Loading ...My position on the origins question
Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did we come about?”
Actually, you’re asking two different questions. The first, concerning the origin of life itself, I have not come to any conclusions on. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a supernatural act of intervention. But then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by some natural process. The fact is, even scientists don’t have a really good explanation for “abiogenesis” (life from non-life), although they’ve got lots of hypotheses. Yet this current lack of knowledge alone does not make me immediately decide, “Oh! Miracle!” I have explained elsewhere why this God-of-the-gaps explanation is a sinking ship; that some rain god’s direct, miraculous intervention is behind the phenomenon of rain might have seemed like the only possible explanation before an understanding of meteorology, but such a claim would not only have been entirely premature, but, when displaced by a scientific explanation, would appear quaint and superstitious. Just because we don’t know now doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure it out, and we may even one day be able to reproduce it.
This leads to an important clarification of my understanding. The rotation of the earth, gravity, photosynthesis, fossil formation - what do these have in common? 1) God is responsible for all of them. 2) They operate independently from overt divine activity. What’s my point? What I’m trying to say is that I affirm that all the rules of the universe, such as those responsible for the processes I just mentioned, operate just as they were designed to do. Therefore, I’m an intelligent design advocate of a different kind. As Howard Van Till says, God designed a “fully gifted creation”, which means that He set it up to run in a way that did not require Him to break His own rules in order to create us. I contrast this with Van Till’s assessment that ID posits a “system of natural causes [that] fails to include the formational capabilities needed for assembling certain complex biotic structures, such as the bacterial flagellum.” I contend that there was in fact more design put into the universe than ID advocates or creationists allow for, only that this design lies so deeply embedded within nature that the unbeliever will not be likely to notice it.
For the believer, however, God’s involvement in nature is much more visible on the surface than even ID advocates claim: scientists in the intelligent design movement go to great lengths to dust biology for God’s fingerprints, when the fact that the laws of nature even exist is God’s smoking gun - He’s responsible for it all, not just the gaps! Note, however, that I’m not using the cosmological argument and asserting that the existence of natural laws are proof of God’s existence; on the contrary, God’s role in the physical processes that perpetuate the natural world is one of intentionality and purpose, unrecoverable by science and unprovable by philosophy. God doesn’t have to keep making the universe work; all He has to do is will it to work. Of course, even creationists and ID advocates would agree: where we differ is that whereas I believe this essentially naturalistic manner of cosmos management started further back than the present day, the stance of the ID/creationist crowd is that God began using natural laws to run the universe only after the creation. This is seen by the fact that they don’t regularly posit the necessity of God’s intervention to make sure that iron rusts when exposed to water nowadays, yet (under a literalist, historiographic understanding of Genesis) the creation, including plants created on the third day, was able to get along without light from the sun until the fourth day, because ostensibly the laws of nature did not apply until after He was done.
Now to the second part of Josh’s question: how did we (humans) get here? We determine these sorts of things by examining all available resources.
What surprises some Christians is that I am fully confident that the Bible is not one of those resources, nor was it ever intended to be. In Genesis 1-11, until we get to Abraham, we are not getting history as we would from a history book; we are looking at stories common throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE), remolded and adapted to serve God’s purposes. I have previously linked to the conservative Wheaton scholar Dr. John H. Walton’s presentation on Genesis 1. Watch it or else: it’s an hour-long presentation, but if you’re at all interested in understanding my position, you’ve got to check it out. An inelegant way of summarizing it is to say that this chapter is a complex literary work affirming that YHWH is responsible for the universe using imagery drawn from the Jewish temple. The Garden narrative, while retaining firm roots in Mesopotamian mythology, has been reformulated as an archetypal story showing God interacting with humanity, in terms reminiscent of and serving as commentary on the Torah. I plan on addressing this stuff later.
