I thank Rev. Murphy for his reply of Thurdsay morning. I found it very enjoyable to read, because of its focus, coherence, level of understanding, and scholarly handling. Even though I disagree with many points made in it, it really is a model for how to carry on an intelligent debate.
I’d like to address the scientific question first. I do appreciate Mr. Murphy’s point that Darwinism has “evolved” since the time of Darwin. Obviously I am not going to hold any defender of Darwinism today to Darwin’s gross errors about the mechanisms of inheritance. However, when we add in all the additions and corrections made by “neo-Darwinism” since then, we still have to ask what they amount to, in terms of the larger issue I’m addressing. Even if to “random mutation” and “natural selection”, we add things like “gene duplication” or “genetic drift”, or other so-called mechanisms that have been bandied about, it seems to me that we are still talking about (a) unguided processes; (b) natural selection (or the absence thereof). In other words, I think that “orthodox” neo-Darwinists like Coyne and Dawkins are still Darwinian in their fundamental mode of explanation for how complex integrated structures arise. And even Gould, who cri!
ticized Darwinian gradualism (rightly so, in my view), still laid a heavy emphasis on the unguided nature of the process, by saying that if the evolutionary tape were re-run, the result would be different each time. And again I repeat that I don’t believe that in implying that evolution was unguided, Darwin was laying on some metaphysically gratuitous addition to his “science”. It is of the essence of the process described by Darwin that it be unguided. He wanted an explanation that did not involve conscious design. (So also Gaylord Simpson, Sagan, Dawkins, Coyne, etc.)
It’s pretty hard, metaphysically speaking, to get beyond the “nature, art or chance” options posed by Aristotle. If things aren’t done by “art” [which for Aristotle implied conscious design], then they must occur either by “nature” (understood as an unconscious teleology, as in Aristotle, or as unguided, law-driven necessity, as in most modern philosophers), or by “chance”, or by some combination of the two. Darwin rejected conscious design, and also Aristotle’s unconscious teleology, and that left him with law-driven necessity, chance, or some combination thereof. In his system, “natural selection” would correspond roughly to the element of “necessity”, whereas the variations would correspond roughly to the element of “chance”. (Though of course it’s not that tidy, because he offered no clear account of what caused variation, and natural selection is tied to changing environments which are themselves determined partly by chance.)
Now it seems to me that Darwin and all the orthodox neo-Darwinians, and probably most evolutionary biologists up until about 20 years ago, have attributed a pretty major role in evolutionary transformation to “chance”. Natural selection, even if it is a non-chance factor (as Dawkins claims, though David Berlinski has argued that it, too, boils down to chance), can do nothing until chance produces the variations upon which selection can work.
It seems, however, that recently some philosophers and biologists have been putting increasing emphasis on “necessity”, in the sense of natural properties possessed by the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living things, which make their association not merely a matter of luck, but an expected outcome. For example, Kaufmann’s self-organizing theory, Denton’s pre-programmed anthropocentric universe, and possibly Sternberg’s interest in Platonic forms, all could be thought of as approaches to evolution that depart to some extent from the conventional Darwinian emphasis on “chance”. So I think of necessitarian approaches of this kind as “non-Darwinian” evolution (even though of they may allow an auxiliary role to chance, as, e.g., Denton does). What makes them non-Darwinian is not the complete absence of any Darwinian element, e.g., natural selection, or a small degree of chance, but their complete reframing of the evolutionary story so that necessi!
ty rather than chance is in the driver’s seat. My hunch, and it can only be a hunch, is that this re-balancing, with less emphasis on chance, is going to be increasingly found in evolutionary theory over the next 50 years or so.
The previous paragraph is relevant to Mr. Murphy’s point about science in this way. He says that God works through “whatever actual natural processes take place”. Well, let’s say for the moment that God does in fact do this. My point would then be that neo-Darwinism and 20th-century evolutionary theory generally may well have had too narrow a conception of “whatever natural processes take place”. It may be that increasingly biologists will be thinking of nature as having a tendency toward complex order built into it, rather than as something that can produce complex structures, even though they are preposterously unlikely to occur by sheer chance, merely because the earth is old enough for serial flukes to have had time to happen, and to build on one another.
I am not competent to evaluate the proposals of Denton etc. in detail. They are still, as far as I can see, at the speculative level, and nowhere near the “detailed testable mechanism” level. But I see them as promising. In terms of ancient philosophy, these proposals move evolutionary thought away from what we can loosely call a Lucretian or Epicurean direction (typified by Darwin and neo-Darwinism), and toward what we might call (against, speaking loosely) Stoic or Platonic or Aristotelian approaches. And with a handle like mine, you can understand why I would see this as an improvement.
