Posted on 08/07/2006 10:27:04 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
The Human Factor :A man of science face Darwin and the Deity.
by David Klinghoffer
The Language of God A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
by Francis S. Collins
Free Press, 304 pp., $26
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Head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins is among the country's foremost author ities on genetics, a staunch Darwinist, and a prominent critic of Intelligent Design. He's also an evangelical Christian who dramatically describes the moment he accepted Jesus as his personal savior. If that sounds like it might be a paradox, read on.
Collins was hiking in the Cascade Mountains of western Washington when, as he writes, he found that "the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ."
Anyone who doubts that Darwinism may coherently be embraced alongside a faith in biblical religion will be intrigued and challenged by The Language of God. Besides offering a lovely, impassioned, and transparently sincere defense of his own Christian faith, Collins argues that one need not choose between Darwin and God. Indeed, he says, embracing both is the most profound and compelling way of penetrating "that mystery of mysteries," as Darwin called it, the puzzle of the origin of species.
He makes a strong and moving case for religious belief with the part of the book that is a memoir. Collins grew up an agnostic. After medical school, he treated a woman with crippling heart disease who relied on her faith for support. She asked him what he believed about God, and he was disturbed to find that he had no thoughtful reply. Another turning point came when, on a medical mission to Africa, he saved the life of a young farmer suffering from tuberculosis with a risky emergency surgery.
The man thanked Collins afterward and commented, "I get the sense you are wondering why you came here. I have an answer for you. You came here for one reason. You came here for me." The experience set Collins to thinking about the workings of Providence, God's oversight of our lives: "The tears of relief that blurred my vision as I digested his words stemmed from indescribable reassurance--reassurance that there in that strange place for just that one moment, I was in harmony with God's will, bonded together with this young man in a most unlikely but marvelous way."
His later, and historically significant, work on the Human Genome Project has mapped the genetic language, DNA, in which Collins believes God speaks His will for living creatures. Collins does a splendid job of clarifying for the layman what genetic information actually is. He explains how evidence for Darwin's understanding of the evolutionary mechanism may be observed in queer, vestigial features of the genetic code. However, if that mechanism was never at any point guided by a transcendent intelligence--as Darwin in The Origin of Species assumes it was not--this naturally raises the question of what need there was for a Deity as most believers understand Him. God has the right to command us because he created us.
Obviously in the background here, and the foreground too, is the Intelligent Design debate. Darwin and his followers advocate an unguided and purely material mechanism of natural selection operating on random genetic variation. Intelligent Design claims to find positive evidence that the mechanism was, indeed, guided--in short, that the software in the cell (DNA) did not write itself.
Collins's book rejects Intelligent Design as an "argument from personal incredulity." That argument, in his telling, would go this way: We don't understand exactly how the Darwinian mechanism could have produced certain aspects of biological information; therefore, a Designer must have done it. I believe Collins misrepresents Intelligent Design, and it appears that he hasn't followed the latest rounds in the scientific debate. But never mind. Let's assume he's right and ask: If Darwinism is the true resolution of the "mystery of mysteries," where does that leave God?
Something you'll often hear people say is, "Well, Darwinism doesn't mean God isn't the creator. Maybe evolution was programmed into the universe from the start. So He had no need to guide the process." The problem with such thinking is that it's directly contradicted by a major current in Darwinian evolutionary theory. In his book Wonderful Life (1989), the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated what he called the "contingency" of life's history. Gould explained what an incredibly lucky break it was that Earth ever cast up intelligent life forms.
Wisely turning away from this doomed approach to showing God's hand here on Planet Darwin, Collins argues that we may discover evidence of His existence and love from looking to our own hearts, and to the heavens. In this he follows the lead of Immanuel Kant, who famously wrote, "Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the Moral Law within." The incredible fine-tuning of the universe's physical laws at the moment of the Big Bang, making existence possible against unimaginably high odds, must indicate that God had us in mind when He created the starry heavens. Collins quotes Stephen Hawking: "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create us."
But doesn't this sound like an "argument from personal incredulity" of just the kind Collins would attribute to Intelligent Design? Here is Collins on the Big Bang: "I cannot see how nature could have created itself."
The same objection may be lodged against Collins's favorite demonstration of God's being and caring. This comes from the "Moral Law," the sense of right and wrong, of charity and altruism, which he believes to be inborn in the human heart. Where else could it come from, he asks, but from God? "In my view, DNA sequence alone . . . will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God." Darwin, among others, would disagree. In The Descent of Man he advanced an evolutionary explanation of altruism.
