Theistic Evolution= clearer definitions

[Josh]

Originally posted 6/23/06:

I find "Theistic Evolution" (as opposed to young earth creationism or progressive creationism) to be a very tricky term, considering it is often used of at least two (if not more) very different positions regarding evolution.

1) That God created the universe with naturalistic evolution 'built-in' so to speak, and life has evolved completely independently on its own since then (has also been called "deistic evolution" by some because it may be seen as implied that God is aloof and removed from His creation, however, there is no reason that this perspective demand a God who is only transcendent and removed from human experience).

2) That God miraculously changed one species into another in the history of life on earth, whether by subtle or radical (miraculous) interventions.

Defining terms is crucial to all beneficial dialogue, of course.

[hume]

Originally posted 6/28/06:

Good point. You could probably draw a line with 1) and 2) on each end, and find people spaced here and there along it.

The first definition is closest to what I think of as TE. Maybe one could call it Theistic Darwinian Evolution or something. The 2nd definition moves further from Darwinism (that is, further from the scientific mechanisms underlying "evolution;" more and more, the mechanism simply becomes "God stepped in at this point.")

[Josh]

Originally posted 6/29/06:

Yes, the 2nd definition is like "creationism with common ancestry of all living things", whereas both YEC (young earth creationism) and Old Earth Progressive Creationism (ala Ross, for example) seem to deny common ancestry, except in the mind of the designer. Actually, I have yet to see a flat denial of common ancestry from Reasons to Believe, which makes me wonder...

[Josh]

So, I've been warming up to the possibility of the Theistic Evolution perspective.

I've been reading Francis Collins' The Language of God; A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief and think he makes some great points.

Collins was head of the Human Genome Project and is an outspoken Christian who holds that God has used naturalistic evolution to create life forms on planet earth.

He maintains that the big bang and anthropic principles are powerful positive evidence for the existence of God and the truths of Scripture.

He is not impressed with God of the gaps arguments that attempt to explain current unexplainables in the theory of evolution and gives good evidence against Intelligent Design concepts such as irreducible complexity.

He also explores his understanding of how Genesis might be read in light of this perspective.

[christopher]

...gives good evidence against Intelligent Design concepts such as irreducible complexity

such as?

[Josh]

Recent discoveries have begun to demonstrate how the eye could slowly develop in stages.

Also, Intelligent Design has lauded the bacterial flagellum as irreducibly complex because no function for a simpler version of it could be imagined... until recently just such a function has been discovered.

[Josh]

Getting ready for your turn to put me on the heretic list???

[ryan]

The problem that I have with Theistic Evolution is that it gives the impression that God is constantly tinkering with His creation to make it better - as if He didn't get it right the first time. I recognize there are things that do require time to develop, and I have no problem with adaptations. Nor am I bothered by the literal 7 days versus figurative.

This has become one area of theology that I would love to simply say "God created" and leave it at that. However, I keep coming back and revisiting/ re arguing many of these same old points.

[Josh]

Dec 4, 2009 8:13:09 GMT -8 ryan said:

The problem that I have with Theistic Evolution is that it gives the impression that God is constantly tinkering with His creation to make it better - as if He didn't get it right the first time. I recognize there are things that do require time to develop, and I have no problem with adaptations.

Well, if one accepts a billions of years history for planet earth, then there's no way to escape the need for changes. What was done "right" at one point simply needed to be adapted to new environments.

Theistic Evolutionists* who believe in naturalistic evolution (most theistic evolutionists) actually don't see God as "constantly tinkering" but actually remove the miraculous from the process (excepting perhaps the creation of the first life form)

*Francis Collins doesn't like the term by the way, preffering his own: BioLogos.

[steve]

Have you read this article from CS Lewis?

"Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its (Christian theology - PG) chief contemporary rival - what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook...Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance - what tragic irony - the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama - just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself: from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies' bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I could never quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the terrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next Act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last Act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet - and perhaps more than the planet - for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Hence forward he has nothing to do but to practice virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little pathetic (sic). It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool - all suns will cool - the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and "universal darkness covers all." The pattern of myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist's career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin.
Such a world-drama appeals to every part of us. The early struggles of the hero (a theme delightfully doubled, played first by life, and then by man) appeals to our generosity. His future exaltation gives scope to a reasonable optimism; for the tragic close is so very distant that you need not often think of it--we work with millions of years. And the tragic close it self just gives that irony, that grandeur, which calls forth our defiance, and without which all the rest might cloy. There is a beauty in this myth which well deserves better poetic handling than it has yet received: I hope some great genius will yet crystallize it before the incessant stream of philosophic change carries it all away. I am speaking, of course, of the beauty it has whether you believe it or not. There I can speak from experience: for I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it. The only other story--unless, indeed, it is an embodiment of the same story--which similarly moves me is the Nibelung's Ring. Enden sah ich die Welt.
We cannot, therefore, turn down Theology, simply because it does not avoid being poetical. All world views yield poetry to those who believe them by the mere fact of being believed. And nearly all have certain poetical merits whether you believe them or not. This is what we should expect. Man is a poetical animal and touches nothing which he does not adorn.
There are, however, two other lines of thought which might lead us to call Theology a mere poetry, and these I must now consider. In the first place, it certainly contains elements similar to those which we find in many early, and even savage, religions. And those elements in the early religions may now seem to us to be poetical. The question here is rather complicated. We now regard the death and return of Balder as a poetical idea, a myth. We are invited to infer thence that the death and resurrection of Christ is a poetical idea, a myth. But we are not really starting with the datum "Both are poetical" and thence arguing "Therefore both are false". Part of the poetical aroma which hangs about Balder is, I believe, due to the fact that we have already come to disbelieve in him. So that disbelief not poetical experience, is the real starting point of the argument. But this is perhaps an over-subtlety, certainly a subtlety, and I will leave it on one side.
What light is really thrown on the truth or falsehood of Christian Theology by the occurrence of similar ideas in Pagan religion. I think the answer was very well given a fortnight ago by Mr. Brown. Supposing, for purposes of argument, that Christianity is true, then it could avoid all coincidence with other religions only on the supposition that all other religions are one hundred per cent erroneous. To which, you remember, Professor Price replied by agreeing with Mr. Brown and saying: "Yes. From these resemblances you may conclude not 'so much the worse for the Christians' but 'so much the better for the Pagans'." The truth is that the resemblances tell nothing either for or against the truth of Christian Theology. If you start from the assumption that the Theology is false, the resemblances are quite consistent with that assumption. One would expect creatures of the same sort, faced with the same universe, to make the same false guess more than once. But if you start with the assumption that the Theology is true, the resemblances fit in equally well. Theology, while saying that a special illumination has been vouchsafed to Christians and (earlier) to Jews, also says that there is some reason. The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of "Science" mounts higher and higher, corresponds to nothing in my own experience.
That grand myth which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought--laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory-in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare's nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; though no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it. (1)
It is not irrelevant, in considering the mythical character of this cosmology to notice that the two great imaginative expressions of it are earlier than the evidence: Keats's Hyperion and the Nibelung's Ring are pre-Darwinian works.
After that it is hardly worth noticing minor difficulties. Yet these are many and serious. The Bergsonian critique of orthodox Darwinism is not easy to answer. More disquieting still is Professor D. M. S. Watson's defence. "Evolution itself," he wrote, "is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice. Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God .Even, however, if Evolution in the strict biological sense has some better grounds than Professor Watson suggests--and I can't help thinking it must--we should distinguish Evolution in this strict sense from what may be called the universal evolutionism of modern thought. By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate: the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe. You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the owls emergence from the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that the express engine of today is the descendant of the "rocket;" we do not equally remember that the " Rocket" springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself-namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination.
On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. I left that ship not at the call of poetry but because I thought it could not keep afloat. Something like philosophical idealism or Theism must, at the very worst, be less untrue than that. And idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism. And once you accepted Theism you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examined them it appeared to me that you could adopt no middle position. Either he was a lunatic, or God. And He was not a lunatic.
I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to "prove my answer." The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are embedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else. -[/size]- The Oxford Socratic Club, 1944. pp. 154-165
Notes:
1. Quoted in Science and the B.B.C., Nineteenth Century, April, 1943.




Some random thoughts on the subject:

• I am also moved by the poetry of the naturalistic epic. It is tempting to believe.
  
• An epic where God begins the process of naturalistic evolution is also grand, but does lack a bit of the stoicism and standing bravely, and steadfastly against the winds of hopelessness. There is quite a romantism to the idea that there is no meaning behind the universe except that which we give it.
  
• I have no theological qualms with evolution of the "deistic" variety, although I don't think there is much of a case for deism. And I must confess I would even like it to be true simply for the epic nature of the story. I remain however a doubting thomas simply for the these reasons: 1)There aren't enough dead bodies in the ground to provide adequate forensic evidence that (even if it could happen) it actually did happen. 2) The mechanisms still don't make sense as far as accounting for the arising of life and speciation.
  

• Do we still have sinful nature in this worldview?
  
  

[Josh]

Steve,
I've never read that. It's awesome. Tell Mo to get on here and jump in with his thoughts.