So, if God does work through natural processes, rather than against them via some sort of miraculous overcoming of nature, I would suggest, based on one growing trend in evolutionary speculation, that it is most likely that the way he works through the natural processes is more Dentonian or Sternbergian than Darwinian.
If I were to connect this up with a particular type of theology, I would do it in this way: if God is sovereign (as Christianity appears to teach), and if he wants to create certain creatures through natural means rather than through miracles, then an evolutionary process in which necessity is in the driver’s seat, and chance plays at most a subsidiary role, would seem the most sensible way for him to get what he wants. If God can set up nature in advance, give it the right tendencies, he can direct it to produce exactly what he wants, just as surely as he could by performing discrete miraculous acts of creation. What this means is that the conventional understanding of creation, in which creation is regarded as an exhibition of God’s power and control over nature, and is guided toward definite ends, is more obviously compatible with approaches like Denton’s than it is with Darwinian formulations, in which nature behaves unpredictably and resists being guided to any!
definite end.
So one question I would ask Mr. Murphy is this: if biology were to move in the direction I’ve been discussing, and if, more and more, evolutionary thinking started to embrace necessity, front-loading, self-organization, built-in tendencies, etc., would that pose a difficulty for his theology? Would a necessitarian process of evolution, or, if “necessitarian” is a bit too strong, even a process of evolution in which life has a sort of “nisus” towards complex organization, fit in with his notion of “kenosis”, or more generally with a Christ-centered understanding of God’s creative activity? Is Christ-centered creationism in principle opposed to any kind of directedness, transcendent or immanent? If not, then it may be that our theological differences don’t actually require us to disagree at all over the “science” of evolution. On the other hand, if a Christ-centred understanding of God’s creative activity is absolutely incompatible with the sort of!
immanent [but fully naturalistic] directedness of a Denton-like approach, then it seems to me that Mr. Murphy is either going to have to re-think his theology, or put up a fight, on the scientific level, against the trend in evolutionary thinking that I’ve identified.
Regarding the larger theological question, I think that Mr. Murphy has hit the difference between us on the head. He understands creation doctrine in terms of Christology, and I don’t. I understand that there are grounds for his position, not just in the post-Biblical formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but in the New Testament itself, e.g., in the prologue to the Gospel of John, which could be seen as a kind of re-writing or corrective to the creation account in Genesis. At one point in my life, I fancied myself a “Christian Platonist” of certain extreme kind. I revered the Gospel of John as the most “Greek” and “metaphysical” of the Gospels, and believed that it presented the authentically Christian doctrine of creation, as opposed to the second-rate, merely “Jewish” idea of creation found in Genesis. But over time, despite the poetic beauty of that opening passage of John, and despite the powerful and often beautiful religious imagery throu!
ghout John which makes it one of the most religiously impressive books in the New Testament, I’ve moved increasingly away from the Johannine teaching. This is not to deny that the Johannine vision is authentically Christian, in a historical sense. Obviously the Johannine teaching is a central component of orthodox historical Christianity. But I’ve felt less and less need to bind myself to orthodox historical Christian theology of any kind; I’ve been caught up by the spell of Hebrew narrative and the thought of the Hebrew Bible, and I’ve been persuaded by a number of things (including, no doubt, some superb Jewish teachers) that Genesis should not be read under the influence of Trinitarian Christology. And my remarks here about John would apply, with appropriate changes, to the Pauline references which Luther and Mr. Murphy have provided. I’m simply unimpressed with the Pauline understanding of the Old Testament in general (I think Paul, like Luther after him,!
completely misunderstands the nature and function of The Law)!
, and of
Genesis in particular (I think that Paul grossly overemphasizes Genesis 2-3 and grossly underemphasizes Genesis 1).
This doesn’t mean that I reject the notion of Incarnation, or the idea that Incarnation can be understood as a “kenosis”, or a self-emptying. It means that I cannot understand Creation and Incarnation as intimately connected doctrines, as Mr. Murphy would have me do.