If we don’t use Genesis as a science book or to determine the origin of humanity, where do we look? My choice has been to look to those who dedicate their life’s work to observing, analyzing, and hypothesizing about the natural world: scientists. And no, that group of people is by no means primarily made up of atheistic conspirators against theism. For Pete’s sake, the head of the Human Genome Project is a devout evangelical Christian who, from his intimate knowledge of DNA, cannot conceive of another explanation of the data he’s seen than common descent.
I’m not going to be dogmatic about exactly how everything got here in scientific terms, because I’m not a scientist. But for me, as with any question beyond my ken, I yield to those people who have studied the matter in depth. To sum up my position as a non-scientist who doesn’t think the Bible speaks to the “how” of creation, I would like to quote Dan Werner’s comment on Mike Beidler’s post discussing Van Till:
As to the scientific question, I stand with the whole of scientific tradition these past 140+ years in affirming full-fledged evolution. There can be no other acceptable position for a layperson such as myself. To believe otherwise would not be humble.
Filed under: Ancient Near East, Evolution/origins, Science
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Very good post Steve. The bible is not a science book, not even a rudimentary one that corresponds roughly with the science of today. It’s much more purposeful (does science have anything to do with purpose without a larger narrative undergirding it?) than that.
Can’t wait for your posts on this topic.
Dan,
Science is wholly inadequate for describing purpose. A scientific account of the history of the world would not have answered the questions the Israelites had. They were pragmatists, and they had it right in focusing on the function of the cosmos as a consequence of purpose, rather than simply a consequence of physical structure. Modernism has been successful in getting Christians to think that the Bible owes us a scientific explanation for the origin of the universe.
Agreed. Modernism has been the bane of much evangelicalism today hasn’t it. I believe there is much to be learned from postmodernism without collapsing into a relativistic notion of truth. Here truth becomes multi-dimensional, relational, and purposeful rather than a list of timeless statements about history and science.
Ok, I’m really tired as I’m reading this so I will have to read it again to get all of your points.
I’m going to attempt to label you here. Hope you don’t mind labels. It just helps me in understanding others’ points of view. So it sounds (if I’m not misinterpreting) that you are a theistic evolutionist mixed with a great-watchmaker kind of mentality.
Your beef with the creationists is that they use the Old Testament too much like a science book? and your beef with ID’s…well I guess I don’t see how you differ with them (unless I don’t properly understand you or them, one).
So if evolution was God’s means, are we the ends? Or does evolution continue (a la X-Men)? Are we what he worked toward and thus when man as we know him had arrived then God rested from His work? Expound.
Sure, I don’t mind being labeled, as long as I have some say in what the labels are and mean. I’m what some people call a theistic evolutionist; most of us, however, prefer to call ourselves evolutionary creationists. To say that I’m a theistic evolutionist is exactly the same as saying that you are a theistic photosynthesist. As far as the Great Watchmaker analogy, I would give you a qualified affirmative on that as well, in the sense that I believe God designed nature to work right without requiring Him to step in and tweak things periodically.
My beef with creationists is 1) that they believe the Creation stories were written as historical accounts and 2) that consequently they must prop up bad science to prove this conclusion. My beef with IDers is that, although most to some degree acknowledge common descent (the notion that humans share common ancestry with non-humans), they insist that there are gaps in current scientific understanding and that those gaps can only be filled with “God did it.” They find complex items in nature and tell scientists looking for natural mechanisms, “Stop looking!” It’s a farce, and it’s the very opposite of science, which says, “Let’s improve our understanding.” This is why it’s no witch hunt if a school seeks to maintain its academic reputation and “expels” people who try to stifle scientific inquiry.
In a nutshell, if you’re not going to believe that creation occurred instantaneously as a woodenly literal interpretation of Genesis suggests, and if you are going to admit to evolution to some degree in the first place, and if you don’t deny that God does regularly and routinely use natural laws (such as gravity or the first law of thermodynamics) to run the physical universe, why not acknowledge the possibility that God created nature to run on its own? Why demonize the theory held by nearly 100% of believing scientists as an atheistic dogma?
