The science-religion front is the site of ongoing conflict. On the one side are the militant atheists like Oxford-based biologist Richard Dawkins, who want simply to remove religion from the face of the earth. On the other side are the Bible-touting evangelicals like Intelligent-Design-enthusiast and Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who want to supplement science with direct divine interventions. Caught somewhat uneasily in the middle, arguing that you can have both science and religion, are the so-called "accommodationists" like UC Irvine geneticist and recent winner of the Templeton prize in religion, Francisco Ayala.
It is indisputable that there can be conflict between science and religion. You cannot consistently hold to Darwinian evolutionary theory and be a Young Earth Creationist, thinking that the earth and its denizens were created in six days, 6,000 years ago. But the reply by accommodationists (I am one) is that traditional religion (let us stay with Western Christianity for simplicity of discussion) has always had within it the means to take claims metaphorically if there is a possible clash between science and religion. Saint Augustine in 400AD told us that we should not take the early chapters of Genesis too literally.
About 10 years ago I wrote a book called Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? Answering my question, I argued that it is not easy, but it is possible. Interestingly, I found that some of the things that I thought would be major stumbling blocks, specifically the problems of miracles and of evil, were not as great as feared. I am not saying that the problems of miracles and of evil can be solved. For myself, I just don't see how one can reconcile Auschwitz with an all-loving, all-powerful God. But I didn't think that Darwinism exacerbated the problem, and in respects I thought it positively helpful. (I know that one of the worst things one can say at a point like this is: read my book to find why I say what I do. But, candidly, read my book to find why I say what I do! If you have to buy it, the next time we meet I will buy you a beer.)
To my great surprise, however, I found what I thought then and still think now a major problem with reconciling Darwinism with Christianity. It is an absolute bottom-line claim of the Christian that the existence of humans is not contingent -- if we did not exist then the Christian story could not be. It might be that we are blue and that we have twelve fingers. Possibly, although I am not sure, it might be that we don't have sex. But intelligent beings, with moral awareness, able to act in this world, have to exist if Christianity is true. Otherwise, what is the point of all of that stuff about being made in "His Image"? However, Darwinism stresses that change is random and non-directed. For Darwin and his followers this has always been an absolute. Obviously humans are pretty complex animals, but our arrival has always been in some sense a matter of chance. From a notebook of Darwin, written early in 1839 just after he had discovered his mechanism of natural selection:
The enormous number of animals in the world depends of their varied structure & complexity. -- hence as the forms became complicated, they opened fresh means of adding to their complexity. -- but yet there is no necessary tendency in the simple animals to become complicated although all perhaps will have done so from the new relations caused by the advancing complexity of others.
Today's Darwinians would make the case for non-directionality on two grounds. First, natural selection is always opportunistic, relative. What works in one case might not work in another. There are no absolutes, no fixed goals. Humans are pretty good organisms, but they have their drawbacks. For a start, their brains need massive amounts of protein, usually dead animals. There was no guarantee in the wild that such protein was always available or that we might not have been better eating grass albeit a bit dumb. Buffalo were doing pretty well until humans turned up. For a second, the building blocks of evolution, the mutations, are random, not in the sense of being without cause, but without regard for what their possessors need. Things can go any which way.
I have been thinking again about these issue thanks to an excellent new book authored by two Duke professors, biologist Daniel McShea and philosopher Robert Brandon. In Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems, they argue that irrespective of natural selection, organisms are going to get more and more complex. This is going to happen as a matter of chance rather than design. (They admit that this puts them more in line with the Victorian general man of science Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin.) Defining something to which they have given the rather ugly name of Zero-Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL) -- but after Punctuated Equilibrium, who is to complain about ugly names in biology? -- they write: "In any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, in the absence of natural selection, other forces, and constraints acting on diversity or complexity, diversity and complexity will increase on average."
No doubt philosophers and biologists will be poring over this claim. I hope that those of us on the science-religion interface will do so also, although frankly my initial sense is that it will not provide what is needed. The authors are not talking about the evolution of value or excellence, and there will be all sorts of questions about whether humans are the most complex organisms that have evolved or could evolve and so forth. The authors define complexity somewhat austerely as "the amount of differentiation among parts in an individual" and it seems to me an empirical matter where humans stand with respect to this. One thing I would note that is that in respects the human genome seems a lot simpler than once thought -- far fewer genes, for instance.
The trouble is that I am not sure that there are any other scientific solutions around at the moment that solve the non-directionality problem. Richard Dawkins thinks that overall evolution shows direction, leading to human-like creatures, because of biological arms races -- lines of organisms complete and adaptations get better. The gazelle gets faster and the lion gets faster. But although Dawkins thinks that ultimately this will lead to organisms with big on-board computers, a.k.a. human brains, I am not sure that this necessarily follows. If things had gone other ways, I don't see why we shouldn't have all ended up as very efficient, grass-consuming buffaloes. Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway-Morris thinks that there are ecological niches waiting out there to be occupied, and eventually someone would have entered the brain-culture niche as did humans. But whether niches do exist in isolation like that is debatable, and why it had to be that the human niche did necessarily get occupied seems to me to be another matter.
