Thinking Christianly about
Biological Complexity
Ard Louis
www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/postgrad/
Department of Physics
University of Oxford
Cross-cultural, broad-brush talk
• evangelical culture(s)
• Many scientific sub-cultures
• culture is often “caught” not “taught”
cultural iceberg
Biological self-assembly
QuickTime™ and a
YUV420 codec decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
http://www.npn.jst.go.jp/
• Biological systems self-assemble (they make themselves)
• Can we understand?
• Can we emulate? (Nanotechnology)
Virus self-assembly
•
Some viruses can be put in a test tube and made to form/dissolve
•
•
(first shown by Fraenkel-Contrat&Williams 1955- for TMV)
Much simpler problem than the flagellum
Design of viruses for
self assembly on computer
Monte-Carlo simulations: stochastic optimisation
http://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/user/IainJohnson/
Protein folding: design of final
state and pathway
Levinthal Paradox:
150 amino acids
~10 angles between them
~10150 different states.
How does protein find its
folded native structure?
we used same design
principles to make
viruses self-assemble
C.M. Dobson, Nature 426, 884 (2003)
Biological self-assembly
•is amazing!!!
•If we didn’t observe it, no one
would believe that it is possible
(think Levinthal)
•We still know very little
•We are still very far from
“a
predictive biology”
Thinking Christianly about
biological complexity ....
• Wonder and Worship
• Fearfully and wonderfully made ...
• Other conclusions are controversial
• Many “cultural” barriers to constructive Christian
engagement.
• Origins: does where we come from determine who we
are and how we should then live?
• hijacked by many ideologies
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
• Taken together, American
evangelicals display many
virtues and do many things
well, but built-in barriers to
careful and constructive
thinking remain substantial.
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
• These barriers include an immediatism that insists on
action, decision, and even perfection right now, a
populism that confuses winning supporters with
mastering actually existing situations, an antitraditionalism that privileges one’s own current judgments
on biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however
hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard
won and carefully stated), and a nearly gnostic dualism
that rushes to spiritualize all manner of bodily, terrestrial,
physical, and material realities (despite the origin and
providential maintenance of these realities in God). In
addition, we evangelicals as a rule still prefer to put our
money into programs offering immediate results, whether
evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into institutions
promoting intellectual development over the long term.
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
• a Scandal because
"If evangelicals are the ones who insist most aggressively that
they believe in sola scriptura, and if evangelicals are the ones
who assert most vigorously the transforming work of Jesus
Christ, then it is reasonable to hope that what the Scriptures
teach about the origin of creation in Christ, the sustaining of all
things in Christ, and the dignity of all creation in Christ-about, in
other words, the subjects of learning -- will be a spur for
evangelicals to a deeper and richer intellectual life: "He is before
all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:1517)."
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
• What about the UK? or Europe? or Africa/Asia/South America?
• “Scandal” is really a description of popular thinking ....
• Barriers to thinking Christianly about science
• Immediatism
• Anti-traditionalism
• Populism
• Gnostic dualism
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
• What about the UK? or Europe? or Africa/Asia/South America?
• “Scandal” is really a description of popular thinking ....
• Barriers to thinking Christianly about science
• Immediatism
• Anti-traditionalism
• Populism
Immediatism: Newton and the
planets
• “This most beautiful
system of the sun,
planets and comets
could only proceed
from the counsel
and dominion of an
intelligent being.”
• Sir Isaac Newton
Immediatism: Newton and the
planets
18th century Orrery from a
London coffee house, used to
show the perfection of the
orbits, which reflect God’s
perfection
Immediatism: Leibnitz objects
“For, as Leibnitz
objected, if God had to
remedy the defects of
his creation, this was
surely to demean his
craftmanship”
•John Hedley Brooke,
Science and Religion,
CUP 1991, p147
Immediatism: Leibnitz objects
•“And I hold, that when God
works miracles, he does not
do it in order to supply the
wants of nature, but those of
grace. Whoever thinks
otherwise, must needs have
a very mean notion of the
wisdom and power of God”
Immediatism:Laplace and
Napoleon
• Mécanique Céleste
(1799-1825)
• Napoleon: Why
have you not
mentioned the
creator?