I mentioned that I wanted to qualify the Watchmaker analogy: deists sometimes claim that God spun up the universe and let it go, and has since been laissez-faire. I think rather that just because God doesn’t need to intervene on the natural order to keep the moon from falling out of the sky does not imply that God doesn’t have an interest in keeping the moon where it is, and that the natural order was thus created and is maintained by His will. This is another failing of ID: does God simply fill in the holes in our understanding? Can we not claim His responsibility for natural processes we have scientific explanations for? Of course we can. And so we do, from the revolution of the planets around the sun with which God intends to sustain us to the evolutionary processes that God used to create us.
Have we arrived? Can evolution go any further? I see no reason why not and, in fact, I fully expect that it will. If, as preterists contend, we live in a world without end, the sky’s the limit, especially when it comes to things that will help us exercise dominion over our charge, the rest of the created order.
Good post and discussion, Steve. Thank you. I find it more fascinating, and a greater tribute to the creative genius of our God that he set into motion a universe that would, quite naturally, result in life. It is a process strewn, however, with all kinds of struggle along the way. Death and extinction are major themes. These suggest a cosmic battle we know little about, and are only given a few hints in the Scriptures.
While I completely agree with your assessment of these natural processes, I see and celebrate the handiwork of God every time I step out on my porch and breath in the fir scented air, look out across our Oregon Coast Range Mountains, or drive 7 miles west to the mighty Pacific Ocean, or watch my children, or enjoy my wife. How anyone can imagine all of this without a magnificent Intelligent One involved in some way is beyond me!
I quite agree. Is it a coincidence that the rise of atheism was concurrent with the decline in the number of people who actually live in and rely on nature? Even those who regularly study it may not fully recognize it in its beauty because of preoccupation with analyzing it. Many, I feel, have missed the forest for the xylem and phloem.
After exploring the link cited to Van Til, I realized I’ve encountered this guy before. I couldn’t get his writing to make sense without first accepting an a-priori theistic evolutionary stance.
Is this ‘folk science’ simply a repackaged version of common knowledge fallacy or consensus science?
Mike: Thus, both atheistic materialism and special creationism derived their distinctive beliefs based not on established methods of scientific inquiry, but rather on their worldview.
But from reading Schaeffer, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The worldviews in question have a thesis/antithesis paper-trail going back quite a ways; often criss-crossing into scholarship we would all agree as valid.
This one makes my head hurt. I challenge anyone to make that statement make sense.
“A causes B, which means that A causes B in a way (non-A) that did not require A to behave non-A in order to cause B.”
Wha. . .??? I can’t even believe that he himself actually believes this stuff. In order to even sell the proposal it has to make sense to begin with. He needs to pick a POV (creation or God, but not both) and then work consistently from there.
And again. . .
Why is this “OK” again? Just because he says so? Your worldview is not arbitrary. Or at least it shouldn’t be. WTH?!?? How is this not a form of “sanctified” moral relativism? Because that’s all I’m seeing.
Oh, but Dembski’s on to him.
http://www.theism.net/article/32
Note the contrast. Therefore, all Howard is trying to sell here is deism with a twist. It all boils down to who’s really in charge, the creator or the creation? Is God some sort of divine back-seat driver here, or what?
Mike: Did I really want to be caught holding the ID bag when scientists declared that something previously thought “irreducibly complex” by ID proponents was, in fact, “reducibly complex”? Of course not.
This fellow spooks easliy. The basic philosophy behind whether or not you accept IC (or its reverse) is whether or not you accept or reject infinite regression.
Infinite regression = infinitely reducible complexity. Correct? If it’s created, then its complexity has got to stop somewhere on closer observation, where you can see it’s fundamental parts. . .and also the very point at which it ceases to function.
- If you accept an infinite regression argument that crosses into the unknown, then this is not science. Don’t walk off the cliff here.