You could of course adopt some kind of God-directed evolution, as did Darwin's great American friend, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray. This is the position of California physicist-theologian Robert John Russell. He argues that God directs mutations down at the quantum level, where we can never enter. But frankly this seems to me to be at total variance with the spirit of modern Darwinism. My suspicion is that if the problem is to be solved, then it has to be done with a theological solution rather than a scientific one. You need to argue from the side of Christianity rather than from the side of Darwinism. My own inclination is to invoke some variant of the multiverse hypothesis -- many different universes -- but to do this on theological grounds (if God wants to He can) rather than scientific grounds. Since humans did evolve, they could evolve (through Darwinism). It was just a matter of God giving it enough shots and it would happen. This seems awfully wasteful, but then as the nineteenth-century English historian and philosopher of science William Whewell worried, this universe with its vast expanses seems awfully wasteful anyway. Who are we to say that God thinks a non-human-occupied world is going to waste?
I am not sure that this is a satisfactory solution, but McShea and Brandon's stimulating new book, Biology's First Law, moves me to say that those of us working on the science-religion interface and who think that the two can be reconciled need to keep up the search for a satisfactory solution to the puzzle of the necessity of humans and the non-directionality of Darwinism.
John Farrell: Bad Faith (in Science): Darwin as All-Purpose Boogey Man?
No, Dawkins simply wrote one of the most clearly organized, and well presented books on the the subject of god(s) and organized religion. He made a pretty solid case for god as a delusion and - as a result - priests, pastors, TV preachers and those who are threatened by reasonable and logical arguments leading people away from potentially dangerous mythologies want to marginalize him in the public media.
I've heard the Dawkins speak a couple of times and I've read both his scientific and philosophical works... he's far removed from the histrionics of the religious opposition.
Whether you believe in god or not, the fact is, evolution is working on the human population continuously.
Taking the Bible literally, even if selectively, is an attempt to prove that Christianity is scientific, in a sense. Taking it as history is also an attempt to bring it in line with modern enlightenment notions of history. They are both largely 19th Century responses to the englightenment that some "disestablished" movements in England took and brought with them to the Americas.
Indeed religion is about faith, following belief in a rather complex dance; tradition and the expression of that faith in daily living rather than by endlessly talking about it.
What 'fundamentalist Christians' think of my Christianity is not my concern. It is what God thinks that matters.
It strikes me that that reaction, that assumes the human body is the form of God, is idolatrist as it worships something which is not God as God attempting to contain the divine. This is best expressed in the soliliqy in Hamlet about the human body. There was a very good reason for the Hebrew faith to forbid depictions of god in pictures or statuary and this illustrates it.
That is similar to the fundamentalist, literalist Christian tendency to place God in a box of their own creation as they insist on defining the age and order of the world which is not theirs to define.
The rest of the article's informative foray in to the different streams of evolutionary thought and research beyond natural selection is intriguing and fascinatiing.
As a Christian I'm not so much concerned about human necessity as I am about celbrating creation and the Divine that created it. I doubt it will ever be completely reconciled, those questions at the interface of faith and science but as long as there is the celebratory quality to it I suspect we're all going at the same thing from different directions and viewpoints.
DUH!
The theories expressed by Charles Darwin explain how living organisms developed. Christianity teaches the faithful how to lead their lives. The conflict between these two things only arises when people who hold with Darwin's theories insist that humanity is nothing more than an animal and that constraints on human behavior are pointless (BTW - I have only encountered one such person and he made that insistence only to justify his own amorality.) or when Christians insist that the Bible must be literally true. Both of these positions are ludicrous.
"The conflict between these two things only arises when people who hold with Darwin's theories insist that humanity is nothing more than an animal and that constraints on human behavior are pointless (BTW - I have only encountered one such person and he made that insistence only to justify his own amorality.)"
Your example typifies a gross misapplication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. That way of thinking reflects an extremely limited understanding of Darwin's pervasive concepts.
http://books.google.com/books?id=PccMuO2pcOcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=frans+de+waal+primates+and+philosophers&hl=en&ei=0MYsTP-ELMP_lgfvq6iSCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
It is the protestant side of christianity that started to take the Bible literal as a reaction against the power of interpretation that the Pope claimed.
Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4588289/The-Vatican-claims-Darwins-theory-of-evolution-is-compatible-with-Christianity.html
The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution should not have been dismissed and claimed it is compatible with the Christian view of Creation.
Anglicans for the most part don't consider ourselves Protestant but "the middle way" between Roman and Protestantism. Lutherans range from the protestant mainline to a similar position as Anglicans.
One of the triggers for Biblical literalism many have come from a reaction to the claim of exclusiviity by one Roman Catholic priest to interpretation while the other was most certainly a response to both the Rennesisance and the Enlightenment in an attempt to prove the Bible was literal history in those terms. Doomed to failure, of course, because it isn't, wasn't and never will be but that's been part of that impulse.
I mean the experiment has been run twice, the first time (the dinosaurs) for a hell longer than the second (the one resulting in us), and that first time there didn't seem to be any likely candidate (at least not one we've yet uncovered) for a creature capable of self-reflection.
