The current state of play in the anti-evolution movement In the last few years, the “Intelligent Design” (ID) movement has attempted to present more-sophisticated, au courant objections to naturalistic evolution than the preceding, more-easily addressed, ones. Two major proponents of this movement, with related but somewhat different emphases, are William Dembski and Michael Behe.
Dembski’s approach is mathematical/information-theoretical, and perhaps his defining work is the book No Free Lunch. The central idea involves “specified complexity” (the word “specified” alone should set off your petitio alarm right off the bat), and that certain degrees thereof “cannot be purchased except by intelligence.” Dembski then goes through a highly-involved range of probability exercises in order to so demonstrate. The whole problem with this approach is the premise itself: natural evolution does not in any way require that a certain level of complexity be “specified” in advance; that is, display a single independently given pattern. There are any number of almost infinite possible outcomes from millions of years of evolution, any of which would, to the point of view of the observer in one of those possible worlds, show “specified complexity.” Of course, why the particular specified complexity represented by the existence of human beings, as opposed to some other possible parallel creature, came to be, is a question we can theologically assign to the purposes of God, but there’s no question of specified complexity, as such, materially proving the existence of a Designer. It’s a completely question-begging proposition. Dembski actually acknowledges this, and then goes on to recast his whole argument as “Darwinism does not guarantee that anything interesting will happen.”—which may be an interesting statement to the theist about the existence of the actual multiplicity of animal life, out of all possible worlds, but says nothing in scientific terms to preclude naturalistic processes. For a more detailed statement of this fundamental flaw, I refer the reader to biologist H. Allen Orr’s extremely incisive review of No Free Lunch*
*The review, although very educational in cutting to the heart of the matter, contains a sentence I don’t condone: “And yes, he believes—contrary to everything biologists have told us for the last 150 years—that an intelligent agent helped shape you and me.” This is a completely unfounded statement and is quite out of character with the insightfulness of the rest of the review. Fortunately(?) he goes on to contradict himself in the very next paragraph, where he states that Darwinism does not rule out the possibility of an intelligent designer, whereas Dembski claims that Darwinistic mechanisms are formally incapable of explaining certain features of organisms, thus leaving a designer as the only possible recourse.
The other prong in the ID thrust is represented by Irreducible Complexity (IC), the idea, as put forward by Behe’s aforementioned Darwin’s Black Box, that like a mousetrap, certain biological structures and biochemical processes require all their constituent parts to function at all, and therefore “slight, successive modifications” (Darwin’s phrase) are unable to explain them. This argument has a compelling common-sense appeal, especially if you’re thinking of an IC system as one from which “taking away” any of its parts renders it nonfunctional, but it has not impressed biologists in the main. The simple answer why is that again, in an evolutionary process, there’s no question of “taking away” individual components: evolution works upwards and outwards from preexisting material, and there is a manifold variety of ways, genetically and biochemically, that different components serving previous functions, or maybe even no function until the right mix of components are in place, can build up to a result we might now call “irreducibly complex.” Behe’s argument, then, rests on an argument from ignorance about the necessarily incomplete knowledge that we have about the complete history of any given biological feature. Behe, of course, would not say that he is arguing from ignorance, but that he has shown Darwinism formally incapable of explaining biochemical complexity. Certainly Darwin, being as ignorant of genetics and biochemistry as any 19th-century scientist, would feel seriously daunted if confronted with Behe’s argument, but Behe, it seems, is as unaware of modern evolutionary theory and how it ties in with molecular biology as Darwin was. So Behe is attacking the wrong target, which is old-school finch’s-beak Darwinism, which has long been supplanted by a modern synthesis that takes account of modern knowledge of genetics and biochemistry and how evolution can work at the molecular level. But to the nonscientist probably only at all familiar with that good old 19th-century Darwinism, the argument seems awfully compelling.