• Laplace: "Je n'avais
pas besoin de cette
hypothèse-là.”
Immediatism: Chaos and the
planets
• Our understanding of the Solar System has been
revolutionized over the past decade by the finding
that the orbits of the planets are inherently chaotic.
In extreme cases, chaotic motions can change the
relative positions of the planets around stars, and
even eject a planet from a system.
• The role of chaotic resonances in the Solar
System, N. Murray and M. Holman, Nature 410,
773-779 (12 April 2001)
Barriers to Christian thinking
about science?
• immediatism
• anti-traditionalism
• populism
Roots of Science
• Science has deeply Christian roots.
•
•
•
•
Uniformity
Rationality
Intelligibility
See e.g. books by Stanley Jaki; R. Hooykaas etc..
• Royal Society, the word’s first scientific
society. Founded in London July 15, 1662,
many were devout protestants
Calvin, and the “Humility
Principle”
“what we find people like Boyle advocating is that we manipulate the natural world,
that under special conditions we observe what’s going on, and it’s only under these
contrived conditions that we actually see, or get insight into, the various processes.
This involves communal observation, it involves accumulation of all sorts of
observations under different conditions. Eventually, we come to some conditional
conclusions on the basis of this long complicated experimental process. This is a
radically new approach to observation.”
“... there is a fundamental difference between the Aristotelian assumption that our
sensory and cognitive apparatus are designed in such a way that they’ll give us a
veridical account of nature, and a Calvinist view that says our cognitive apparatus
and our faculties of observation are fallen, imperfect, that they give us the wrong
knowledge, they persistently mislead us, ...
Peter Harrison (Cambridge 2005)
http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/Harrison/Peter%20Harrison%20-%20index.htm
We see through a glass darkly (I Cor 13)
Humility Principle?
• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have
to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled
yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just
have to be honest in a conventional way after that. -R.P. Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science” (1974)
•
Tokyo Aug 06
http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html
23
Humility Principle?
• Humility Principle is methodological not
personal
• We are fallen and easily “fool ourselves”
• Scientific method(s) contain mechanisms to
minimise this
• Many of these mechanisms are communal
• Peer review
• Traditions
• Often “caught” not “taught”
Critiques of communal nature
by sociologists of science
• -- science is not essentially self-correcting, but is
instead controlled by elites and what is “true” is
largely determined on sociological grounds.
• There is some truth to this on the short term, but on
the long term?
• e.g. the “Science Wars”
Golemizations
Case study 2: Relativity
Quantum Mechanics + Relativity = antimatter
Schrödinger equation (Quantum Mechanics)
+
Energy-Momentum (Special Relativity)
=
Dirac Equation (1928)
Electrons
Positrons (antimatter) discovered 1932
Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, a wonderful gift which
we neither understand nor deserve (E. Wigner (1960)
Michaelson-Morley and Aether
Michaelson-Morley and Aether
• published 1887
• Einstein 1905
• Dayton Miller and others
did measure aether wind
see 1933 review
why did the community largely ignore Miller?
Michaelson-Morley and Aether
• published 1887
• Einstein 1905
• Dayton Miller and others
did measure aether wind
later 1933 review
The meaning of an experimental result does not, then, depend on the
care with which it is designed and carried out, it depends upon what
people are ready to believe.
The Golem: what you should know about science
Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (CUP 1993)
The Golemization and
Tapestries
The Golemization of Relativity, David
Mermin, Physics Today 49, p11 April 1996
Collins and Pinch took their
understanding of the field from
textbooks which often misrepresent
for pedagogical purposes.