His argument here:

That grand myth which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought--laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory-in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare's nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; though no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it. (1)

is still going strong. In fact, there's a great book I'm reading just now entitled "Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins' Case Against God" by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker that emphasizes this argument, what I call the "argument from the intelligibility of the universe".

1)There are enough dead bodies in the ground to provide adequate forensic evidence that (even if it could happen) it actually did happen. 2) The mechanisms still don't make sense as far as accounting for the arising of life and speciation.

Am I correct in assuming that on #1 you meant to say "there aren't enough dead bodies"?

I have no theological qualms with evolution of the "deistic" variety, although I don't think there is much of a case for deism.

But couldn't evolution occur naturalistically (kicked off by God) while at the same time God intervenes otherwise in human history?

[steve]

Yes, I suppose he could have kicked it off, but if this is the case, than we don't really need a evolutionary mechanism that could cause speciation. Because the minute we let one miracle into the process, we might as well let any number in. I see few varieties here:

1.) Deistic evolution can either be: a) God started the big bang and placed into the laws of physics some yet unkown self-organizational principle which would eventually assemble the 4 basic building blocks of DNA and the six carbon sugars in the correct configuration so that they would inevidably produce single-celled organism.
b) God placed into the sequence of events a determinism which would lead to all the freak accidents necessary to bring us inexhorably to this point.

2.) Theistic evolution: God started evolution and helped it at key point along it's way. This, in my view, is no different than 6 day creationism because the minute you concede miraculous intervention, the timescales are irrevelant.


I personally think the forensics point to version 2. However, I think version 1 is more aesthetic and I would rather it be the case.
What does Francis Collins say on the matter?

The argument for the intelligability of the universe is being made in many different forms at the moment. I find it good, but for me it is not the best one. In doing a thought experiment where I pretended I had no beliefs and started from scratch, I realized I would have become in any case a theist, because I think existence demands an explanation. Things which exist can be understood abstractly. For example: You have a cat, and cattyness. The cat is the particular and specific. Cattyness is a non-material abstact concept. Some part of us (let's call it intellect) can interact with this abstract entity. Since material cannot interact with non-material, there must be some part of us which is non-material.
Put it another way, the ideas behind everything must have there origins in a mind or some sort of ultimate reality. This for me debunks the argument that if we posit a God as explanation for a complex universe, He therefore must be even more complex and demand an even more complexer cause. But the idea of cause must be birthed from some ultimate source of ideas. Beginning, End, Cause, Effect.....these are all abstract concepts which have there origins in a mind. If they don't, then it the epitomy of senselessness for us to debate anything because ideas would no longer have any meaning.

[Josh]

Nice post.

I think Francis Collins would take your option 1.

When you say the evidence leads to option 2 does that mean that you think the evidence leads more toward option 2 than it does for the "progressive creationist" model or were you just saying which of the two "theistic/deistic evolutionary" views you thought had the best evidence?

[steve]

Although I don't know what I personally think, the fossil record does seem to chime in the most for the progressive creation model. You've got species appearing rapidly and then going extinct. The average duration of a species is a million years. There is very little in the way of fossilized intermediates.
I'm a little baffled by the wave of excitment over decoding the DNA and showing the remarkable similiarities between species. It would seem that some people are taking this as explicit proof that naturalistic evolution happened. (If anybody out there can educate me as to why, PLEASE chime in!)
It is one thing show that evolution could theoretically account for speciation, it is quite another to proove that it did. Most experiements have shown the loss of traits and the simplication of the DNA rather than the opposite. (Although I believe that there are one or two which exhibit the aquisition of traits.)

Like I stated before, the 1. model is the most appealing for me, although it does have some staggering implication to our theological understanding (Let do this on another thread) , but I am disappointed with the evidence for it. Having said that, it seems that every Christian in Europe believe in naturalistic evolution and, by the way, so do Tim Keller and N.T. Wright.

Additionally, I don't think that there is philosophically a lick of difference between version 2 and the progressive creation model. They both involve direct miraculous intervention.

[Josh]

I'm a little baffled by the wave of excitment over decoding the DNA and showing the remarkable similiarities between species. It would seem that some people are taking this as explicit proof that naturalistic evolution happened. (If anybody out there can educate me as to why, PLEASE chime in!)

Steve- check out this thread for some thoughts related to this:

Common Ancestry?

Additionally, I don't think that there is philosophically a lick of difference between version 2 and the progressive creation model. They both involve direct miraculous intervention.

The lick of difference is... common ancestry.

[steve]

I'm aware that common ancenstory is what seperates progressive creationism with theistic evolution, but what I mean by "not a lick of difference" is that whether God miraculously changed one species into another or simply creates them, doesn't make a whole lot of difference. Both of those views, for me, fall into one camp.

[Josh]

Got it.