Almost as bad as fundamentally fallacious ID arguments themselves are certain attempts that have been made to rebut them by tacitly concurring with ID’s underlying (and utterly backward) burden-of-proof precept that scientists must propose a complete evolutionary pathway for every biological structure in order to even begin to conceive of them arising by naturalistic evolutionary processes. A case in point is biologist Kenneth Miller’s essay “The Flagellum Unspun: the Collapse of Irreducible Complexity”, referring to Behe’s favored example of the bacterial flagellum, a compact and efficient assemblage of biochemical machinery, as a prime example of IC. Besides its dependence on broad rhetorical flourishes (for example, the title), the whole problem with Miller’s approach in refuting ID is in his central statement, that the existence of the Type III Secretory System (a structure with a different purpose from the flagellum, but with some molecular homology, and named as a possible evolutionary precursor to the flagellum) proves that the bacterial flagellum is not IC. The claim is simply not true as stated. In order to present a proof of that nature, it would remain to elucidate a complete possible pathway from one to the other, then prove that that’s what in fact happened; but Miller is attempting to answer the wrong statement, Behe’s ill-conceived one, rather than showing why Behe is wrong to try to make that kind of claim. The IC argument is, of necessity, difficult to answer in detail, which is a reason why it is so easy to use rhetorically. Its fundamental problem lies at its very inception, in methodology. It is this, ID’s body of tacit assumptions that make up its theoretical structure (such as it is), that need to be addressed.
Dembski, for some reason, took it upon himself to reply to Miller’s article with an article of his own: “The Bacterial Flagellum: Still Spinning Just Fine” (don’t you just love all the rhetorical one-up-manship). Dembski’s response is of a more general type, wherein he attempts to defend the central methodological tenets of Intelligent Design. After carefully analyzing his paper, I came to the conclusion that Dembski is deeply, deeply confused about burden of proof: he repeatedly demands to be shown a complete proposed pathway from Type III Secretory System to flagellum. It’s really just the same argument as made by the person who “just doesn’t see enough fossil evidence.” I was really rather disturbed at the amount of ground-shifting, contradiction, outright misrepresentation, and shameless dissembling that thoroughly pervaded his paper. He comes across as a flim-flam artist of sorts, or as one who is in some way mentally unbalanced. It is a case in point of what dismays me so much about a lot of these ID folks: they present atheists with a ready-made argument, on a silver platter, about how intellectually dishonest Christians can be. Many nonscientists continue to trumpet their unfortunate misconceptions to similarly uninformed audiences; they may conceivably be simply mistaken, and really not understand the invalidity of the arguments they make. But these ID figureheads are highly educated people and should know better.
ID theorists themselves cannot seem to present a unified picture of what they are trying to peddle: for instance, the IC argument seems to quite strongly imply interventionism, while the “No Free Lunch” argument, needing simply front-loaded information, does not seem to. The ID crowd and its ideological ilk need to come to grips with this and many other facts if they expect any respect among the scientific community instead of just book sales and notoriety. At the end of Scientific American’s “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense,” the problems of ID methodology from the point of view of mainstream science are addressed, and very well, so I’ll simply quote it here:
“Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life’s history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion—that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.
“Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.
“Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.”
Theological implications of evolution So if we posit that natural processes “alone” are sufficient to create all that we see, just where does that leave God? Need we echo LaPlace’s fabled reply to Napoleon, “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis”? Well, notice that it is only a god-of-the-gaps that I have eliminated from contention—and good riddance to him, a vacuous argument-from-ignorance being his only support. I won’t absolutely appeal to interventionism on any specific count with respect to natural history, but I wouldn’t rule out its possibility—although I have a certain aesthetic distaste for the idea of a long natural biological process that chugs along just fine on its own until it reaches certain points at which it needs a little “nudge” from God. What I’m getting at is that a smooth uniformitarian principle for God’s general involvement in the world’s events (excepting certain miracles specifically attested to by the Bible) is certainly to be preferred over anything that leads to a god-of-the-gaps that is further chased out of relevance with each new scientific discovery. As Christians, we believe that God is involved in our lives and in the world, right? Is that because we see particular events that directly violate the laws of nature? No, we believe God works in and through events, in a way we don't necessarily understand, in a conventional, causal way.