Science is a tapestry
-- you can pick at a few strings, but
that doesn’t break the whole cloth
In this case: e.g. Dirac equation,
fine-splitting in atomic spectra, antimatter etc.....
.
Tapestry arguments
• May differ from field to field
• Physics
• Dirac, Wigner, unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics
• Observation still key
• Biology?
Tapesty arguments in biology
Case study 3: Is the earth old?
Science is a tapestry -- you can pick at a few strings, but that doesn’t
break the whole cloth
•Radiometric dating (many overlapping isotopes)
•ice cores:
up to 8000 years -- volcanoes like Vesuvius
up to 740,000 years
•Milankovitch cycles
•Tree rings
•All these methods (when used properly) agree.
There is no scientific controversy
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
Case study 3: Is the earth old?
Milankovitch Cycles: here seen in 420,000 years of
ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica research
station.
Case study 4: common descent of
human & chimp?
Divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages occurred about 6 million years ago; the times of lineage divergence are
not to scale
News & Views: The chimpanzee and us, Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders, Nature 437, 50-51
(1September 2005) .
tapestry arguments in biology:
chromosomal banding:
Humans have 46 (2 X 23)
chromosomes
Apes have 48 (2 X 24)
chromosomes
The origin of man: a chromosomal pictorial legacy. J.J Yunis and O. Prakash,
chromosome
2: (1982)
Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan
Science 215, 1525
tapestry arguments in biology:
fusion of chromosome 2?
chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan
tapestry arguments in biology:
evidence from the human genome
Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having
emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric
chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise
fusion site has been located in 2q13−2q14.1 (ref. 2;
hg16:114455823−114455838), where our analysis confirmed the
presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5,
8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A).
During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two
centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the
centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric
structure quickly deterioriated [42].
Generation and annotation of the DNA sequences of human
chromosomes 2 and 4, L.W. Hillier et al., Nature 434, 724 (2005).
endogenous retroviruses
HERV-K insertions
In humans endogenous retrovirus sequences make up about 1% of the genome.
Lebedev, Y. B., et al. (2000) "Differences in HERV-K LTR insertions in orthologous loci of
humans and great apes." Gene 247: 265-277.
tapestry arguments in biology:
more threads of evidence
•Genetic threads
•SINEs (Alu )
•LINEs
•Retroviral insertions
•pseudo genes (e.g. olefaction)
•chromosomal inversions
•Phenotypal similarities
•Fossils
•The tapestry for: do humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor?
seems to most biologists almost unbreakably strong
for physicists, mathematicians and engineers
-- these arguments may still seem foreign and vague; where is the
“proof”?, how do you know? -- so communities talk past each other
tapestry arguments in biology
“But others [biologists], I soon came to realize, regarded logical arguments as suspect.
To them, experimental evidence, fallible as it might be, provided a far surer avenue to
truth than did mathematical reasoning. .... Their implicit assumption seemed to be:
How could one know one’s assumptions were correct? Where, in a purely deductive
argument, was there room for the surprises that nature might offer, for mechanisms
that might depart altogether from those imagined in our initial assumptions? Indeed
for some biologists, the gap between empirical and logical necessity loomed so large
as to make the latter seem effectively irrelevant.
•Evelyn Fox Keller, in “Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development
with Models, Metaphors, and Machines, HUP, (2002)
You can’t ask those kinds of questions!!!!
(Biologist to AAL at “Protein-Protein Interaction Conf”, June 2004)
“Where are the equations” -- a physicist might ask
Tapestry arguments
• Basic scientific principles are shared across fields
• But what is considered “necessary” or “sufficient” for
a (self-organised) tapestry varies from field to field
(often unwritten)
• cultural iceberg, above and below waterline
• evidence: grant or paper review
• demarkation problems
• mathematics->physics->chemistry->biology>medicine->engineering
• Differences --in spite of apparent epistemic laxity ... it
still works!
