drought, and evolutionary suffering. And, of course, if God gets the credit for the adaptive mutations that led to humans, why is he exculpated for the maladaptive ones, like mutations that cause cancers, genetic diseases, and deformed children? If mutation were a process designed by God, there’s no reason why the vast majority of mutations should be harmful—though that’s exactly what you’d expect if the process were purely a naturalistic one involving random errors. Unsurprisingly, theologians like Alvin Plantinga have an answer to that one, too:
But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain. (Some may snort with disdain at this suggestion; it is none the worse for that.)
It is astounding to see something like this coming from a respected philosopher. Not only do we encounter special pleading involving a God who makes animals atone for the sin of humans, but also the invocation of another source of evil: Satan. We are asked to believe, for instance, that the genetically based facial cancer wiping out Tasmanian devils could involve satanic manipulation of their chromosomes—innocent marsupials suffering horribly because of the sin of a primate. Snorting with disdain is in fact the proper response to this kind of ad hoc-ery, at least until Plantinga gives us some evidence for Satan.
It won’t do for religious people to say that these answers are necessarily speculative because we have no idea how God works in evolution. If you admit that kind of ignorance, then you must also admit that we have no idea whether God has anything to do with evolution. It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God’s nature and works become silent when asked about God’s methods.
The biggest problem with theistic evolution, as with all attempts to twist theology to fit new facts, is that it’s simply a metaphysical add-on to a physical theory, a supplement demanded not by evidence but by the emotional needs of the faithful. It’s what the philosopher Anthony Grayling calls an “arbitrary superfluity”: the cosmological twiddling that Laplace rejected when he told Napoleon that the God hypothesis wasn’t needed. And in fact, you find these superfluities only in evolutionary biology—and occasionally cosmology—for other sciences don’t conflict with people’s cherished beliefs. If you stretch science to include medicine, then we also have the arbitrary superfluity of seeing disease as a product of faulty thinking or spiritual error, a view that, as we’ll see in the final chapter, has led many to reject science-based medicine and to suffer the consequences.
Finally, theistic evolution makes a common error of accommodationism: confusing logical possibilities with probabilities. Yes, it is logically possible either that God started the evolutionary process, created the first organism, and then stood back to watch the action, or that he intervened from time to time, creating new organisms or mutations. But from what we know about evolution, that’s unlikely. The process shows every sign of being naturalistic, material, unguided, and lacking divine assistance. To a scientist, theistic evolution fails because it requires that with one part of your brain—the “evolution” part—you accept only those things that are tested and supported by evidence and reason, while with the “theistic” part you rely on faith, assuming things that are either unnecessary or unevidenced. It’s an unholy matrimony between science and religion, theology wearing a lab coat. We’ll discuss the harms of this dysfunctional marriage in the last chapter, but some of the effects include the public misunderstanding of science (as in thinking that “theistic evolution” is scientific); the belief that religion can give us answers that currently elude science (e.g., why do the laws of physics permit the existence of life?); and the idea that there are “other ways of knowing,” including revelation, that can yield truths about the cosmos. These are not just academic issues, for they have serious (and harmful) consequences for the real world: implications for morality, medicine, politics, ecology, and the general well-being of our species.
CHAPTER 4
Faith Strikes Back
When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.
—Mike Aus
The failure of accommodationism has led believers to engage with science in other than conciliatory ways. One way is for religion itself to don the mantle of science, claiming that there are some observations about nature that are best explained—or only explained—by the existence of a god. I call this strategy the “new natural theology,” because it descends from earlier efforts to discern God’s hand in nature. A related argument is that religion, like science, philosophy, and literature, is simply another “way of knowing” about the universe, possessing unique methods that yield valid truths. Some further argue that religion should get credit for science, because science was supposedly an outgrowth of faith—usually Christian faith.
When all else fails, believers find ways to denigrate science. Science is said to be an unreliable way to find knowledge (after all, scientific “truths” often change), is susceptible to misuse (read: atomic bombs and Nazi eugenics), and promotes “scientism,” the view that science aims to engulf all other disciplines, forcing areas like history, literature, and art to become scientific or become irrelevant.
There are two more diagnostic signs that accommodationists have been pushed against the wall: their insistence that “science can’t prove that God doesn’t exist” (also known as “you can’t prove a negative”), and their claim that science is just as fallible as religion because both ultimately rest on faith. As the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has pointed out, denigrating science is often more appealing than making theological “god of the gaps” arguments, for “there must always be many extraordinary facts that could potentially discredit the conventional world-view [science], but relatively few facts that could provide positive support for a specific alternative [religion]. The project of doing down science was therefore always more likely to make headway than the project of bolstering a new kind of parascience.”
These ideas, while not rare, are scattered through a huge literature, and some, like the “other ways of knowing” trope, are rarely discussed critically. In this chapter I’ll examine the most common critiques of science. This is not just a tempest in an academic teapot, for by unfairly denigrating the field and trying to privilege indefensible “ways of knowing,” the critiques do serious damage to science, and ultimately to society.
The New Natural Theology
No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and i
ncomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
—Robert Green Ingersoll
While faith can be seen as belief without evidence, or belief with insufficient evidence to convince most rational people, that doesn’t mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they’ll accept it. Further, they’ll even seek such evidence, and not just through revelation. The perpetual search for Jesus’s tomb and Noah’s Ark underline this yearning for evidence.
But there are also difficult problems that science hasn’t yet explained—the origin of life and the biological basis of consciousness are two—and, given their difficulty, some may never be solved. These lacunae constitute openings for theology: opportunities to propose God as a solution. These are, of course, the famous “god of the gaps” arguments, and while the problem with proposing a god as a solution to obstinate scientific puzzles is obvious (science has a history of filling the gaps and displacing gods), supernatural solutions continue to appear whenever science faces a really hard problem. These arguments might in fact be seen as a backhanded form of accommodationism: the use of religion to supplement and complete the task of science. And they are at the same time a form of apologetics: if a god is the best explanation for a natural phenomenon, then that validates the existence of gods.
“Natural theology” represents the attempt to discern God’s ways, or find evidence for his existence, by observing nature directly instead using revelation or scripture (“revealed theology”). It operates, or is supposed to operate, in a manner similar to that of science: aiming to show that for some of nature’s puzzles, using God gives better answers than using naturalism. The philosopher Herman Philipse defines natural theology as “the attempt to argue for the truth of a specific religious view on the basis of premises that non-believers will be able to endorse, that is, without appealing to the alleged authority of a revelation.” Natural theology is popular because, by offering God as the only reasonable solution to a scientific problem, it appeals to science-friendly believers as well as to theologians, both of whom realize that divine solutions can strengthen the faith of coreligionists and convert those on the fence.
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