I appear to have created a rumpus at Grasping the Nettle (GTN). For those that do not know, GTN is an organisation based in Scotland that sets out to encourage “informed and respectful dialogue on ‘the Science/God issue'”. Its main interest is to explore God’s existence and facilitate events that support that goal. The row was between GTN’s Facebook anonymous administrator, and an atheist friend and myself. My comment was that in my view, several recent posts on GTN’s Facebook page promote the idea of intelligent design (ID), which stands opposed to Darwinian natural selection. I’ll return to ID shortly. But first, who are GTN and what is all the fuss about? And does the fuss matter?
GTN and The God Question
GTN presents itself as a platform for discussing the interface between science and faith. Its website observes that there is a widespread assertion in much of modern society, both at the popular level and in academia, that belief in God is at odds with the objectives and practice of science; that ultimately, science and religious faith are in conflict with one another. GTN further observes that many people today believe that society has outlived God. Are either of these assertions grounded in truth? This is the question GTN sets out to explore.
According to its website, GTN takes a variety of forms. These include supporting churches and ad hoc groups using resources developed by the organisation to explore questions relating to science and faith, as well as public lectures and debates and a range of other types of events. The organisation itself is led by a board that consists of eight church leaders from various backgrounds, and two officials from the Search for Truth Charitable Trust, of which more anon. There is also a council of forty seven advisors, which is again dominated by leaders of churches and parachurch organisations along with some medics and a rather small number of professional scientists. The scientists include an astrophysicist, a biologist and a petroleum geologist. GTN is an explicitly Christian organisation. It strongly believes that science and faith are not at odds. It is not neutral therefore. It has a message to proclaim.
The Search for Truth Trust bills itself as a largely educational organisation concerned “to provide thoughtful leadership in the process of openly thinking through the basis for believing – or not believing – in the existence of an intelligence behind the universe and the life that inhabits at least a tiny part of it”. It does this by funding, through Search for Truth Enterprises Ltd., the production and supply of a series of videos entitled The God Question. Like GTN, Search for Truth Trust is run by Christians. Its chairman is John Spence, former Vice Principal at the University of Strathclyde. John also sits on the Steering Board for GTN. After meeting John recently, the blog I have written is different from the one I had intended to write following my initially negative experience of GTN through its Facebook page. I hope it is more constructive.
The God Question series consists of six videos covering three topics, each in two parts. These are: The Cosmos, Life and Evolution, and The Mind and Consciousness. There is no doubt that the six instalments are very well produced. In fact, they were produced in Scotland by small independent film maker Kharis Productions. It is well regarded and has won several awards. The six episodes each last just around thirty minutes but their scope is substantial. Not only do they attempt to answer the Biggest Question of All, Is there a God? – they draft in some of the world’s great minds as they do so. Many are household names, certainly for anyone with any interest in the subject at all. In no particular order, we meet Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Lord Sacks, Chuck Colson, Steve Jones, Francis Collins, Christopher Hitchins, John Polkinghorne, and many more. There are theists and there are atheists, probably in roughly equal proportions. There is a narrator to hold the films together.
The particular issue on the GTN Facebook page that seems to have irritated them (and me) is a post about artificial symbionts with the potential to treat cancer. It so irritated the administrator that he started another thread to have a fresh rant about my friend and I. This is very poor Facebook etiquette. No matter.
Endosymbionts are bacteria that live inside the cells of another organisms, usually, although not always, in a mutually beneficial way. The suggestion in the post is that endosymbiosis (which is thought to have been a key step in the development of complex cells two billion years ago) reveals how wonderfully creative nature is. The author asks what are the chances that it is “just all luck”? The implication is that endosymbiosis could not have emerged from natural selection and so must be the product of directed design, just as artificial symbionts created in the laboratory are. Is this a reasonable inference? As I try to answer that question, I do so with some reference to GTN and TGQ but extend it beyond the film to include some of my own reflection on so-called design (also known as teleological) arguments for the existence of God.
Life and Evolution
From the very start, there was little doubt that TGQ film on evolution was going to be controversial. This is unfortunate at so many levels, not least in that in academia there is no controversy as to the effectiveness of natural selection as the process that produced from the very first single celled organisms the amazing diversity and complexity of life. Virtually the only people that challenge the scientific consensus are religious people that often deny not only the truthfulness of Darwinian evolution, but much else in tested science besides. Alongside a denial of Darwinism we also get climate change denial and opposition to vaccines, particularly for covid. For example, well known Christian blogger and former moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, David Robertson rejects Darwinism in favour of intelligent design. When I knew him well he also enthusiastically embraced Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (pub. 2001). These are the very people that keep the narrative of conflict between science, which they often dismiss as ‘worldly’, and religion very much alive.
