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Anti-evolution Campaigning by Christians Should Be Discarded Immediately Without Further Ado

Contents
Statement of purpose
A brief personal historical outline
What I believe about evolution
Why I believe as I do
Responses to common objections to evolution
The current state of play in the anti-evolution movement
Theological implications of evolution
The pointlessness of anti-evolutionism as a Christian apologetic
Conclusion
Postscript: additional thoughts

“Men create oppositions which are not; and put them into new terms so fixed, as whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning.”
— Francis Bacon

Statement of purpose
I believe that the long-standing “Creation versus Evolution” controversy between many religious persons and evolutionary scientists has served no useful purpose at all. Moreover, the polemical strategies and kinds of arguments used by anti-evolution campaigners have only served to alienate non-Christians “in the middle” who might otherwise have been interested in theism, as well as hardening partisans on both sides against the possibility of meaningful dialogue between them, and calcifying positions defined by reactionary, polarizing impulses, that have much more to do with resisting an imagined opposite than with principle and meaning. I will herein put forward the case, primarily, that Christians should not be threatened by the idea of evolution, but instead should at least suspend absolute negative judgment on the matter while being aware of the way they present the implications of their beliefs to non-Christians (Col 4:5–6); and secondarily, that a Christian who believes in evolution can do so on a theologically sound and rational basis.

A brief personal historical outline
I suppose I was indoctrinated, more or less, in Young-Earth Creationism by sources such as science classes in the Christian junior high I attended and Christian camp speakers. When I was in the 10th Grade, I composed an “argumentative essay” for English class which had the thesis statement “The theory of evolution should be discarded immediately without further ado.” The thing is, all that I knew about evolution came from some Young-Earth Creationist tracts I had picked up somewhere. I remember what my main arguments were, and understand them now to be completely without merit.

Time passed, and I didn’t think about it too much for a while. Then I went to college and majored in Biology. Interestingly, “evolution” as such was neither explicitly taught nor argued against in the course of my Biology classes at the Christian college I attended, although one came through the experience with the distinct impression that life on Earth has a long history that seems to be characterized by a process of development and descent over time. There was no major paradigm shift I underwent, no sudden realization that maybe the theory of evolution should not, in fact, be “discarded immediately without further ado.” In fact, I don’t remember ever actually consciously revisiting my initial position and acknowledging it as total bunk until fairly recently, although certainly long ago I would have explicitly disavowed said position if put to it.

Dateline: 1998. I’m just out of college, and I run into “Irreducible Complexity,” flavor of the month for evolution opponents, and latch eagerly onto its flagship work, Darwin’s Black Box by biochemist Michael Behe, having accepted an old Earth and some kind of “process” for creation, but personally not in acceptance of the notion that “evolution” can explain every aspect of life. I also digest Phillip Johnson’s well-written and incisively-argued (but alas, ignorant of modern evolutionary theory) Darwin on Trial and am left quite convinced that the idea of “evolution” is deeply flawed. The case goes back to rest for another several years.

Zip forward to the present time, at which I am a “theistic evolutionist” (or “evolutionary creationist,” if you like). I’ve arrived at this position following exposure to a lot of additional evolutionary information in the course of my job as a science textbook editor, and an inexorably-dawning realization of how pointless it is to nitpick over evolution as though our very faith in God sorely depended on it. It might be presumed at this point by the reader that I have simply succumbed to the influence of the environment around me, but I would hope that the anti-evolution-minded critic would attend to the arguments I shall herein present before assuming I have simply “gone soft” or something (discussions in which judgments are assumed at the outset necessarily go nowhere and enlighten no one).

What I believe about evolution
I believe that all forms of life on Earth are descended from earlier forms, and always have been since the first form of life “appeared.” This includes man: I believe that humans and apes share a common ancestor (not that we are “descended from apes” as the popular phrase goes; not that the distinction would mean much to the man on the street). I believe it is theologically, scientifically, and philosophically unsound to attempt to prove God’s existence by trying to demonstrate that certain biological structures could not have arisen without some kind of intervention or advance plan. This, however, is precisely the aim of the current “Intelligent Design” movement,* with which I consequently find myself distinctly at odds, for the reasons just stated. I believe that Genesis 1–11 of the Bible does not consist of what we now call “historical accounts” (for an excellent explanation of the basis of this position, see the second half of this “evolutionary creationist”’s essay), nor was it ever meant to be taken as such. I have no clue what “actually” happened in Eden (most saliently, how Homo sapiens became a sentient, godlike being) but I believe that the Genesis narrative detailing those “events” presents an account of what happened in the only way that counts: it tells us what man is (beyond a materialistic, scientific description), and how, qualitatively, he got to be that way.