On some other points:
1. I don’t understand what it means for God to “co-operate” with the laws of nature in the process of evolution. If I understand the distinction between absolute and ordained power, in the use of his ordained power, God’s operation is invisible. While he may be “acting” in a technical theological sense, nature operates, from the human point of view, “as if God were not given”. How can a human being, looking at, say, the orbit of the moon around the earth, tell whether the cause is what Bertrand Russell would say it was, i.e., purely natural causes, or whether it is what some medieval theologian would say it was, i.e., natural causes, which are expressions of God’s ordained power? And if there is no difference, then the world “co-operation”, however correct it might be as a technical term of theology, is misleading to modern ears. To modern ears, “co-operating” means that two people or things work together in such a way as to effect some end, a!
nd each person or thing performs part of the necessary action, so that the two actions are complementary. Thus, a husband and wife may co-operate to make a bed, and if the husband doesn’t pull up his half of the sheet when his wife does on the other side, the job remains undone. But when you say that God and nature “co-operate” to cause the orbit of the moon, you don’t mean that God does half the work (say, providing the inertia of the moving body), and nature does the other half (say, providing the gravity). You mean that nature, on one level, provides all of it (inertia and gravity), and that God, on another level, is responsible for all of it (sustaining the properties or laws of inertia and gravity). You mean that God and nature work in a sort of parallel manner, with every point of God’s action mapped one-to-one with every point of nature’s action. The word “co-operation” is therefore confusing. In fact, to modern ears, the use of this medieval la!
nguage of “co-operation” might even suggest what I think !
you don
t want to suggest, i.e., that nature does most of the work, and God seals the deal with some special action of his own, distinct from nature’s, without which nature wouldn’t have succeeded. People might therefore conclude from such language that, in evolution, God, unaided by nature, provides the mutations (say, by spitting them out from his hidden position behind the cloud of quantum uncertainty), and nature, unaided by God, provides the selection, or something like that. So I don’t like the word “co-operation”, and I wish some other could be found.
2. I understand “kenosis” to mean “self-emptying”. So God “empties” himself of his Godhood, so that he can live on earth as a man, and suffer, hunger, thirst, be humiliated, die, and so on. Now if creation occurs on that model, then it would be an abdication of God’s power to compel nature to do anything, a withdrawal of God which allows nature to be itself, and show its capacities. But this does not seem to square with the notion of ordained power. In ordained power God is acting – as God – through nature, whereas in kenosis God has given up his Goddishness, so to speak. I cannot see how God can create “kenotically”, because kenosis means giving up (temporarily, to be sure) that quality – divine power – which enables God to create in the first place.
Now I think you may have addressed this question in your reply, because at one point you suggest that kenosis is not strictly necessary to your argument. You suggest that it is sufficient for your case if God refrains from miracles and simply keeps his “ordained power” running along behind nature as usual. But if so, why bring in the notion of “kenosis” at all? If the distinction between absolute and ordained power already covers what you are driving at, why muddy the waters with an extra concept which was not originally designed to deal with the issue of absolute versus ordained power?
3. Regarding your remarks on quantum theory, I haven’t yet finished Robert Russell’s essay in *PEC*, so I won’t say too much. My general comment, as one who has read much philosophy, is that people who connect “quantum indeterminacy” with “freedom” (whether that freedom is the freedom of the human will, or the divine freedom to act in or on nature), are often very loose and sloppy, and tend to think that if some subatomic process is indeterminate, then someone, somewhere, is somehow free. But indeterminacy does not automatically provide any explanation for free will, free choice, etc. It is merely “freedom from” deterministic causation. Thus, if there are genuinely undetermined events in nature (which even some physicists contest), it hardly follows that they provide a basis for the divine direction of evolution, as opposed to random disorder. The argument needs to be spelled out with much more precision. Unfortunately, when it comes to evolution, mo!
st of the people writing about the God/indeterminism link are either scientists dabbling in theology, or theologians dabbling in science; in both cases the firm hand of people who have spent years reading Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Hume, etc. is often lacking, and the discussion becomes vague and imprecise. It is not enough to say that because the physicists tell us that a quantum event is undetermined, that gives God an “opening” to operate in nature without performing any miracles. Concrete scenarios should be put forward, and analyzed philosophically. For example, is it being asserted that God, in a unique act expressing a divine volition, causes an alpha particle to be admitted at precisely this moment, rather than earlier or later, and thus causes a particular segment of DNA to be struck by that alpha particle, producing a particular mutation? That claim can be analyzed philosophically for its implications regarding theology and design detectability. But !
just to say that God hangs around somehow in the indeterminate!
quantum
vagueness, and therefore that Darwinism and divine direction can go together, is neither good science, nor good theology, nor good philosophy; it’s mystery-mongering. It’s not a refutable claim in either science or theology, because it’s not a clear claim at all.