That's nothing though. To my mind the far bigger stumbling block, the riddle we must solve before we can even hope to make any kind of reasonable estimate as to the frequency of intelligent life in the Universe, is why the hell were prokaryotes around for 1.8 BILLION years before a single eukaryote made an appearance? Then, on top of that, you've got yet another billion years before multicellular organisms appeared.
Man, that's some evidence of a "trend toward complexity" you've got yourselves there.
Why do people keep reading religious morality and gobbledygook into Darwinism. Darwinism is science - a set of facts that are constantly tested for validity.
Religion - set a faith based principles - either you believe it or not! No need to reconcile. This article only shows how insidiously the religious right tries to bring their morass into scientific classrooms.
I mean - "On the one side are the militant atheists like Oxford-based biologist Richard Dawkins, who want simply to remove religion from the face of the earth. On the other side are the Bible-touting evangelicals like Intelligent-Design-enthusiast and Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who want to supplement science with direct divine interventions."
Remove religion (extremists) vs ID people (just want to add something) who "supplement science" is that the battle here!!
If 1600 years ago the talking snake and the Animal Love-Boat already sounded insane, How people can believe it now? A Darwinian cannot be more Christian than a Jew can be a Nazi. He can, if he has some sort of mental disorder.
The bible was not right about how we came here. How can it be right about the rest? Jesus's story is Identical to Horus's story, wich is 2000 years older. The only way to believe that is to ignore reason.
There is no interface between religion and science. those who claim there is are like vampires feeding off the unwillingness of people to give up their superstitious crap. Religion is a poor way to answer questions of survival, especialy in an age when we really have to focus on serious scientific questions about energy and the environment. Also, we must transform our political systems to deal with integrating science into our existence. Nobody really should care about ones pet beliefs; however, when they threaten humanity as a whole, like they do now, something must be done.
Your valiant attempt to portray organized ignorance as a good thing is misguided. Obviously we should heed our post-Christian Founding Father Thomas Jefferson's advice - we must follow the Golden Rule, the “diamond”, and discard the “dunghill”, the sacred superstitions.
Even vegetarian India with its multitude of gods, holy cows and sacred calves now has nuclear weapons and is “blessed” with an unhealthy, nasty pollution.
Knowledge is a good thing. Wishful thinking does not keep a society free.
Post-Christian Thomas Jefferson said: "IF A NATION EXPECTS TO BE IGNORANT AND FREE IN A STATE OF CIVILIZATION, IT EXPECTS WHAT NEVER WAS AND NEVER WILL BE."
--Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1350.htm
MY BLASPHEMOUS BLOGS
In the East God Won - The high cost of organized ignorance.
Michael Pieracci, Ph.D., Religion Instructor: “Holy heretic’s insight is indeed profound.”
http://whengodwins.blogspot.com/
Holy Cows and Calves - Sacred superstitions, aka religions.
http://holycowsandcalves.blogspot.com/
Look around my friend. Most of the threats, but not all, are products of human culture and consistent with bad memes being passed through the ages. Pet beliefs give agency to dangerous behavior at the intersection between survival and needless empowerment of our cultural artifacts.
On Darwin's religious beliefs we have this form Wikipedia under "Charles Darwin's religious views".
"Though reticent about his religious views, in 1879 he responded that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, and that generally "an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind."
Although it isn't clear to me why this is of any importance beyond being an interesting "factoid".
Thanks for adding your two cents to the debate about Darwin’s religious faith.
I know I can always trust you to shed more light on an issue. Thank you so much for pointing out that Darwin was an "agnostic".
People who know you do not need to verify the veracity of your statements. But next time please provide us with the web link so that we can explore the issue further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin's_religious_views
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_relig.htm
You wrote: "Although it isn't clear to me why this is of any importance beyond being an interesting "factoid"".
Let me try and help you understand why this is of utmost importance. Many scientists agree with Einstein that religious dogma is a hindrance for free thinking.
"I HAVE SELDOM MET AN INTELLIGENT PERSON WHOSE VIEWS
WERE NOT NARROWED AND DISTORTED BY RELIGION."
James Buchanan, Jr. (April 23, 1791 – June 1, 1868) was the 15th President of the United States from 1857–1861 and the last to be born in the 18th century.
Views of religion, Part 1
By Rufus King Noyes - page 282 (Biography & Autobiography - 1906 - 783 pages)
http://books.google.com/books?id=KGcSAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA282&dq=
Everybody's magazine - page 195 - http://books.google.com/books?id=x4_NAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=
James Buchanan, cited in Jonathan Miller. (2004). A Brief History of Disbelief [TV-Series]. BBC Four.
http://www.secularsites.freeuk.com/jonathan_miller_quotes.htm
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Christianity
http://philosopedia.org/index.php/B
http://www.blacksunjournal.com/quotes
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P1-79275410.html
http://mcarr.org/religion.htm
It is nice to have Darwin and Einstein on "our" side, but if they were not it wouldn't change any of my conclusions.