- If you require that God absolutely must have a cause (or, “who created the creator?”), then God is stripped of omnipotence, self-sufficiency, and then ceases to be God. So don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.
- But then, ID doesn’t depend on a presupposition of a Judeo-Christian God, or any particular God for that matter. Thus ID and YEC are two distinct camps and should not be confused.
God is not a tortoise, and it’s not “turtles all the way down” either. Might as well join the Mormons with this kind of thinking.
Oh Dawkins, where is thy sting?
-PJ
PJ:
Please don’t take this as condescending, but I think this betrays the fact that you are not very open-minded and already immoveably set in your beliefs. I read Van Till’s Science Held Hostage without accepting his theistic evolutionary stance with virtually no problem at all. Although I was much more open to TE when I finally got around to reading it, I firmly believe that If I had read it 20 years ago, when I was a die-hard YEC, I wouldn’t have had any problem then either.
No. Common knowledge fallacy doesn’t require a worldview to support the fallacy. Consensus science comes close, but again, it doesn’t necessarily require a worldview in order to maintain its existence. It merely requires a lack of strong, reasoned objection supported by fact and repeatable experimentation.
You must be a Schaeffer fan. As much as I appreciate Schaeffer, a lot of his later work began to reflect a retreat into rigid fundamentalism and false dichotomies. But I digress … of which “worldviews in question” are you speaking? I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say.
Easy. Once God set the universe in motion (let’s assume for the moment it was the Big Bang), the universe was governed by laws (or, “rules”) that God ordained. We were a result of those laws. No divine tinkering (aside from the universe’s prime cause, which is, of course, scientifically unverifiable) was required along the way. Now, how hard was that?
Why is this OK? Not because Van Till says so. There is much about Van Till’s current position with which I don’t agree. And the particular article from which you are quoting does reflect Van Till’s current theological stance, which is quite deistic. I have no problems admitting that.
Sadly, the ID community has produced no evidence of an ID. Behe’s assertion of “irreducible complexity” has proven to be false, time and time again. Methinks you need to get into the scientific literature, my friend. Take the blinders off and look at the evidence objectively, with no thought to your biases.
It all boils down to who’s really in charge, the creator or the creation? Is God some sort of divine back-seat driver here, or what?
Who’s really in charge? God. And God can divinely interject when and where he desires. He may have tinkered with the evolution of life on earth, but there is no evidence that He did. Just because God can do a thing doesn’t mean He has to do a thing. For instance, Jesus performed miracles, the mechanisms by which they occured being far outside scientific observation or repeated experimentation; thus, you likely have a genuine miracle. Sounds like God’s fully in charge to me. Besides, without God’s divine power, the universe would cease to exist. And that’s a bigger miracle than feeding 5000.
Them’s fightin’ words.
Anyone who truly knows me knows that I do not spook easily. In fact, I typically shift paradigms kicking and screaming. My words simply reflect the poorly designed (no pun intended) argument of ID. Every time Behe, Dembski, and Wells chalk something up to IC, they have to wipe egg of their faces a year later. Somewhere down the line, they’re going to have to realize that the easiest way to wipe off the egg is not to allow egg on their faces in the first place. That’s the smart route.
Now you’re invoking the powers of science to bolster your argument? Keep doing that and you’ll be a non-ID evolutionist in no time. Unfortunately, I don’t think science is at an advantage here. It’s impossible to go “back to the beginning” and take an outsider’s (i.e., God’s) POV. Thus, the question of who/what is the Prime Mover is well outside the bounds of science; that question is for philosophers and theolgians. TE/EC is faith-based, not science-based. Make no mistake about that.
My that herring is red! Who here is requiring that God has a cause? You’re starting to get so defensive, you’re making nonsense.
This is true. However, two distinct camps can still have something in common. Can you say “folk science”? (Good! I knew you could.)
What’s wrong with rigid fundamentalism? As long as none of the presuppositions of fundamentalism are threatened, right?