The film on life and evolution begins with a very fair description of Darwinism. In the titles we get a famous quote from Darwin: “There is grandeur in this view [Darwin’s view] of life”. By way of recap, let’s define what we mean by evolution by natural selection. We start with the fact that an organism produces more offspring than can survive. Those most likely to survive are those most fitted or adapted to their environment. There is thus a struggle for existence, or to use Herbert Spencer’s expression, survival of the fittest. Darwin gained this insight from Thomas Malthus and his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. The idea is hardly controversial. Darwin’s own insight was that the characteristics that favour survival can be passed on to successive generations. Although Darwin did not know how this could occur – it was not until Gregor Mendel’s discovery of genes and the subsequent neo-Darwinian synthesis that revealed how potential adaptations can be passed on – theory made sense of disparate observations in the world of living organisms, past and present. It turns out that the most impressive thing about Darwinian evolution – and this is acknowledged in the film – is that it is so well supported by modern genetics. The power of Darwin’s theory is that it is able to explain the huge variety of life on our planet by entirely natural means without the need for supernatural intervention. Most strikingly, Darwin’s theory is beautifully simple. Crucially, it explains how the appearance of design can be produced without the need for a designer. Hold that thought.
I do not want at this point to describe the masses of science that support Darwin’s theory. I am not a specialist (I am an earth scientist not a life scientist) and there are ample readily available resources elsewhere. Jerry A Coyne’s Why Evolution is True (pub. 2009), for instance, is excellent. Besides, there is, as I said, no serious scientific debate as to the overall validity of the theory of evolution. Neo-Darwinism is settled science. It is settled in the sense that Newton’s Theory of Gravitation and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity are settled science. That is not to say that there are not debates within the life science community concerning technical details of the theory that are likely to be lost on the non-specialist. Take endosymbiosis for example. A geneticist friend tells me there are literally thousands of research papers on the evolutionary origin of endosymbiosis and the precise details of how endosymbiosis may have provided the mechanism that gave rise to eukaryotes. This is exactly what one might expect from a cogent scientific theory such as that of evolution by natural selection. Not only do valid theories provide an explanatory framework for known observations, they also provide an basis for future research. Karl Popper described the doctrine of natural selection as “a most successful metaphysical research programme”. For Popper, Darwinism is more than a hypothesis that may be testable (fasifiable) in isolation. Rather it provides a unifying approach to understanding the natural world that makes sense of the whole. The theory of plate tectonics does the same thing for geology. Valid scientific theories like natural selection that suggest areas of further research that give deeper insight are said to possess the property of fecundity. The neo-Darwinian synthesis possesses the property of fecundity in spade loads.
A Frosty Reception?
When Darwin’s The Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) was published in 1859, opposition from Christians was inevitable. There are several reasons for this, not least that Darwin’s ideas seemed to undermine the Bible’s teaching that humans are unique in all creation and set apart from all other living organisms. There could be no possibility that Adam and Eve were descended from ‘lesser’ organisms given that the Book of Genesis insists that God moulded Adam from the dust of the earth and formed Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. The Church of England’s opposition was made most evident in the infamous debate held in Oxford in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley speaking for Darwin and Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce speaking against. The debate is said to have provided some choice quotes, although no written account was ever produced. Most well-known is Wilberforce’s reported taunt of Huxley when he asks whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey. Huxley is supposed to have replied: “If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape”. A much more serious question that arises from our descent from earlier primates – one that Darwin himself asked in a letter to his friend William Graham in 1881 – is this: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy….Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” This is an important question that touches on the question of what, if anything, can be reliably known about ourselves and the universe we inhabit. It occupies the minds of philosophers even today. I may return to it on another occasion.
Before getting into how On the Origin of Species challenged contemporary religious thinking, it is important to note that while Darwin’s theory had become the accepted orthodoxy of the scientific establishment by the 1880s – it is remarkable that so revolutionary a theory was accepted so quickly – it had provoked as much scientific as religious debate, at least initially. That the hostile scientific debate subsided so easily is testament to the power of Darwin’s theory and the rigour of his research. It is also important to note that the response of the religious establishment was not universally one of opposition either. So while we find English geologist and Anglican priest Adam Sedgewick (1785 – 1873), who had been a tremendous influence on Darwin, rejecting the idea of evolution by natural selection, influential American Calvinist theologian Benjamin B Warfield (1851 – 1921) accepted it. Warfield was principal at the impeccably orthodox Princeton Theological Seminary from 1886 to 1902. He believed in Biblical infallibility. Similarly, the highly influential botanist and devout Christian Asa Gray (1810 – 1888), whose work provided Darwin with some of the basis for his ideas, enthusiastically embraced the new theory. My point here is that despite the shenanigans in Oxford in 1860 and the caricatures it produced, the reality is far more nuanced. A very full account is provided in David N Livingstone’s excellent Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (pub. 1987).