For instance, I believe it was God’s action in the world and in my life that got me the job I have today. Do I mean by that that I suddenly one day found myself lifted up by an unseen force and physically placed in Austin, where I stood and witnessed a publishing company being built in a matter of moments, from the ground up, complete with a building, employees and publications, and which subsequently offered me a job? No, things turned out in a natural way to unfold in such a way that I got where I am today, which means that each event depended on the one before it in an unbroken chain, but things could have gone any number of different ways. This is exactly the way I think the history of life on Earth unfolded: in a unbroken treelike outgrowth of “natural” events without necessarily any particular thing “miraculously” popping into existence, the actual events themselves (out of myriad possible ones) being an expression of God’s influence. The fitness and beauty of this conception is obvious: we can say that God worked in the history of the world before man in the exact same way we perceive Him to work now! No forced dichotomy, no appeal to hypothetical, unknown miracles in the past: It’s all a miracle. Of course, “miracle” in that loose, meta-sense is not to be confused with special miracles that God, and God as Jesus, performed as recorded in the Bible. I am by no means redefining the word as any event normally considered “natural,” thereby precluding miracles in the usual sense of the word.
It’s well worth looking at what might be meant by God “working through natural events,” as at first blush many will no doubt object that this seems to be a contradiction in terms of sorts. I can think of two ways of looking at this. You might say that perhaps at the quantum level, where individual events are unpredictable and only statistically combine to add up to the apparent predictability of “macro” events, or in some other way, chaos-theoretical or otherwise, God acts within the interstices of nature to produce macro outcomes that are expressed through time as outgrowths of infinitesimally tiny causations. In this way, at the level of unpredictability of “which mutation will occur and when,” God chooses certain possibilities, out of very many, to be instantiated. Or, if one prefers to hold to a deterministic interpretation of quantum events as unpredictable yet rigidly determined, you could say that the whole cascade of events and generations that compose the history of the universe, and life on Earth, were “front-loaded” at the moment of Creation (a.k.a. the “Big Bang”), along with the array of physical laws and constants through which they found their expression. Or, some unimagined or unimaginable third option. But the important thing to notice is, I think, as far as both the options I’ve proposed, the outcome of either one is philosophically identical. This truth is well expressed by Colossians 1:17, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” It seems to me that little more than that needs to be said about it, though speculation may continue about specifics.
The foregoing so far has been a necessary harmonization of the idea of God’s action with a robust notion of the scientific intelligibility of events in the history of life on Earth. The success of modern science in characterizing natural processes contributes to a unity of knowledge that would on the whole represent a dissonant dichotomy if we retain the popular image of God creating each animal, fully formed, out of nothing (and a dichotomy compounded further if we imagine Him, arbitrarily as it were, creating some animals ex nihilo while letting others evolve “on their own”). Moreover, far from this synthetic view belittling and marginalizing God’s creative influence, I am much more impressed and awed by a creative process that takes time, and results in a myriad of strange and wonderful creatures as part of that process, and can “turn” a sea creature “into” a mammal given 500 million years (or whatever) and the right particular combination of countless generational changes, than in creation ex nihilo. And the same God that works on existing material in careful ways to bring about all the biological change that has happened over time and that analogously works on the existing material of our selves and the things of our lives, to me is truly and magnificently praiseworthy.
The pointlessness of anti-evolutionism as a Christian apologetic “Naturalistic” evolution (in the sense of scientific sensibility) being wholly compatible with orthodox Christian faith, whence, then, comes the need to point out “weaknesses” in evolution? Clearly, Christian faith does not depend in any way on perceived weaknesses in evolution, for if evolution indeed proceeded in the unbroken, naturalistic manner that scientists suppose, this does not weaken any fundamental Christian claim.
