Evolution and God Aren't Mutually Exclusive

In the past, schools were urged to teach creationism or 'teach the controversy.' Now, intelligent design is the new war cry.

The debate over "intelligent design," a topic on the borderland between science and theology, has climbed its way to two new pinnacles lately: the White House and the Vatican.

Larry Witham is a Maryland writer who has published three books on science and religion, including 'Where Darwin Meets the Bible' and the forthcoming 'The Measure of God' (HarperSanFrancisco).

That's another interpretation, although it assumes God is actively directing evolution, which, of course, violates evolutionary theory, which states that there is no intelligent directing agent at work.

Pet peeve time. A "directing agent" for anything is impossible for science to see. If they do catch glimpses of it, it's called a force or a law and declared that no "directing agent" is necessary for it.

Science similarly cannot see "purpose" or even "value" (necessary for purpose).

Science models and maps, quite literally. It is, by design, a limited sphere of knowledge of reality - the firmest sphere (rocks and atoms and other matter or energy capable of being detected by the senses and quantified). It is also the most limited sphere of knowing.

If we stay aware of its limitations, the vast majority of reality is available to us - and to God.

I get what you're saying:

God created us but made it look like evolution, but it really wasn't.

Translation: I really don't want to look stupid by saying evolutionary theory is bunk, so I'll put God in there and say he created in such a way that it looks exactly like evolutionary theory did it. If evolutionary theory later turns out to be bunk, well, then I can change my scriptural interpretation at that time to fit whatever the prevailing theory of man happens to be. At least I won't be called stupid or foolish or a zealot by the self-proclaimed educated and sophisticated in society.

The idea that physicality is unimportant to God is from Greek influences on Christianity. God was very concerned with the physical. Creation is physical, man is physical, the resurrection is physical.

It is only the ideas of Plato, who taught that the physical is polluted and evil, and which was adopted by Christians because they wanted to be cool and hip like the Greeks, that have resulted in the Christian idea of spirit being purer and noblers and superior to matter.

Thanks for your reply:

Statistics can often be used to determine if an event is random, weighted random, or directed.

"Directed" is different from "directing agent."

I think an example would help. Suppose, we look at the Taj Mahal - scientifically.

Statistically, not a random occurrence of white marble. Would science say, "ah, directing agent." Yes, it would seem - at first glance. But science would not say that Shah Jahan was the first cause of the universe - that the Taj was created ex nihilo either materially or causally.

Was the shah the directing agent or was he merely an agent for - and directed by - something larger? Was he the cue stick or one of the billiard balls?

Science would say that, for the male of the species, there are powerful forces at work here, directing the shah.

Let's look scientifically again at the what caused the building of the structure: Jahan killed all his male relatives, and he built the Taj Mahal for his wife Mumtaz who bore him 14 children.

Aha! Seeking power, attracting the most desirable females, removing rivals, seeking to assure his genetic material survives and dominates. 'Twas biology - nature - that built the Taj Mahal.

When it finds, statistically, events that appear to have a "directing agent," science works by reduction to remove the agent and ascribe the directing to "nature." When it is sufficiently reduced, as I said earlier, it's called a force or a law and declared that no directing "agent" is necessary.

I would suggest you read Alexander Kalomiros' "The Six Dawns" before you get much older. It gives a masterful exposition of Genesis as read by the notables in the generation of Christians alive at the time when the Christian canon was fixed, and shows it to be in remarkable accord with the modern scientific account of cosmology, biological diversity, and (even) human origins.

I would also point out as I am often at pains to point out on creation/evolution threads that the purported incompatibility between evolution and theism (an incompabibility believed by folks on both sides--creationists argue that Genesis is true and therefore Darwin is false, while Dawkins and other militantly atheistic evolutionists argue that the truth of the neo-Darwinian synthesis implies the truth of atheism) is based on an error.

It is not the case that a stochastically modelled phenomenon is void of intent. The best models of futures markets (Black-Scholes) are given by stochastic differential equations, yet no one suggests that futures markets are not set up by intentional actors, nor that their dynamics are not the result of intentional actions (by traders). Bizarrely, though, it seems universally assumed that if our best model of biological diversity involves a stochastic element, this implies that the existence of life and its dynamics are void of intent ("we're here by mere chance" or some other nonsense).

Similarly, certain metallugic processes (annealing and hardening) are the result of thermal (and thus really random, not just stochastically modelled) phenomena, yet well-hardened or well-annealed metal is assumed by archaeologists to be the result of intentional action.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the truth of Genesis (allowing for the fact that in the first instance it was directed to cultures very different from our own, and thus should not be read as a scientific treatise, but as a prelude to the Torah, and, for Christians, ultimately a prelude to the Incarnation), and a stochastic model of biological dyanmics are incompatible.

(Personally I think that the neo-Darwinian synthesis falls short on a number of points, but for reasons related to my own hyper-Popperian view of science, not for theological reasons.)

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