• Christian evaluation needs communities of scholars
Barriers to Christian thinking
about science?
• immediatism
• scientific progress can be slow, surprising,
unexpected
• anti-traditionalism
• understanding the strength of a tapestry
requires communal effort
• populism
Populism and Paley
•
that couldn’t have happened by “natural means”
Populism and Paley
• God only present through interventions?
• God present in the whole thing?
- (providence - sustains all things ... Col 1:15)
History of life on earth
earth forms from
accretion disk
Grandeur of God?
•humans -- last 2 seconds of 24 hr day
•not unlike astronomy: the heavens declare the
Glory of God - Psalm 19
•What is man that you are mindful of him?
Psalm 8
Aside:Emergence of Humans?
e.g. at what age is a child spiritually responsible to God?
John Stott on “Homos Divinus”
Advice from C.S. Lewis
When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a
vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern
Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final
appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both
mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by
some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality.
(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)
See also: Can we believe Genesis today,IVP (UK) Ernest Lucas
http://www.ivpbooks.com/product/1844741206.htm
see also www.cis.org.uk/resources/books/books.shtml
In the Beginning : The Opening Chapters of Genesis, Henri Blocher, Leicester:
Inter-Varsity Press, (1984).
Advice from Billy Graham
"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the
Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many
times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't
meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible
is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a
book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I
believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created
man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain
point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not,
does not change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way
God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's
relationship to God.”
• - Billy Graham quoted by David Frost
•
Source: Book - Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (1997, p. 72-74)
Aside: Defining Evolution
•
•
Evolution as Natural History
•the earth is old (+/- 4.5 Billion years)
•more complex life forms followed from simpler life forms
Evolution as a mechanism for the emergence of biological complexity
•generated by mutations and natural selection
(note: most Christians agree that God created this mechanism)
• Evolution as a “big picture” worldview (scientism)
George Gaylord Simpson:
"Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have
him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort
of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all
of life and indeed to all that is material."
or Richard Dawkins:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
Language: Random or stochastic?
• Random mutations and natural selection...
• Stochastic optimisation
• e.g. used to price your stock portfolio .....
Lego blocks or play-doh?
• Evo-Devo Lego Blocks:
•
•
•
•
•
pax6
sonic-hedgehog
shaven-baby
tinman
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New
Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the
Animal Kingdom. S.B. Carroll (Blackwell
Science 2005)
Gene language
Why are there so few genes?
complexity comes from the
interactions
gene networks
systems biology
transcriptional network for yeast:
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Gene language
[Genes] swarm in huge colonies,
safe inside gigantic lumbering
robots, sealed off from the
outside world, communicating
with it by tortuous indirect
routes, manipulating it by
remote control. They are in you
and me; they created us, body
and mind; and their
preservation is the ultimate
rationale for our existence.
Richard Dawkins -The Selfish Gene (1976)
[Genes] are trapped in huge
colonies, locked inside highly
intelligent beings, moulded by
the outside world,
communicating with it by
complex processes, through
which, blindly, as if by magic,
function emerges. They are in
you and me; we are the
system that allows their code
to be read; and their
preservation is totally
dependent on the joy that we
experience in reproducing
ourselves. We are the ultimate
rationale for their existence.
Denis Noble -The Music of Life: Biology
Beyond the Genome (OUP
2006)
Contingency v.s.``deep structures’’
• Rerun the tape of evolution again...
• S.J. Gould: “Wonderful Life”; (W.W. Norton 1989)
“Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical
starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence
would grace the replay.” In evolution, there is no direction, no progression. Humanity is dethroned
from its exalted view of its own importance
• Simon Conway Morris “Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a
Lonely Universe”; (CUP, 2003)
When you examine the tapestry of evolution you see the same patterns emerging over and over
again. Gould's idea of rerunning the tape of life is not hypothetical; it's happening all around us.