Darwinism and the text of Genesis
The most obvious difficulty with Darwin’s theory then is that it appears to undermine the Biblical narrative of creation in the Book of Genesis, assumed by many to teach that the earth is young (only a few thousand years) and that living things were formed by divine fiat. Crucially, God fashions Adam from the dust of the earth and makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. There is no suggestion here that all living things including humans are descended from a common ancestor that had lived in the mists of geological time. In responding to this, we can note that by Darwin’s day, many people had already accepted not only that the earth is almost immeasurably old, but also the account of the history of the earth that had been elucidated by geologists like Adam Sedgewick. In Sedgewick we have a conservative Christian and pioneering geologist that opposed Darwin’s theory. He opposed literalism in the text of Genesis 1 but also rejected evolution by natural selection. The point is that well before Darwin, the literalism of modern day young earth creationists had been rejected not only by the scientific establishment and also by many in the church. I discussed this in a blog on Scottish geologist and churchman Hugh Miller (1802 – 1856) (https://alexstaton.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/hugh-miller-and-me-geology-and-scripture-reconciled/). At the same time, theological studies in Old Testament itself were undermining literal interpretations. By itself, then, the creation narrative in Genesis need not be seen in opposition to evolution if we concede that the text need not be taken literally.
As an aside I want to reiterate a point I have made before. The contemporary obsession with Biblical literalism that underlies much of the supposed conflict between science and faith is a relatively modern phenomenon. When Darwin published his Origin, the crass and unimaginative Biblical literalism that marks young earth creationism had been rejected even by those that opposed Darwin. In fact, it did not really appear in mainstream American evangelicalism until around the 1920s. It arrived there from Seventh Day Adventism and the writings of George McCready Price (1870 – 1963) who, without so much as an O Grade in geology dissed the work of nineteenth century geologists like Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875) and Adam Sedgewick wholescale in favour of a resurrected version of the flood geology long validated research had led the scientific community to discard. The infamous The Genesis Flood by Henry M Morris and John C Whitcomb that according to Ken Ham “was the book the Lord used to really launch the modern creationist movement around the world” was in 1961. Like George McCready Price, Morris and Whitcomb merely rehash old ideas about geology that had been debunked more than a century before. Ham is probably correct in his assertion that The Genesis Flood help launch the modern creationist movement outside America, including in the UK where YEC does not come to prominence in evangelical churches until as recently as the 1980s. To that end, TGQ introduces us to young earth creationist Andy McIntosh.
Andy McIntosh is a former professor of thermodynamics at the University of Leeds and a well known young earth creationist. His academic qualifications are impressive. As a YEC, he insists in the film that he does not “find that the evolutionist approach to science really fits naturally with theism…[He] thinks evolution fits more naturally with the atheist viewpoint”. It ought to be obvious what McIntosh is doing here. He starts with what he believes theism to require and pays no attention whatsoever to the science. He is not interested in the science. He believes that the earth is 6,000 years old and that Adam was made from the dust of the ground and Eve was made from Adam, as Genesis apparently teaches. A worse example, who we do not meet in the film, is someone like Kurt Wise. Wise is a young earth creationist that trained as a geologist and palaeontologist at the Universities of Harvard and Chicago. He could not be more explicit. In an interview with Richard Dawkins he stated: “Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young earth creationist because that is my understanding of scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand” (quoted in Richard Dawkins The God Delusion). Of course Dawkins can hardly hold back his contempt. Or is it sheer disappointment? And who can blame him. A highly intelligent and gifted scientist chooses to simply throw away all that skill and ability in pursuit of a lie. Both McIntosh and Wise make very clear that notwithstanding their claim that young earth creationism is scientific, in the end it comes down to a particularly inflexible, and, in my view, unjustifiable interpretation of scripture. “Here I stand!”
As a professional geologist, I find the approach of YECs beyond ridicule and cannot really understand why a film that is supposed to be serious about arguing that belief in God might be consistent with science includes a YEC. I am going to say it: Creationists have no serious role to play in the discussion. For John Spence, their saving grace is that many Christians interested in science and faith are in fact creationists. While I see his point, to my mind they do a great deal of damage; not only in their rejection of science but in their frequent toxicity. In making the film, John hoped that the presence of Andy McIntosh alongside the others would alert those watching to the fact that there is another far more cogent side to the story. I’m still a little uneasy in that the film sends out a confused message. By including a YEC like Andy McIntosh, the film might be taken to validate his position and so reinforce the impression that non-Christians often hold that science and faith are indeed opposed. One can imagine a sceptic saying to himself rather smugly, “I wondered how long it would be before they wheeled out the creationists”. Perhaps the issue here is one of intended audience. I do not accept that these individuals can be thought of as providing useful insight. You would not include geo-centrists or flat earthers (both are a thing even today on the margins of mainly American fundamentalist Christianity) in a discussion about the planets of the solar system. Why would you include a creationist that believes the earth is 6,000 years old in a discussion about evolution? As I said, there is no controversy. Darwinian natural selection is as fully established in the corpus of modern science as relativity and quantum mechanics.
It may be an interesting exercise to investigate the rise of creationism in UK evangelical churches. What was the social background to a resurgence of regressive and anti-science thinking? Like the 1960s, the 1980s and 1990s marked significant change. Once trusted authorities, including scientists, were being challenged and post-modernism was in the ascendency. The thing about post-modernism is that it began with the idea that the meaning of any text cannot be properly accessed. Authorial intent is elusive. Perhaps it is safer to insist that the “plain meaning of the text of Genesis” – the plain meaning to the individual that is, is the correct one and that there is no place for nuance or even the humility that coming face to face with a three thousand year old text ought to inspire.
