Origins: A Reformed Look at Creation, Design, & Evolution [Paperback]

 

 

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This is a bold and necessary foray into the complex and contentious subject of science and faith, tailored to a discussion group format. The authors move in a systematic fashion, explaining how since God is the author of both Scripture and nature, what seem to be tensions between the two are only apparent. They gradually set the stage so that a discussion group consisting of participants of mixed persuasions can engage the final topic of human origins without generating more heat than light.

The conclusion they seem to come to is that human beings probably have come about as the theory of evolution says they did (ie. by strictly material processes). There are a number of Christians, myself among them, who disagree with this conclusion for reasons not discussed in the book. That we disagree is fine, but it is unfortunate that the broader reason of why we disagree is left unaddressed.

I believe the authors underestimate the role that the worldview of naturalism plays in the background assumptions of evolutionary science, and are unaware that its rules have been changed to suit this anti-Christian worldview. Naturalism is the belief that nature is a closed system of natural causes and effects, and that if there is a God we know from the outset that he was not involved in the history of nature in any way that is empirically (scientifically) detectable. The authors seem to believe that naturalistic influences on science are external to the essence of modern science itself, and thus that the illegitimate pronouncements of "evolutionism" are easily distinguished from the honest, rigorous conclusions of science.

We agree that God's revelation in nature is truthful. Where we part company is in determining the rules for the discipline (science) that investigates this revelation. This is a hotly disputed point among Christian academics which should have been at least mentioned but is not. The key issue in the debate is whether science requires the practice of methodological naturalism (a restriction of explanatory categories to material realities and a rejection of agent causation) in order to count as science. The authors seem to assume the affirmative side when they really ought to argue for it.

What it comes down to is this: is science to be the search for truth, or merely the search for the best naturalistic explanation? That's the issue. To say it another way, we know that both natural and agent causation occur in our everyday experience, and we have reliable criteria for distinguishing between them. On what basis do we assume, then, that only natural causes played a part in the history of biology?

It will not do to appeal to the limitations of science, as the authors do, as if to imply that even if the Creator has left tangible fingerprints on his creation, there are other knowledge disciplines other than science that have the natural world as their focus that one would more appropriately turn to. Even if this were the case it ignores the fact that another influence of naturalism was that it immersed our culture in scientism, the belief that scientific knowledge is the only valid form of knowledge. Thus the limits of science are widely perceived to be the limits of reality. Furthermore to appeal to this limitation is ultimately to argue in a circle since the necessity of such a limitation is the very point in dispute.

The authors are right in claiming that the theory of evolution is not in principle atheistic. But it is important to realize that evolution was not born in a theistic worldview but in a naturalistic one. You don't become a Christian reading Darwin's "Origin of Species", with its repeated argumentation that the apparent design in nature is not real but counterfeited by the blind, unguided, material forces of nature. Christians who find evolution to be theistic do so, in my opinion, because they have other reasons to believe in God. But to the one who is not already committed to Jesus Christ, the arrangement seems a little forced: why, if God actually exists, must we begin with the assumption that he acted in such a way that is empirically invisible to science? To a non-believer it would seem that if one can explain the entire history of life without reference to a Creator, the Creator really is just a superfluous add-on and the intellectually honest thing to do is to discard the God hypothesis altogether. If you start with naturalistic premisses, the most convincing conclusions will be naturalistic ones.

Now despite my misgivings these considerations do not make evolution false; the truth of the theory must be decided on the basis of the evidence. The authors assemble a formidable array of evidence that indicates the antiquity of the human race and likely common descent with animals. However, that in itself is not evolution. Evolution is first and foremost a theory about process, about how organisms changed one into another. It is not primarily about relationship and common descent, although these will follow if an evolutionary process is demonstrated. These are necessary conditions for evolution, but not sufficient conditions. Thus it is possible for biochemist Michael Behe, an intelligent design proponent, to accept common descent but reject the theory of evolution. Yet the authors, though they do at one point distinguish common descent from the mechanisms of evolution, give no evidence of the all-important claim of a purely material process. And the fossil record is not nearly as supportive of evolutionary theory as the authors suggest it is; evidence of transitional forms is extremely rare, and they ignore a crucial piece that counts heavily against evolutionary theory: the fossil evidence from the Cambrian Explosion which turns Darwin's tree of life on its head.

Even so, on page 189 we read that "Evolutionary creationists argue that God also fine-tuned the laws of nature so that simple organisms can evolve into complex ones." What are these laws? How do we know they exist? Yes, God could have created in such a fashion but to say that therefore he did, is to miss the process of reasoning by which we arrived at the Darwinian conclusion in the first place. I am convinced that we know that frogs and spiders and trees and humans all came from a single-celled ancestor through strictly physical processes (this is the key element in evolutionary theory), not because we see it in the fossil record or because it has been demonstrated in the laboratory, but because of the naturalistic worldview commitments of the scientific community that make evolution a certainty before the evidence is examined.

Science was born in a theistic worldview and it is high time we started learning how to bring theistic presuppositions back into our practice of science (and other disciplines such as law and education). Intelligent design is doing just that, and it is maddening to see not only non-Christians, but Christian academics, fighting this new way (well, actually the original way) of doing science, using the same straw-man arguments that the scientific naturalists are using. For example, the entire chapter on intelligent design is, unfortunately, simply a mischaracterization. The authors claim that intelligent design falls into god-of-the-gaps thinking. This is false. Intelligent design is not an argument from ignorance, claiming that life is too complex, therefore God must have intervened miraculously somewhere. Rather, I.D. makes a positive case based on what we do know, and concludes that design in nature is empirically detectable. The mode whereby design is introduced is not relevant, and so discussion of miracles is really a red herring.

I would strongly encourage the interested reader to refer to William Dembski's books "Intelligent Design" and its sequel "The Design Revolution" to see how I.D. characterizes itself, that it is not something fundamentally new, but actually a return to science's roots. You might be surprised to learn that I.D. can accomodate any degree of evolutionary change. Furthermore, central to intelligent design is the detection and flow of information in biological systems, an idea that the authors neglected even to mention. Their approach begs the question by judging intelligent design in terms of a naturalistic conception of nature, when it is this very conception that is the point at issue. The difference between evolution and intelligent design is very simple and shows that contrary to the authors' hopeful assertion, they cannot both be true: evolution claims that the history of life can be explained exclusively by natural causation, while intelligent design claims that nature shows evidence not only of natural but also of agent causation.

The influence of naturalism on theistic thinking is not just an academic discussion. It is in fact the primary reason why, in the span of 150 years, Christians have gone from dominating the culture to being utterly marginalized within it. Because of what's at stake, let us as Christians be very careful in assessing that the evidence presented by a scientific community steeped in naturalistic thinking actually supports what it is claimed to support. If we don't, we may unwittingly be giving legitimacy to the creation story of a worldview that is utterly antithetical to Christianity and is corroding the very roots of our culture.

I can certainly recommend this book as a discussion guide. But in light of the above considerations, I have found helpful supplementary reading in the above mentioned Dembski books and also in Nancy Pearcey's book "Total Truth," which goes into great detail in the worldview issues surrounding evolution and creation.

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