And the result is well known to biologists — evolutionary convergence. When convergence is the
rule, you can rerun the tape of life as often as you like and the outcome will be much the same.
Convergence means that life is not only predictable at a basic level; it also has a direction.
Convergent Evolution?
"For the harmony of the world is made manifest in
Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all
poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the
concept of mathematical beauty." (On Growth and
Form, 1917.)
Convergent evolution in mechanical design of lamnid sharks and
tunas
Jeanine M. Donley, et al. Nature 429, 61-65 (6 May 2004)
Convergent Evolution?
• Enormous number of examples ... from proteins to vision
up to societies to intelligence.
• Are rational conscious beings an inevitable outcome? “
The principal aim of this book has been to show that the constraints of evolution and the
ubiquity of convergence make the emergence of something like ourselves a nearinevitability. SCM, “Life’s Solution”, (CUP 2005) pp328
Thinking about science
• Cultural barriers to Christian thought about
science
• Scandal:
• Immediatism, anti-traditionalism populism
• Scientific practice
• humility principle
• tapestry argments
• Language is important
• self-assembly and bio-complexity
• evolution: random chance or stochastic
optimisation ?
• convergence and inevitable humans?
Fine Tuning and the
Anthropic Principle
• “The universe is the way it is, because we are here”
– Prof. Stephen Hawking, Cambridge U
• If the [fine structure constant] were changed by 1%,
the sun would immediately explode Prof. Max
Tegmark, U. Penn
• “Just Six Numbers” by Sir Martin Rees
We are made of Stardust
He
C via a resonance
• Sir Fred Hoyle,
Cambridge U
• “A common sense
interpretation of the
facts suggests that a
superintellect has
monkeyed with
physics .. and biology”
• His atheism was
“deeply shaken”
Fine Tuning and the
Anthropic Principle
• Fine tuning is not a proof of God, but seems
more consistent with theism than atheism
• Note the difference with “God of the gaps”
• We seem to have three choices'... We can dismiss it as
happenstance, we can acclaim it as the workings of providence,
or (my preference) we can conjecture that our universe is a
specially favoured domain in a still vaster multiverse.’ If this
multiverse contained every possible set of laws and conditions,
then the existence of our own world with its particular
characteristics would be inevitable.”
• Sir Martin Rees (just 6 numbers) --
• John Leslie firing squad argument
Thinking Christianly about
Intelligent Design
Ard Louis
www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/postgrad/
Department of Physics
University of Oxford
Christian responses to natural history
1. Young Earth Creation Science (YECS)
2. Progressive (old age) Creationism
3. Theistic Evolution
Intelligent Design (ID - caps) is
heterogeneous w.r.t. 1,2,3
Young Earth Creation Science
• Denies much of mainstream science, especially natural
history
• key issue is really age of earth; death before the fall (atonement
and theodicy)
• evolution -- baraminerology
• Driven by interpretation of Scripture
• Upholding the Bible from the first verse of Genesis)
• Excellent understanding of how elite science and its
popularisations affect Christian confidence
• but cut off from vast majority of active academic scientists,
sometimes misses tapestry arguments
• polemic styles
• Avaroism?