What is man?
For many religious people, a more pressing question arising from Darwinian evolution is that of the place of human beings in the natural world. We have always considered ourselves rather special. In Shakespeare’s memorable words:
“What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.” (Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2)
The Psalmist asks the same thing. “What is mankind that you remember them, or human beings that you take care of them? For you have made them a little lower than heavenly beings and have crowned them with glory and honour” (Psalm 8:4,5). I discussed what I believe it is to be human in a blog devoted to that issue. I argued that in Biblical terms, our human uniqueness consists in our relationship to God and the role God has given us as coregent over the created world; which world we are to rule humbly and justly, as Psalm 8 suggests:
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
Our uniqueness within creation is encapsulated in the concept of imago dei, the image of God. While there may be many elements to this – it is not defined in scripture – I believe it certainly includes the idea of dominion although that dominion ought to be exercised with the mind of Christ, who is the Image of God par excellence. I discuss the image of God further in my piece on what it is to be human (https://alexstaton.wordpress.com/2021/09/11/where-are-we-from-how-did-we-get-here/)
On the face of it, Darwin’s theory could be taken to demolish what some believe to be elitist hubris. Like every other living thing on earth comprising all animals, plants, fungi, protists and bacteria, humans are descended from single celled organisms that, in Darwin’s phrase, inhabited ‘some warm little pond’ vast aeons ago. We are not unique. All humans are not descended from a man God fashioned directly from the dust of the earth and into which he breathed life, as the Bible claims. Actually, Darwin hints that the emergence of life itself may be spontaneous, thereby rejecting the vitalism that was current at the time. There is no need for a divine zap to get life and evolution going.
At first, Darwin was a little reluctant to spell out the implications of his theory for human identity. In a pregnant phrase at the end of The Origin he comments only that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”. It was not until 1871 that Darwin published his two The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Darwin need not have worried about its reception because by that stage, people were no longer shocked by his ideas. Indeed in an 1871 review of The Descent of Man in The Annual Register, we find these words: “Mr. Darwin’s theory, if completely established, would by no means prove that we have not an intuitive perception of certain moral truths, but would explain in what way those intuitions had been generated.” I believe this is exactly right and that we can trace the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens without losing sight of those characteristics that distinguish us from other species. The key thing here is what in The Open Mind and other essays (pub. 1988), Donald N Mackay called “nothing buttery”. Few will seriously doubt that like every other living thing, humans are descended from single celled organisms that lived nearly four billion years ago. But to claim that humans are therefore “nothing but” evolved pond slime is wrong. It is equally wrong to claim that any other animal is “nothing but” evolved pond slime. While we recognise our continuity with the rest of creation, animate and inanimate, we also recognise that humans possess certain traits – traits that emerge from brains that are much larger than our closest animal relatives – that make us unique. As far as we know, humans are alone in their desire to understand our place in the universe and how we got here. Only humans concern themselves with questions of ultimate meaning.
It should perhaps be acknowledged that our sense of importance has been dealt several blows over the last few hundred years. Prior to the sixteenth century we believed, without any attempt to find empirical support, that the earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun and all other heavenly bodies revolve around it. Copernicus (1463 – 1543) revealed otherwise. The eighteenth century brought us modern field-based geology and the rejection of supposedly Bible-based flood geology. In particular, it revealed how old the earth actually is. It was not possible to quantify the age of the earth at the time – some thought it may even have been eternal having, in Charles Hutton’s (1737 – 1823) words, “no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end” – but all agreed that Archbishop Ussher’s 6,000 year chronology was way off and that the earth is unimaginably old.
The nineteenth century showed us that we are not quite so special in terms of our biological origin as had been supposed. Rather, we come at the end of an almost immeasurably long process of evolution by natural selection. Some might say we are here only by luck. Having explored the unimaginably large and the unimaginably ancient, by the twentieth century, scientists were exploring the strange world of the very small where, according to quantum mechanics, contingency breaks down. Things appear from nowhere. Could this include the universe itself? And what of life elsewhere in the universe? When I was a child, the possibility of worlds beyond the solar system was mere conjecture. Post-Hubble we know there of thousands of such worlds, some of which may well possess liquid water and so the potential for extra-terrestrial life. Indeed astrobiologists are giving serious consideration to the possibility that there may be, or once have been, extra-terrestrial life in the solar system itself. Not intelligent life admittedly, although it has been argued with some cogency that given the right starting conditions such as were present on the earth four billion years ago, the emergence not only of life but intelligent life is all but inevitable. Intelligent or not, if there is inevitability in the emergence of complex life under suitable starting conditions, whence design? And what of the multi-verse? Just 20 years ago this was science fiction on the very margins of academic cosmology. Nowadays, it is orthodox wisdom and we find Christian physicists such as John Barrow (FRS) (see his The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos, pub. 2011, in which he describes and evaluates various models of the multiverse) and John Polkinghorne (FRS) ready to accept it. Where does this leave room for God? After all, it there are an infinity of universes, or at the very least an unimaginably large number of universes, anything, or almost anything, is possible, God or no God.