In his most satisfying defense of belief, Collins brings forward a clever way of reconciling an unguided evolutionary process with God as the Creator. He points out that God resides beyond the limits of time. Hence, what appears to us as evolution's unpredictable course was, from God's perspective, entirely predictable. It's a neat perspective--except, perhaps, if we ask whether an unguided process of "creation" is still "creation" even if its results were foreseen.
I am surprised that Collins didn't try another approach to harmonizing God and Darwin, an approach I find more promising. This one is brought forward by an Orthodox Jewish scholar who deserves to be more widely known outside Jewish circles. In his own new book, The Challenge of Creation: Judaism's Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution, Rabbi Natan Slifkin also summarily dismisses Intelligent Design. On the other hand, he offers a sumptuous variety of theological and philosophical approaches to reconciling Darwinian evolution with religious faith. Slifkin's perspective, while endorsing Darwinism, holds that what may appear random and unguided in life's history may not be at all.
His writing is too fascinatingly rich to summarize here, but a hint of this line of thinking may be found in a citation from the book of Proverbs: "[When] the lot is cast in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God." Or as a cryptic verse of a famous Sabbath hymn, "L'chah Dodi," suggests, in Slifkin's paraphrase:
The end of the deed is first in thought, which explains that the final result sheds light on the entire process. In this case, it clarifies that when a seemingly meaningless process results in a highly meaningful conclusion, one looks back and sees that the apparent meaninglessness was a mere disguise for the goal, which was actually envisaged at the start of the entire process. This turns Stephen Jay Gould's notion of contingency on its head. The unlikely course of evolutionary history with its ultimate product--us--actually becomes an argument for the emergence of humans having been intended all along. After all, the unlikely thing actually happened. But Slifkin's attempt at harmonizing would likely trouble Darwin, who assumed that the process not only seemed to be unguided but also was unguided.
Can we reconcile God and Darwin without changing the accustomed meaning of one or the other? I remain skeptical. Yet readers owe Francis Collins--and Rabbi Slifkin--a debt of gratitude for making us think more deeply about issues that often get swept away with trite, unexamined formulations designed to give us an excuse for not thinking. The theological and scientific paradoxes will not be resolved in a book review, nor perhaps in any book that has yet been written.
David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is the author, most recently, of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.
(Zondervan’s New International Version) And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
According to current Physics conceptualization, there is a subatomic quantum that is the force communicator for each fundamental force in the universe, such as gravity at galaxy sizes (the graviton), electromagnetism at atomic and molecular sizes (the photon), the weak force and strong force at nuclear sizes (with separate ‘photonesque’ particles of specific properties for each). Physicists have succeeded in combining predictability equations for all but gravity, and are seeking an equation or set of equations that can include gravity. Such an equation or equations would be called grand unification, making it possible to calculate phenomena from the smallest scales all the way to the reality of galaxies, using the same equations. One of the problems with this quantum mechanical definition of reality is the yet to be found gravity particle, the graviton. If no such particle for the force communicator is found then some other way of describing the ‘field’ of gravity will be necessary.
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Time is as much a dimension as space is a dimension. We speak of past, present, and future time, but in fact we perceive only events that have already happened in our world because it takes time for information of the event to reach our senses and be processed … the information system of energy exchange (those force communicator particles) carry a representation of present for when the event takes place at the sender, and that present is conveyed to our mind via photon particle arrival at the receiver. According to Physics (but there is a catch to this that we will get to in a later chapter) nothing can transmit information at a rate faster than the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second --meters are almost as long as yards, for you football fans), or roughly 186,000 miles per second. It is possible to transmit information much more slowly, as in the Pony Express for example, but the top speed limit for information transfer in the universe of our perceptions is the speed of light because that is the typical speed at which light exists in our spacetime.
***
Do not assume that God created the universe from light. God created the universe of spacetime with information, the Wisdom of God, the Word of God. [John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. JN 1:3 Through him all things were made (NIV)]
God’s command to time and space became light to build the things in space and time, but the universe of spacetime and the energy were created through His Word. God created space, time, and energy, then He made things with light … which brings us back to light (sort of). What follows is not basic Physics, it is a speculation upon the nature of God’s command ‘to’ the energy in spacetime at the beginning.