4. I confess that I got on my high horse regarding the Church Fathers. I didn’t mean they were worthless in every respect. I certainly enjoy some of the metaphysical discussions of Augustine, for example, when he isn’t pretending to comment on a text, but discusses God or Love or Time or Eternity in a philosophical and sometimes beautifully poetic manner. However, I do find that, by and large, the Fathers have trouble with the Old Testament. They often seem to me to be proof-texting, performing eisegesis, subordinating it in a crude way to the New Testament, and so on. (They are not unique in this: medieval theologians were often worse, and Reformation theologians often show the same defect. Calvin is a partial exception – his commentary on Genesis shows a certain inkling of respect for the Old Testament as it stands, and not merely as a preparation for the New Testament.) And while the father you mentioned may have been able to read Hebrew, he wasn’t typica!
l of the Fathers, at least not of the major Greek or Latin Fathers. Hardly any of them could read Hebrew. And none of them had available to them the mass of knowledge we have today about the ancient near eastern background of Hebraic thought.
5. Yes, you are right that in Genesis the arrival of the plants could be interpreted in naturalistic or emergent terms, but if you look at all the verbs of production carefully, the plants are the exception rather than the rule. Right after they successfully emerge, God asks the earth to produce animals in the same way (same Hebrew verb), but it doesn’t; he has to make them. And the waters do not simply “swarm swarms” of sea creatures; God has to create them. God “makes” the heavenly bodies and “creates” man. He “divides” the waters above and below. The plants are the only example of an emergent or “evolutionary” description in Genesis 1. I’m not of course saying that I think Genesis is a photographic image of what actually happened; rather, I’m saying that the Hebrew writers presumably chose their language carefully. The text in Genesis 1, especially in Hebrew (the Septuagint and Vulgate not so much), gives every impression of being careful!
ly crafted, almost down to the last word. Its account is not one of a self-generating natural world, but of a shaped or crafted one.
6. Near the end you write:
“Your sarcasm might be appropriate if I had been talking about what God could
do – God’s absolute power – but I am instead speaking of what God has done,
his ordained power. Thus your gibe misfires. But the answer to your
question is yes, of course. The fact that we can understand most of what
goes on in creation in scientific terms means that the phenomena in question
aren’t miraculous, at least in any careful way of speaking.”
This reply illegitimately presumes an answer to the point which is under debate. How do you know that “what God has done” he did entirely through his ordained power? How do you know that at points he didn’t exercise his absolute power? Is this something you know through textual exegesis, through theological reasoning, or through private revelation? All I know is that the species are here. I have no idea how they got here. And as for your last sentence: “The fact that we can understand most of what goes on in creation in scientific terms means that the phenomena in question aren’t miraculous”, I question the premise. Since when did we understand most of what goes on in creation? Are you referring to theories about the birth of stars and planets, etc.? But even if we fully understood all of those things (which we don’t), we are nowhere near understanding either the origin of life by naturalistic means or major evolutionary changes through naturalistic m!
eans. We have no clear picture of how these things happened. So how can you rule out miracles? I have no particular liking for miracles, and I’d rather not appeal to them, but I cannot understand how you can rule them out, until we can show in a test tube that a cell can form without prompting by an intelligent agent, or until we can show that after 50,000 generations bacteria with no genes for flagella acquire them and grow flagella by themselves, or until we can demonstrate a detailed pathway from one multicellular creature to another.
7. Regarding your very last paragraph, I cannot speak for all ID supporters, but I can speak for myself, and I don’t recognize myself in your final comments on ID. I certainly believe in using the human intellect to understand the world, and I certainly don’t leap to simplistic explanations (I presume you mean miracles) just because I don’t understand a phenomenon. As for your suggestion that we must exercise “responsible dominion” over the world, I agree, and have a few ideas on that subject, but I cannot say too much more without compromising my identity, and in any case, nothing in ID is opposed to the notion of responsible dominion. Finally, the wording “the IDers don’t realize that God has made a world that can be understood as though God were not given”, presumes the conclusion which is under debate. God may indeed have made a world that can be thus understood; but there is no reason why any ID proponent, even front-loaders who are not inclined to !
accept miracles, should grant this out of hand. It appears to be a dogmatic theological assertion, which is exactly what I was complaining about in the last paragraphs of my previous post.
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Received on Fri Nov 14 10:36:15 2008
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