I stumbled upon a watch
The idea of design in nature as an argument for God’s existence is not new. The most famous version is that described by William Paley (1743 – 1805) in his Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of Deity, first published in 1802. His book begins with these words: “If I stumbled on a stone and asked how it came to be there, it would be difficult to show that the answer, it has lain there forever is absurd. Yet this is not true if the stone were to be a watch.” His point, of course, is that watches do not appear from nowhere and that their existence implies intentionality and design. Someone may have dropped the watch by accident but at some point the watch had been designed and made by someone. He writes, “There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement, without any thing capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to use, imply the preference of intelligence and mind.”
Paley’s book is wonderfully descriptive. He is enthralled by the amazing complexity and intricacy of the natural world. Darwin was equally enthralled by the amazing complexity of the natural world during his HMS Beagle voyage only thirty years later. In an historically important example, Paley compares the eye with a telescope. Both eye and the telescope fulfil similar objectives and share some characteristics, he writes. That the one is clearly designed surely suggests that the other is also designed. In truth, the eye is infinitely more wonderful than any human designed telescope. In his discussion, Paley notices differences between the eyes of terrestrial animals and those of fish that only confirm the brilliance of the designer in that the eyes of fish are so evidently better suited to their aquatic life the eyes of land animals would be. He writes: “What plainer manifestation of design can there be that this difference?” It should be noted that Darwin himself had a very high regard for Paley’s work and that he had been convinced by it.
Atheist Darwinian Richard Dawkins also has a high regard for William Paley. He even borrows Paley’s watchmaker analogy. At the very beginning of his The Blind Watchmaker (pub 1986), Dawkins writes: “Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of the day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong.… All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind force of physics … Natural selection, the blind unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has not purpose in mind. … If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.” For Dawkins, as for Darwin, the living world only appears to be designed.
I think the first thing to note by way of response is that the Bible is not interested in God as designer, or in any of the various philosophical arguments that are held to lend intellectual credibility to faith in God. The Bible takes God’s existence for granted when it begins with the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Having asserted God’s existence, it invites the reader to experience God in an existential encounter. The Bible is not a book about God per se. It is not even a book about human history. Rather, it is a book that tells us the story of how God interacts with two groups of people: firstly, ancient Israel and then the Christian church. I think we go awry if we fail to see that even the opening chapters of Genesis prior to the Abraham narrative that begins at Chapter 12 are themselves mainly about Israel as the people of God in Old Testament times. They are not intended to provide a detailed factual account of how the universe and humanity came into existence.
Secondly, I think we need to recognise that Richard Dawkins is correct in his assertion that Darwin’s theory makes God the designer essentially redundant, certainly in the way Paley and some contemporary advocates for design envisage. Dawkins helps us to see why by way of analogy. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins introduces us to computer generated “biomorphs”. These virtual creatures start life as a simple line on the screen that can produce branched “offspring” as the computer program Dawkins developed is run. The clever thing is that the user can constrain how the branching takes place with reference to nine properties that can be varied within prescribed limits. The variable properties relate to things such as the height, width and depth of branching. As the program is run, it produces from the initial (parent) biomorph eight new biomorphs (children) that differ from the parent and each other very slightly. The manner in which and the extent to which they differ is determined by the properties chosen by the user. The user can then select one of the eight children and run the program again, perhaps altering slightly one or more of the nine variables to produce a fatter or taller biomorph. The choice of biomorph depends on the user but in order for the analogy to work, they must have an end in mind. It might be to favour only biomorphs that look like a beetle, say, or a pair of antlers. Having selected that end, the user should stick with it and always select the biomorph that looks most like a beetle or the antlers, no matter how marginally so. The idea behind the program is that the nine variable properties can be thought of as being similar to the genes that influence biological characteristics and that can mutate to produce new outcomes. The strength of the analogy is that it illustrates how powerful a simple recursive algorithm can be. By repeatedly selecting the biomorph that looks most like a beetle, one can go from a single unbranched stick to something that really does look like a beetle. The weakness in the analogy is that there is no mind in natural selection. There is no end game beyond that of survival and there is no teleology. This latter is an important point when we think about how God might be involved in natural selection. If we claim it has a God given end point, we undermine the power of the selection algorithm to select exclusively for the good of each organic being. At this point, either we accept evolution as a wholly naturalistic process, or we do not accept it at all. Any process that requires God’s direct involvement at any point, such as intelligent design, stands opposed to Darwin’s theory.