Progressive creationism
• Day-age theory (old earth)
• harmonising Genesis sequence with
natural history
• many different schemes
• e.g. Hugh Ross and “Reasons to
Believe” in USA
• vicious fights w/ YECS
• Theological overlaps w/ positive ID
Theistic Evolution
• God used a stochastic mechanism to create
biological complexity
• Majority view among evangelical academic scientists
and theologians; doesn’t trickle down
• Sometimes a poor understanding of how elite science
and its popularisations affect Christian confidence
Intelligent Design (capitalised)
heterogeneous movement -- will focus on ID centred at Discovery Institute
some key publications and people
•The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984)
•Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, Roger L. Olsen
•Evolution, a Theory in Crisis (1986)
•Michael Denton
•Darwin on Trial (1991)
•Philip Johnson
•Darwin’s Black Box (1996)
•Michael Behe (CT book of the year)
•Icons of evolution (2000)
•Jonathan Wells
•No Free Lunch (2001)
•William Dembski
Dutch ID debate
• Schitterend ongeluk of sporen van ontwerp? (2005)
• En God beschikte een worm? (2006)
Cees Dekker, Ronald Meester en Rene’ van Woudenberg (ed)
What is ID
• Intelligent agency, as an aspect of scientific theory making, has
more explanatory power in accounting for the specified, and
sometimes irreducible complexity of some physical systems,
including biological entities, and/or the existence of the universe
as a whole, than the blind forces of. . . matter.’[1] That is,
intelligent design is a better explanation for entities exhibiting
complex specified information (CSI) than are appeals to the
inherent capacities of nature (i.e. chance and/or physical
necessity). ID suggests that the world contains objects that
exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected natural causes,
and can only be adequately explained by recourse to intelligent
causation.
• (definition from Peter S. Williams)
Intelligent Design
• In principle the claim is that one doesn’t need
to specify who the “designer” is.
• For Christians, it is God of course.
• So ID asks: can we use methods borrowed from
scientific practice to find evidence that God used
supernatural means to bring about the emergence
of biological complexity?
Intelligent design
• Most popular science issues:
• Origin of life
• Cambrian Explosion
• Irreducibly Complex biological elements
e.g. the bacterial flagellum
• Origin of biological information
Origin of life?
• God (or the designer) did it:
• Stephen Meyer:
• Chance?
• Necessity?
• IBE -> Designer did it
• If the simplest life owes its origin to an intelligent Creator,
then perhaps man is not the "cosmic orphan" that
twentieth century scientific materialism has taught.
Perhaps then, during the twenty first century, the
traditional moral and spiritual foundations of the West will
find support from the very sciences that once seemed to
undermine them.
• Meyer (1996)
Origin of Life
• The problem of the origin of life has much in common with a
well-constructed detective story. There is no shortage of clues
pointing to the way in which the crime, the contamination of the
pristine environment of the early earth, was committed. On the
contrary, there are far too many clues and far too many
suspects. It would be hard to find two investigators who agree
on even the broad outline of events.
• Leslie Orgel (1998)
Origin of life
• Chemical space (Nature
• Chemical space — which encompasses all
possible small organic molecules, including those
present in biological systems — is vast. So vast, in
fact, that so far only a tiny fraction of it has been
explored.
• Chris Dobson (Nature 432, 824 (2004))
• Counterfactual space is too vast?
• Maybe we will never know -- probably not a
very fruitful place to look for signs of
intervention
Irreducible Complexity
Michael Behe (1996)
•Bacterial flagellum, immune system, etc...
are too complex to have evolved
This result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as
one of the greatest achievements in the history of science ... The discovery
[of intelligent design] rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and
Schroedinger, Pasteur and Darwin.”
Complex Specified Information
William Dembski
• CSI -- information that could not have come
there by chance alone?
• e.g. when we see a statue v.s. weathered
rock
• “Law of the conservation of information”
ID and Science
• There are genuine scientific issues e.g.
we don’t understand exactly how the
bacterial flagellum evolves
• The question of information might be
particularly subtle.
Intelligent Design
• Philosophical issues:
• Definition of science (demarcation) ?
• Problems, but why not follow the evidence?
• Theological issues:
• when/why does God intervene?
• miracles?
• Newman/Barth critique
ID and Christians
• Major issues is -- why these miracles?
“And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to
supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks
otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and
power of God” Leibnitz
•Miracles occur to serve God’s redemptive purpose
•Origin, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin etc...
e.g. what is the Biblical rationale for supernatural action
aiding the creation of the flagellum?