*No one in the ID camp will state their position as such, of course, and I think it is even likely that many of them honestly do not believe that this is what they are trying to do. As they advocate their position, however, it is inevitable that their efforts will be taken to be motivated by a desire to “prove God’s existence” or something like that, and this is part of the reason I find their position to be philosophically and polemically unsound, and essentially useless. More on ID methodology below.

Why I believe as I do
I take the various evidences for common descent for all forms of life (explained in more detail below) to be sufficient to assume that God allowed life to unfold in a gradual, stepwise manner that can be understood in terms of the various disciplines, including those genetic, physiological, biochemical, and paleontological, of evolutionary science. I don’t think there’s any need for a Christian to insist that God must have waved his hand and—poof!—certain forms of life appeared out of nowhere (Genesis itself, after all, says “The earth brought forth...” [Gen. 1:12, 2:19; NASB]). Of course, the theist is free to entertain any of a number of ideas about how God created life. Starting with a basic belief in God, I could always just appeal to creation ex nihilo, but it turns out that the data and inferences gleaned from natural science give us clues as to the origin of species over time. Pursuance of evidence in conformity with these inferences is rightly done according to the methods of natural science. Natural science proceeds by a program of methodological naturalism: a term that is contentiously quibbled over in many philosophy-of-science as well as theological circles, but the following is what I mean it to entail for the purposes of this paper:

1. Empirical data are the starting point: What science “works on” is empirical data—that which can be measured, quantified, and characterized in a systematic way.
2. Uniformitarianism: It is assumed that for patterns and processes observed now and that can be described by physical laws, those laws applied in the past (unless we have a specific reason for thinking the basis for them changed at some point), and will continue to apply indefinitely. This basic assumption is what the inferences of science are ultimately based upon, and what gives science its predictive power.
3. Universalism and falsifiability: The knowledge and conclusions of natural science can be independently verified and agreed upon by other investigators. If a conclusion is incorrect, others will be able to disprove it. Thus, natural science is self-correcting.

Toward the principle of integrity in methodological naturalism, then, and so that I can converse meaningfully with other methodological naturalists (Note, again: this is the whole basis of natural science), I provisionally (because in science, all knowledge is “provisional”) assume a naturalistic description, to be more and more fully discovered and fleshed out as the scientific process of discovery continues, to be valid for the origin of species. I now turn to the evidence that constitutes that body of knowledge which scientists have unified under the paradigm known as the “theory of evolution.”

Most evolutionists will trot out a standard litany of evidential “set pieces” like The Fossil Record, Embryology, The Peppered Moth, et al., a lot of which I find too “question-begging” and/or not particularly illuminating to the subject (reliance on such "icons" seems to only invite "Straw Man" attacks such as contemporarily done by Jonathan Wells). And a lot of that just doesn’t convey anything to the Special Creationist dead-set against evolution, so I won’t go into a lot of it. But to me, the phylogenetic evidence is strongly suggestive. There are seemingly limitless examples of DNA homology that allow one to elucidate evolutionary relationships between related organisms. The homology does not just reflect similarities of type: for instance, there are extensive regions of DNA “error” (a loaded word in this context, to be sure, but let’s just recognize it as meaning “nonfunctional”) shared by humans and apes. These consist of thousands of identical base pairs whose sheer quantitative heft represent an enormous hint toward common descent. Given evidence of that kind, and add to it the fossil record showing simpler organisms early in life’s history and ever-more complex ones appearing later, and the ample evidence for the billions of years necessary for it all to unfold, and things fall into place rather clearly. In addition, look at our taxonomy and classification of animals: each genus consists of several species, each family consists of several geni, and so on down the tree. The implication of these systematics towards common descent, and therefore evolution, is impossible to ignore, on the most basic “common-sense” level. In addition, feeding all of the foregoing back into theological considerations, you’d have to ascribe to God a certain measure of arbitrariness and deception if you continue to hold that God created organisms “specially,” all at once.

When different types of evidence point to a single conclusion, as with the age of the Earth itself, and the existence of God, it lends a certain kind of credence, that I would posit is qualitatively of a nature higher than mere guesswork, to the proposition. Below are some web sites with a lot of good supplemental information explaining why evolution is such a well-established concept.

• A National Academy of Sciences page
• “The Evolution Evidence Page”
• TalkOrigins, a website based on the newsgroup of the same name. Lots of FAQs and topics presented thoroughly and definitively.
• EvolutionPages.com

Responses to common objections to evolution
To many nonscientists who are theists and therefore do not simply assume evolution to be true, evolution just doesn’t seem to make much sense, under purely physical considerations. Most of the common objections raised against evolution by people coming at it from that angle take the form of either basic scientific misunderstandings or an imposition of an unrealistic burden of proof. You can find a lot of FAQs and the like on the web that respond to these. For instance, Scientific American has its “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense”, which I don’t find thoroughly convincing all the way through, so I won’t simply regurgitate it (I also wish to avoid invective language like “nonsense”), but I will use it as a guide. Following, I’ll go through the ones I perceive as most-commonly stated, and give my own responses.