Darwinism as atheism
For some Christians, the problem with natural selection is its very naturalism – the fact that it is an entirely natural process. Once it gets started, there is no reason why it should not run indefinitely. All it needs is something to produce variation within a population – genetic mutation – and environmental pressure to provide the force that drives evolution. It requires no tinkering from outside. According to Darwin, natural selection is sufficient in itself to produce the living world in its enormous complexity; everything from the simplest bacteria to Homo sapiens. When American presbyterian theologian and contemporary of Darwin, Charles Hodge, who served as principal at Princeton between 1851 and 1878, asks the question “what is Darwinism?” he concludes categorically that “it is atheism”. He adds, “This does not mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic; that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism” (CH Hodge What is Darwinism, pub. 1874). That’s the point: it excludes design from nature. As Dawkins and others argue in TGQ film, it produces the appearance of design without a designer. It produces the appearance of design merely by the repetitive application of a simple algorithm. For Hodge and others, Darwin’s theory effectively kills off once for all the argument that the living world points to the existence of God. I noted above that Hodge’s successor at Princeton, BB Warfield, did not consider Darwinism in the least bit problematic for the Christian believer. He considered Darwinism neutral on the existence of God. The key thing is whether the Bible itself requires one to believe in design. Warfield thought not. In fact it has been argued that Warfield was a Darwinian.
In an interesting side note, it is worth pointing out that popular though design arguments had been, they were not universally accepted by Christian theologians even before Darwin’s time. One of the most famous sceptics was Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890). He appears to have seen the writing on the wall. Newman rejected Paley’s design argument well before Darwin. In his Idea of a University (pub. 1854), Newman is scathing: “I do not hesitate to say that, taking men as they are, this so-called science tends, if it occupies the mind, to dispose it against Christianity.” He saw Paley as a liability. Why? Principally because the design argument had already had a severe kicking 75 years earlier in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (pub. 1779). Hume’s principal point is that you cannot argue from analogy unless the causes and effects are similar. We have no access to the design of another universe. In inferring the existence of a human designer for a watch found upon a heath, we rely on experience. But when we infer the existence of God, an unseen cause, from the apparent design in nature we have no experience to fall back on. Sure Hume did not have an alternative explanation, but he recognised that the argument as presented does not rule out other causes. Darwin identified that cause. For Newman, even before Darwin, Paley’s argument was naïve. I think this is fair comment in that while one would not want to downplay the importance of Paley, he was more populist than original thinker. Of course people hold on to very deep seated beliefs for naïve reasons, sometimes when the belief itself might be supported in other ways. One could add that in the age of the multiverse, Hume’s argument gains extra power.
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is a form of creationism based on the idea that there exist in nature certain structures and processes could not have been produced by the supposed randomness of evolution by natural selection. Supposed examples include the bacterial flagellum, the haemoglobin molecule and blood clotting, and, of course, the human eye. It is claimed that, in the language of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (pub. 1996), such structures are irreducibly complex and that their existence points to a designer. In this was, the study of the natural world is supposed to point to the existence of God. By irreducible complexity, Behe means to say that certain biological systems cannot have evolved by successive small modifications of pre-existing functional systems through natural selection, because no less complex system would would function. This is simply not true. Take the human eye, for example. The human eye is incredibly complex but simpler eyes are abundant in nature. The simplest eyes comprise single photoreceptor cells. They are found in the simplest organisms and give a basic sense of the direction of a light source. They appear to have evolved independently up to 65 times. A more complex version is capable to discriminating the direction of light to within a few degrees. This form of eye is found in 98% of all living species. I don’t want to go into the evolution of the eye in detail except to reemphasise that every type of eye from the very simple to the very complex is found in the fossil record and in contemporary organisms. We find a whole range of types of eye as early as the Cambrian (541 – 485 million years ago). There is a good discussion of the evolution of the eye in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. By itself, that is enough to put the lie to Behe’s claim.
In the film, we meet two well-known ID theorists: William Dembski and Stephen Meyer. Neither Dembski nor Meyer have any experience in the life sciences. Meyer has a PhD in history while Dembski has a background in mathematics. Between them, they probably represent ID’s principal advocates. Neither of them have any published peer-reviewed research on the subject. Live their country cousins in the world of YEC, they claim that the scientific establishment is against them in some kind of conspiracy/
ID proponents try to give their position the air of scientific respectability by presenting the results of probability calculations which they claim support their position. For example, we find fellow ID advocate Doug Axe, who is a biologist at least, telling us that there is only one chance in 10 followed by sixty series zeroes of biological success from random trials. It is very like Fred Hoyle’s (1915 – 2001) claim that “probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.” One of the problems with these kinds of calculations is that life, complex life at that, exists. You simply do not know what the probability of the alternative scenario (non-life) is until we have a reasonable sample size to compare it with. In part, this is Hume’s objection to the design argument. It is possible that where suitable planets exist, life is all but inevitable.
The other problem here is that natural selection does not start with nothing. Rather, it works with pre-existing functional structures as described above. When I was talking about biomorphs, I noted that there is a selection process. In nature, nature itself does the selecting, if one may speak like that without being accused of anthropomorphism. That selection drastically shortens the odds of a beneficial adaptation. It is wrong to make the kind of comparison that Doug Axe makes.