It is true that some influential evolutionary scientists have used discussion in the realm of their discipline, directly or indirectly, as an argument against belief in God (more commonly it’s done indirectly, through innuendo and turn of phrase and the like, so as to better cloak the underlying metaphysic). And indeed, for the atheist, necessarily, evolution is the only game in town. As one would expect, atheists lean heavily upon belief in evolution, and they use it as a polemic against theism because, through their particular lens, it functions as a bolster for not having to believe in God. Many Christians, seeing this, mistakenly consider atheism to be a necessary concomitant to belief in evolution, and therefore viciously attack evolution as a vast put-up job by those in the intellectual elite hostile to belief in God. In addition, the way in which atheists argue for evolution may let their metaphysical commitments come across in such a way that it is clear that it is more important to them that evolution be considered true than what the objective evidence is. To many Christians, this heavily reinforces the impression that evolution is, by its very nature, a tool and outgrowth of atheist thought. But this kind of reasoning is just sheer, brute illogic. The logical fallacy being committed is of the type “Affirmation of the Consequent.” In general terms, it is saying “All ‘A’s are ‘B,’ therefore, all ‘B’s are ‘A.’ In this case, the manifestation is “All atheists are evolutionists, therefore all evolutionists must be atheists.” To further clarify what makes this a fallacy, consider another example of the same type: “If it’s raining, the streets will be wet. The streets are wet. Therefore, it’s raining.”—not necessarily: the streets might be wet because the street cleaners went over them this morning.
To respond to atheistic claims that evolution somehow disproves God and the Bible with “weaknesses in evolution” is to agree with the underlying assumption that evolution eliminates God. It doesn’t, and any effective response to such atheistic arguments will be based on that fact. For example, let’s say someone tells you, “there’s no need to believe in God; evolution explains life just fine.”
The wrong way to respond: “Well, you know, I find evolution to be a highly questionable idea. Here are some reasons why I say it ain’t necessarily so...” If you respond in this way, you are telling the objector that your belief in God depends, at least in part, on your own personal nonacceptance of certain evolutionary explanations, or on gaps in current scientific knowledge. This means that if (when) scientific knowledge should advance to fill these gaps, your grounds for belief will have disappeared. This is a terribly impoverished kind of faith that the unbeliever will accurately assess as radical intellectual uncuriosity that would simply paste “God” into spaces where your own personal knowledge and understanding has gaps. The unbeliever is also likely to, by extension, incorrectly view faith in itself as having that nature, and view God as being simply one’s own personal “god-of-the-gaps.”
The right way to respond: “Evolution doesn’t contradict the Bible, only certain traditional interpretations of it that aren’t necessary to extract its central message. Genesis is exactly what we should expect from something arising out of a Bronze-Age milieu with no modern scientific knowledge. Further, it’s not a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ I believe in—He’s a God who sustains the Universe, and all the elegant laws that govern it, by his Word, and who also knows me personally and is involved in my life.” Belief in God and adherence to Christianity is thereby presented as dynamically relevant to life, and not a blind clinging to some kind of atavistic prescientific superstition, as atheists typically accuse theism of being.
Using anti-evolution argumentation as apologetics, then, is a terribly misguided precept that serves no useful purpose. Nonbelievers and even those “on the fence” will receive a powerful impression of intellectual uncuriosity and weak-mindedness on the part of theists so arguing, and likely by extension theism in general. Believers not thinking the issue through fully will, in bulk, by encouraged by such apologetics, but on an extremely flimsy basis: it only serves as a crutch for an extremely threadbare kind of faith that must rely on arguments from ignorance in order to keep God in the picture. Such “faith” should not be pandered to with facile presumptions.