The Genesis 1:3 passage conveys a kind of span, from present to present, as if a length of time, or a length of space bounded by variables of time. Notice that in the majority of parallel versions quoted the command starts with a verb ‘Let’, followed by location ‘there’, followed by another verb ‘be’, followed by a noun ‘light’. The verse is completed with ‘and there’, that location which is a representation of space and implying present tense with the ‘and’, then ‘was’, a past tense verb, then the noun again, ‘light’. The first part of verse three is a linear span of time or space bounded at each end with present tense, the second part of verse three is a span of time bounded at one end by present and the other end by past tense. It is as if there are two versions of light: one bounded by present and present, one bounded by past and present. Would the present and present separated by a span represent the mixing of space and time? Could the expression of length of dimension space be the notion conveyed by present bounding each end of a span (linear, as simplest variable of space)? Might the span with past at one end and present implied at the other be conveying an unfinished span and thus make room for wave motion of the energy we perceive as light?
If we were discussing classic string theory [the notion that everything in the quantum world is made of very small vibrating strings, some of which are open on one end or the other and others closed upon themselves like tiny circles or closed loops] one might think that Genesis 1:3 is describing the formation of quantum strings! We are not asserting that, but we will use that concept to aid in explaining what happened at the Belshazzar party.
Meant to ping you, sorry.
Milton he ain't.
You lost me, RW, but then you do that occasionally.
"and he blew into him the breath of life"... Spirit must be a metaphor for something as are the metaphors that explain/describe it.. Few if any have seen a pure spirit.. is spirit "plasmic?"... The future holds many wonders too wonderfull to wonder at.. "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered the heart of man, the wonders in store".. Be shame to miss it.. Your candid spirit is appreciated..
Please keep me posted on that.
We need to find that "pesky" graviton! And understand the activity of the photon far, far better than we now do. Not to mention the elusive "time problem" and "extra" dimensionality....
Thank you so very much for your marvelous essay-post!
I agree with you all: great thoughts from Mark (and in reply to him) and bravo!
There are two ways to approach your question - science and theology - and since I believe your interest is in the theology, I'll start there.
Scriptures and Jewish tradition speaks of the soul and spirit in four levels as follows:
2. ruach - the self-will or free will peculiar to man (abstraction, anticipation, intention, etc.) – by Jewish tradition, the pivot wherein a man decides to be Godly minded or earthy minded (also related to Romans 8, choosing)
3. neshama - the breath of God given to Adam (Genesis 2:7) which may also be seen as the “ears to hear” (John 10) - a sense of belonging beyond space/time, a predisposition to seek God and seek answers to the deep questions such as “what is the meaning of life?"
4. ruach Elohim - the Holy Spirit (Genesis 1:2) which indwells Christians (I Cor 2, John 3) – the presently existing in the “beyond” while still in the flesh. (Col 3:3) This is the life in passage you quoted: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men..." (John 1)
The “self-will” is in the domain of the ongoing inter-disciplinary studies of consciousness and the mind. The monist view would be that consciousness (as well as the soul) are merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. Qualia speaks against such a conclusion. Qualia are the properties of sensory experiences which are epistemically unknowable in the absence of direct experience of them and therefore, are also incommunicable. Examples include likes and dislikes, pain and pleasure, love and hate, good and evil.
Finished with a flourish... quite good too...
What if, "God", has access to and can mold "dark energy/matter" at will?... Then creating planets, galaxys, even lifeforms, walking on unfrozen water, would seem like magic.. Coming from nowhere.. Yet it (the stuff) was always there(dark energy/matter).. On the otherhand, what if, in the future,"WE" will be given gifts to do some of the same things(populating "and remodeling" the Universe[this one]).. Trumping "string theory" so bad it would make it seem like a comic book..
Reading 'Paradise Lost' for the first time in 45 years. What a difference some life experience makes! What seemed silly nonsense and turned one off to poetry now speaks loudly.
It was THIS fact that got me seriously thinking about GOD!
A snot nosed young lad of 18; a know-it-all HS graduate, thinking of the BigBang and a sky full of brillant pinpoints of light on a cold Colorado, November night.
"Yeah! That's how all this came about: BANG! and all those massive stars are flung out there. Einstein and all that stuff!"
Walking along, back to the barracks, when a small, almost audible thought(?) formed in my head, asking, "Where did the ENERGY come from?"
I knew the formula -
E=mC2
and knew you could re-arrange it so:
m=E/C2
A few years later, and many contacts with folks who KNEW what and where the ENERGY Source was, I, too, came to believe.
I suspect that is a function of your acquired wisdom rather than any new wisdom in Milton's text.
The energy was the command to disturb the ground state of space and time so that they could express together our spacetime ... the disturbing of ground state with the command 'caused' it all. Science measures and describes what has emerged so far ... and I do mean to leave that door open, for we have not yet been shown the blessings He has in store for those whom He transforms into the image of His Son.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this!
ping
great post...
Bump for later reading.
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Ah, but what of the Heavenly Muse?
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