Another way of looking at this is to turn intelligent design on its head and to focus instead on what might be called unintelligent design. This is a real problem for intelligent design because the design of organisms is often inefficient. This seems inconsistent with the suggestion that God was directly responsible for the great variety of life on earth. There are loads of examples. A good one is provided by the recurrent laryngeal nerve controls the pharynx, which directs food and air to the oesophagus and the larynx respectively. One might expect it to take the most direct and shortest route possible. In fish, it does so. It travels from the brain, past the heart and to the gills. In humans, who are evolved from fish, it also travels down to the heart and round before returning to the larynx, a long and indirect route. It does the same thing in all animals. In a giraffe, the laryngeal nerve approaches 5m in length. This just seems clumsy. Surely this phenomenon is far more easily explained by the trial and error of natural selection than by direct divine intervention. A good and often entertaining source of further examples is provided by Mark Perakh’s book Unintelligent Design (pub. 2004).
There are a couple of further comments to make concerning ID before winding this up. The first thing to note about ID is that it is opposed to Darwinian evolution. I mention this because ID proponents are sometimes deliberately vague. They want to retain the air of scientific respectability by not being seen to deny Darwinism absolutely. They insinuate that for the most part they accept Darwinism but believe that at certain points natural selection is not enough and that life needs direct divine intervention. They claim that this view is supported by science. They are being dishonest. They may claim that natural selection is capable of small changes within species – even YECs concede this – but not the major changes between phyla, say. In TGQ, John Lennox is, for once, explicit on this. He flatly denies that natural selection is capable of these larger transitions. This is really quite arbitrary. Besides, we now have abundant evidence from so-called ‘transitional forms’ (a bit of a misnomer), as well as a great deal of other evidence, to support the view that natural selection is indeed powerful enough to account for the whole history of life.
The second thing to note is that it is rightly referred to as pseudoscience. It is pseudoscience firstly because it is a dead end that cannot give rise to further research. I wrote above about fecundity is science; that is the idea that good theories suggest avenues for further investigation. ID does not do that because its working hypothesis is “god did it”. In fact it actively discourages further investigation. In the end, all it has is an appeal to incredulity. Dembski or Meyer, not even scientists still less biologists working in the field, conclude that some biological process or other is amazing and that they, personally, can think of no way by which the particular process could have evolved. It is shockingly hubristic.
Christian Darwinians
What about scientists that are Christians that also accept evolution, as most do? Examples in the film include physicist John Polkinghorne (FRS) and biologist Dennis Alexander, who describes himself as an “enthusiastic Darwinian”. Both men maintain that God worked through evolution as the process by which he created all life including human life. I noted above that BB Warfield Neither claim that evolution requires the direction of God although Polkinghorne speculated that God may have set limits to its freedom. In any event, Polkinghorne believes that God uses evolution to preserve the freedom of nature to be itself and, in a provocative statement, to create itself. In practice, of course, evolution is constrained in that it must work with the limited genetic variation available and within the constraints of what constitutes a feasible organism. It is perhaps remarkable that the various types of organism that now exist, and that appear to have almost always existed, conform to certain generic patterns. All plants are similar, all fish are similar, all insects and all mammals are similar, and so on. We do not find mammals with five limbs, for example. This is an important observation because it puts the lie to the common creationist contention that evolution by natural selection is random: “mere luck”.
Hopefully I have explained above why this is not the case. Natural selection is both random and directed. It is random in the sense that it depends on random mutations to provide genetic variability. It is also random in the sense that natural selection is driven by environmental pressures that are themselves randomly directed. They may arise from environmental pressures driven by geological process or by catastrophe, such as happened to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Natural selection is directed in the sense that environmental pressures select those individuals better adapted to whatever ecological niche happens to be available. Of course you and I are here exactly because our ancestors were ‘successful’. They survived. They survived without the need for divine intervention. No intervention, no direction, no teleology.
The final straw
It seems that as far as GTN’s Facebook page is concerned, the final straw came when I commented on a post that showed a Remembrance Sunday Parade at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. The photograph was accompanied by some chat about human emotion and the suggestion human emotion somehow points to the existence of God. Leaving aside the dubious logic, what irritated me was that something so serious had been hijacked to score points against atheists. I suggest you read the post. My own suggestion in response was that rather that the rather facile point the author had tried to make, which was in bad taste in any case, a more serious discussion might be to consider how the deaths of nearly one hundred million people over the course of two world wars, and countless others in wars throughout the twentieth century, fit in with an affirmation of faith in a benevolent transcendent-imminent God. If there is one thing above all others that people find all but impossible to reconcile with faith in God, it is the problem of evil.
Of course, evolution itself also touches on this. Darwin knew a great deal of human suffering in his own life, not least in the death of his beloved daughter Annie at the age of twelve, which left him devastated for the remainder of his life. But he also had a keen sense of the reality of suffering in the natural world. In one of his most famous quotes, he writes: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars”. Other equally grotesque examples abound. We have been caught up in the middle of one since January 2020. To date, there have been over 260 million cases of Covid and over five million deaths, each one the loss of a parent, a sibling, or a friend. Just this week, we have heard about another more contagious strain that is causing the World Health Organisation and others some concern. Viruses mutate while natural selection ensures that the most successful variants propagate. We are now on the omicron variant. Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. The last variant that caused concern was delta, the 4th letter in the Greek alphabet. It is not that there were not other variants between the 4th and 15th – just that they were of relatively little concern. They were much less successful in terms of their transmissibilty. The good thing for us is that in general, if is is to spread, it does not suit a virus to kill its host. So viruses become more transmissible, they tend to become less deadly. This is natural selection in operation before our very eyes.