You first. You stated “worldview” first. Therefore, you seem to know where the lines of these philosophies are traced. Which worldview precedes scientific inquiry?
I’m just trying to grab ahold of something solid here; make sense of the whole thing. I don’t understand how you accepted it so easily.
Other than contradicting Jesus Christ, it appears no more than rank deism. Why couldn’t Van Till (or Steve) for that matter have simply stated it this way to begin with? But then who says that God was ever confined to natural laws (such as time)? Why does God absolutely have to follow those laws?
Okay. That’s fair. But it appears that Van Till is trying to be something original here.
I keep hearing this, but whenever I ask for details I get sent to a lot of “just so” links. Has there been a follow up to the bacterial flagellum?
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
That’s the last one I read. What about the whole mousetrap silliness?
http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_mousetrapdefended.htm
One critique of Behe’s thesis actually depended on propping a mousetrap against a wall (a 90 degree angle, which is a foreign element; and thus an evolutionary diversion) with the intent on falling on the mouse or something.
So, I’m more than willing to examine any proof that current ID postulates are invalid. For the past 6 years I’ve heard they’ve, “pretty much been all disproven,” but I’m still waiting for the proof that undoes it.
Ah, yes. Dawkin’s ever-so-popular “read a book” defense. It never gets old. The classic canard that information, arguments, and experiments are only valid when published and sitting on a shelf at Barnes and Noble. Why can’t we actually look at the individual examples you claim are there, and witness together how they have been proven to be false one at a time?
Van Till’s process God cannot do that. Any form of interjection is non-deism. This same God also appears to be a slave of time.
Then you’re postulating a complete fossil record? To confidently assert there is “no evidence that He did,” would require that, correct?
That doesn’t sound like deism either.
Assuming your fear was realized and scientists actually produced something “reducibly complex” to begin with. Your writing style appeared to be a wish to pre-empt that foreseen disaster and adopt a new paradigm before your old one “got caught” as it were.
Links plz. Preferably Behe and/or Dembski in particular.
That’s not what I stated. Infinite regression is the popular argument of the supporter of ET, where IC is not infinite regression, because the necessary parts that make up the design can be seen.
I am agreeing that presupposing a specificed “named” creator is not science. I am also proposing that ID does not do this, but rather it is accused of doing it in order to create a strawman argument and take attention away from the science. In reality, the designed object itself can be measured and proven as designed without actually identifying the designer.
Like Van Till states, “wink-wink, nudge-nudge.” Oyeah, you-know-who is of course, assumed by all. . .but that’s still an assumption and a quick jump outside of the science of ID, since the science doesn’t presuppose a Judeo-Christian God of the Bible, but only assumes it. See my discussion with Steve on this please. This is what set ID apart from YEC.
For example, the same information theory criteria (math) that determines whether a radio signal is of intelligent extraterrestrial origin (SETI) is the same standard for judging the “information” in a genome. ID would depend upon that as well. The only problem is that one project is/was more popular than the other.
No, I’m simply arguing the “who created the creator” defense. Whether you personally support it or not is not my accusation. Either you believe in infinite regression or you don’t. I claim that belief in God doesn’t immediately demand the question “who created the creator?” I also claim that belief in ID doesn’t require the presupposition of a Judeo-Christian God. It could just as very easliy be alien space seeding.
Then please define “folk science” without relativism. I assert ID plays by the rules of hard science until proven otherwise.
-PJ
Well, PJ, it’s certainly gotten quiet around here since you left. Did things get that ugly? Rigorous debate, I thought (and this is always welcome here), but the worst problem we had was talking past each other to some degree. I apologize for missing your points and wholeheartedly forgive you for missing mine.
I want to respond to a few of your last comments, but I’ll refrain. I’ll leave it as it is, at least until someone else takes up your torch and brings them up again. I regret losing your contributions. I wish you well wherever you roam.