“Evolution is just a theory.”
This misconception stems from the common use of the word “theory” to mean a “guess.” However, in science, as it used in the context of “the theory of evolution,” a theory is “a well substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.” The “theory of evolution,” then, is an inference drawn from a wide variety of evidence. For more on what roles laws, hypotheses, and theories play in science, read this.

“If people descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
Curiously, this kind of argument is often taken to be a kind of slam-dunk against evolution, but it reflects a very basic misapprehension of what evolution is. First, as noted previously, evolution does not imply that “humans descended from apes,” but that the two have a common ancestor. Populations, not individuals, evolve. When a population of a certain species geographically separates into two or more populations, different selection pressures and different genetic drift works on each population. Fast forward many millennia, and you likely have two different populations that cannot interbreed: two different species. In the man/ape example, a (not necessarily, for the process) now-extinct simian ancestor of both species split into different populations, which each gave rise to different members of the order Primates. Obviously, none of this requires humans to be the only primate species still in existence.

“Evolution cannot explain the origin of life on Earth.”
Evolution and origin-of-life are actually two separate issues, although the latter does impinge on the former. As it turns out, in the present state of our knowledge no one has a clue how life originated, but it's simply invalid to go from that to an argument from ignorance that God created life miraculously. Remember, a Christian by definition already believes in God, so the fact that we don’t materialistically know how life originated is consistent with the notion of a God that does miracles; however, but cannot be regarded as proof to the unbeliever, as the idea of an as-yet unfound scientific explanation is always there. The impressive apparent improbability of life “appearing” in any way is something to marvel at, given that life does exist, but it is a metaphysical, not scientific, interpretation of that fact that the Christian brings to bear on the question; even if true, it cannot be considered a proof in a physical sense.

“It is mathematically inconceivable that any aspect of biological complexity could spring up by chance.”
This kind of statement attempts to exclude the possibility of evolution by refuting a claim that the idea of evolution does not in fact make: that complex structures arise all at once. The mechanisms of evolution work on existing structures: there’s no question of “running a tornado through a junkyard and coming out with a 747,” as I once heard a Christian camp speaker say. The first “eye” was probably a light-sensitive spot in a simple organism, perhaps even a unicellular one. The process of evolution is long and opportunistic, new mechanisms arising from old ones “repurposed,” recombined with genetic material transposed in any number of ways, and then refined by elimination. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be able to “imagine” a specific pathway from light-sensitive spot to full-fledged vertebrate eye. It’s an enormously complicated process, and the “argument from personal incredulity” that complex mechanisms cannot arise from simpler ones is simply invalid, however much subjective appeal it may have. Also, remember that just because we don’t have an everyday-experience analogy for it, doesn’t mean it can’t be true.

“The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that systems become more disordered over time. How, then, is increasing complexity supposed to have arisen over time?”
The short answer to this is: Because the sun shines.
It’s hard to believe how persistently this objection is voiced, given that it arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Second Law actually says, which is that entropy must increase in a closed system. But if we take any scale as large as the solar system into account (which we must, if we are to consider the sun’s energy of any consequence to life on Earth; and yes, it most certainly is), the entropy of that system does increase, given the very high entropy increase represented by the huge amount of energy given off by the nuclear fusion reactions in the sun. Another example of how entropy can decrease locally is that plants take advantage of the huge entropy increase of the sun when they photosynthesize, building sugar molecules out of simpler carbon dioxide and water ones (this “same” energy is then carried on up the food chain). This represents a decrease in entropy, but is amply made up for by the entropy increase represented by the sun.

“The fossil record is full of gaps.”
This argument is of the kind that places a massively unrealistic burden of proof on the defendant. It is as if the only thing that would convince the arguer that all life on Earth has been part of an unbroken stream of generations is to find a specimen of each such generation in the fossil record. Given the nature of the geology of fossil preservation, and the comparative rarity of the conditions in which fossils form, no one should expect to find fossil evidence of every creature that ever lived. The fundamental flaw in this argument can be put another way: let’s say we have a “gap” between two species, one of which is supposed to be a descendent of the other, separated by, say, a million years. Then let’s say we find a fossil of a creature that appears to be intermediate between the two. Okay, now we have two “gaps”: one between the oldest fossil and the middle fossil, and one between the middle fossil and the newest fossil. And so on, with each new fossil discovered. Have we made the situation progressively worse by increasing the number of gaps all the way up until each generation is discovered? Clearly not. The fact is, we have quite reasonably enough fossil examples to support evolution, and more are being discovered all the time.

Continue to part 2