People sometimes find it easy to marvel at the beauty of the natural world, perhaps on a television wildlife programme, while forgetting that a great deal of it is ugly. I mentioned parasitic wasps and deadly viruses. Of course one might ask on what basis is one making that value judgement. In truth such judgements are meaningless within the context of natural selection. And yet one wonders if there might not be a more efficient way. Why, if God’s ultimate purpose was to create man in his own image as his viceregent to rule over the earth, why did he choose a process that not only took billions of years of evolution – countless species over which man did not have dominion – but is also so extravagantly wasteful? To put this into perspective, we can note that is thought that something like 95% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. Some went extinct as a result of catastrophe while others just failed to keep up with changes in their environment (a result of the so-called Red Queen hypothesis). All this wastage, we are led to believe, was to prepare the world for Homo sapiens. It raises extremely difficult questions. When John Polkinghorne touches on it in TGQ, he suggests that it somehow prepares the ground for the coming of Jesus into a world whose very existence is permanently marred by death. He seems to suggest a congruence between the world that produced the first Adam through a process of death and the death of the last Adam, Jesus on the cross to redeem that world into an existence marked by life. At least I think this is what he is saying. Either way, we are very much in the realm of speculation.
What then?
Wrapping this up, I think that not only is the intelligent design argument seriously flawed, arguments from design in general are flawed. I do not agree with Hodge in his conclusion that Darwinism is atheism but neither can I quite get to seeing mind behind Darwinism. That does not mean that design is absent, just that it not readily discerned.
How as a Christian do I reconcile the reality of evolution by natural selection with my faith that God has a purpose in all that happens? I am reminded of words in the Book of Proverbs: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Prov. 16:33). The Bible recognises that randomness is a real part of life. Toss a fair coin and there is no way of knowing whether it will come up heads or tails. Turn to the world of quantum mechanics and we have no way of predicting the outcome of a quantum interaction. And yet God knows. This ought not to trouble us because while God knows the outcome of a casting of the lots, he does not tell us. Because he does not tell us, we have no way of predicting the outcome of natural selection, even if it may be reasonable to conclude that where natural selection is operating a tendency towards increasingly complex and even intelligent life may be inevitable. Is there another planet or even another universe where a highly evolved lizard-like or fish-like organism occupies the place Homo sapiens occupies here?
The fact is that we know that natural selection is capable of producing complex life without the direct intervention of God. When Pierre-Simon Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his Traite de mechanique celeste in which he describes his theory on the origin of the solar system, Napoleon is supposed to have asked why his work contains no mention of the creator. Laplace is said to have relied: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis”. Evolution has no need of that hypothesis either. It has no more need of the God hypothesis that any other law of nature. We do not invoke the activity of God when we work out the trajectory of a ball after it has been thrown and neither to we imagine that God himself is carrying it along its trajectory as in an invisible hand. We know very well how Newtonian physics works and we know very well how natural selection works. It does not need the direct intervention of God for it to work.
For myself, I cannot say that I particularly see design in nature. What I see most often is the result of happy accident; “luck”, if you well. I see nature in all its viciousness; nature red in tooth and claw. I watch pigeons pecking at a discarded McDonald’s meal or a pizza in the town, for example. I enjoy the wildlife programmes where we find lions chasing a gazelle. The fastest ones escape. The slower ones get eaten, perhaps without passing on the genes that may have contributed to their relative slowness compared to the rest of the population. Very often, when I am thinking of birds, I am thinking of dinosaur. Having learned a bit of vertebrate palaeontology and dinosaur anatomy I see the resemblance. It makes perfect sense to me that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs over tens of millions of years. In some ways, I approach nature as an atheist – or a deist, at least. But then that is what scientists do all the time. We are interested in natural rather than supernatural explanations. The approach is known a methodological naturalism. For the reasons I’ve outlined, anything else is simply not science; it is pseudoscience.
What then? Like Newman I do not believe in God because I believe in design. It’s a rotten argument. Rather I believe in design because I believe in God. I simply cannot see design in evolution without the eye of faith. Evolution does not suggest design. The natural world is rotten. It is vicious and horrible. Yet having embraced faith in Jesus I come to this conclusion: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible”. It’s the best I can do. Thankfully I’m in good company.
Afterword
This struck me after I had posted my blog. If GTN wants to be taken seriously, the best thing it can do is to distance itself from creationists of every kind, whether of the YEC variety or the ID variety, and show it is serious about real science. To my mind, it does not do just to note that it includes serious scientists on its board of advisors. Perhaps if it simply took Darwinian evolution for what it is as far and away the best explanation for the origin of species as read, and worked from there (like everyone else), it would have more credibility. As it is, the organisation is overseeing posts on its Facebook page that support ID (or more charitably that reveal that their Facebook administrator does not understand the issues) while anyone that challenges it gets an instant ban. It needs to sort this out now. It is beyond embarrassing.
Unconformable Views 
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