Conclusion What does all this matter? Are there important issues at stake contingent on the Christian believing or not believing in evolution? Strictly on principle, absolutely not. The important thing to notice in all this is that it doesn’t at all matter, on doctrinal, practical, and other basic grounds, what one thinks about the history of life on Earth. It’s not even of any scientifically pragmatic consequence: belief in evolution is not going to, indirectly or any other way, help anyone cure any diseases or develop any new technology. It’s purely “academic,” as they say. It is important, however, insofar as many people have conflated belief or disbelief in evolution with matters of supreme importance: to wit, the existence of God and our disposition in relation to Him. The issues need to be sorted out and dealt with according to their own merits so that mistaken lumpings of one thing with another does not cause anyone to throw out the baby with the bathwater (which is always a danger unless one ensures that clear thought is given a hearing).
Many Christians don’t believe in evolution because they don’t understand it; well, no big deal, most people tend not to understand scientific things themselves, and instead take things on authorities they trust. But if educated Christians who use big words are telling the flock that evolution is all a big lie, they’re likely to trust such people. This is why figures from the ID crowd and the like that continue to present well-refuted arguments give every impression of intellectual dishonesty, whatever their own state of zealous confusion is, and thereby represent a positive embarrassment to Christ. The aforementioned H. Allen Orr, at the close of a debate with William Dembski, puts this in such an incredibly dramatic fashion that I’m going to have to let him drive the point home himself:
“Dembski, Behe and associates may in the end prove a thorn in the side of not only biologists but also the devout. By promising devastating objections to evolution but delivering half-baked technobabble that disintegrates upon close inspection, they subject certain religious persons to unnecessary and traumatic cycles of expectation and dashed hope. The point is that all skirmishes involve risk of friendly fire and the faithful will, sooner or later, have to ask who poses the greater actual danger: those who merely suggest that life evolves or those who routinely announce “proofs” of the handiwork of an interventionist Designer—proofs that have, so far, been fantastically flawed, noisily imploding almost immediately after their much publicized debuts.”
Christians need to come to grips with the idea that God has simply not set up the universe in such a way that we can “prove” His existence. It’s easy enough to see why when you consider the ways in which God wants us to know him: not forced by dint of some absolute mathematical certainty, but personally, and by faith so that we can grow into ever-greater knowledge of Him, not simply catalog Him as merely a fact from which one might then go on to expect to be able to rely on that same capacity, to prove or disprove, to simply coldly deduce the rest of truth and reality. God has not created reality in that way or for that purpose.
The Christian anti-evolutionist partisan very likely sees himself as staunchly holding the line for a holy cause. I think that such people will always be with us, although Christians who know better should gently try to inform other Christians if the topic arises, so as to bridge unnecessary divisions. This should take the form of dispelling simple misconceptions about evolution, and presenting the simple logic, as I’ve already done, of the idea God’s slow, unhurried creation in tandem with natural processes, as an alternative to, and demonstrating as unnecessary, the traditionally rigid dependence on “special” creation. The theological and scientific unacceptability of suggesting a “god-of-the-gaps,” in whatever form, is certainly to be introduced where it is applicable in order to address the motives and context of anti-evolution arguments. But it will probably be needful at a certain point with certain people to simply agree to disagree, instead of pressing the issue to an extent that resentment and reactionary contrarieties are nursed. As already mentioned, belief or disbelief in evolution ultimately doesn’t matter in any inherently consequent sense, and certainly it is the defining commonalities within the body of Christ that are to be dwelt on, and nonsinful diversities tolerated; indeed, celebrated. Throughout Scripture we are reminded that our primary responsibility is to our brothers and sisters in Christ. I refer the reader to this excellent essay, “The Necessity of Godly Disputation” instructing and reminding the Christian of Biblically-informed behavior toward Christians with whom we have disagreements over non-crucial matters. One should keep in mind the spirit of Paul’s advice in bearing with believers saddled with personal hang-ups: “Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything else that will cause your brother to fall.” (Rom. 14:20–21)