ID and Christians
• Most vexing problems for Christians
come from Natural History:
• death before fall
• most species have gone extinct
• It is not clear how ID solves these
problems
ID and Christians
• If one wants to make an apologetic argument from
design, then cosmological ones (fine tuning) are
much safer:
• Science is not nearly as controversial
• counterfactuals much easier to explore
•
We seem to have three choices'... We can dismiss it as happenstance,
we can acclaim it as the workings of providence, or (my preference) we
can conjecture that our universe is a specially favoured domain in a still
vaster multiverse.’ If this multiverse contained every possible set of
laws and conditions, then the existence of our own world with its
particular characteristics would be inevitable.
•
Sir Martin Rees (just 6 numbers) --
ID and Christians
• Major issue: the sirens of populism.
• US state school system (deep feelings)
• example of Scandal?
(a populism that confuses winning supporters
with mastering actually existing situations)
Populism and ID
• Discovery Institute and co: fantastically good popularisers
• websites, blogs, interviews, books: a prodigious output
• Sometimes fail on
• immediatism
• anti-traditionalism (insufficient community of scholars)
• populism leads to habits that lose touch with the “humility principle”
• fast and lose with arguments, hype, and quotations etc...
• For scientists this is enough to discount the argument outright
William Dembski and populism
•www.uncommondescent.com (blog)
•www.designinference.com (main site)
from his own biosketch:
As interest in intelligent design has grown in the wider culture, Dr.
Dembski has assumed the role of public intellectual.
William Dembski and populism
• Intelligent Design:The Bridge Between Science &
Theology, IVP (1999)
• William Dembski is the Isaac Newton of information theory,
and since this is the Age of Information, that makes Dembski
one of the most important thinkers of our time. His "law of
conservation of information" represents a revolutionary
breakthrough. Rob Koons
• For most scientists such statements are red flags
William Dembski: Technical books
• The Design Inference, CUP (1998)
• endorsed by William Wimsatt: “Dembski has written a sparklingly
original book ...”
• No Free Lunch, Roman & Littlefield (2001)
• Anyone who could have succeeded in showing that natural
selection is incapable of generating biological structures according
to standards from mathematics or logic would have constructed a
mathematical proof that would have dwarfed Godel’s famous
Undecideability theorem in importance. ... I can categorically say
that Dembski has surely done no such thing, and I call upon him as
a mathematician to deny and clarify the implications of his
advertising copy. ... William Wimsatt April 4, 2002
Jonathan Wells: Icons of Evolution
•
•
•
•
Jonathan Wells (PhD Yale, PhD Berkeley)
Father's [Rev. Moon] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me
that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of
my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying
Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other
seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the
opportunity to prepare myself for battle.
http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm
“During my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology
graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed
almost everything I read in my textbooks. I knew that the books
contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical
of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought
that most of what I was taught was substantially true”
(preface to “Icons of Evolution, Regeny (2000))
Jonathan Wells: quotations out of
context
•
Henry Gee, Chief Scence Writer for Nature, is even more pessimistic. “No fossil is buried
with its birth certificate”, he wrote in 1999, and “the intervals of time that separate fossils are
so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through
ancestry and descent”
•
Gee (who is a theist) responds: (2001)
1. The Discovery Institute has used unauthorized, selective quotations from my book
IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME to support their outdated, mistaken views.
2. Darwinian evolution by natural selection is taken as a given in IN SEARCH OF DEEP
TIME, and this is made clear several times e.g. on p5 (paperback edition) I write that "if it is
fair to assume that all life on Earth shares a common evolutionary origin..." and then go on
to make clear that this is the assumption I am making throughout the book. For the
Discovery Institute to quote from my book without reference to this is mischievous.
http://www.natcenscied.org/resources/articles/3167_pr90_10152001__gee_responds_10_15_2001.asp
In spite of this, Wells still regularly quotes Gee out of context
Jonathan Wells and
quotations out of context
•
"When I first encountered his [Jonathan Wells] attempts at journalism, I thought he might be
a woefully deficient scholar because his critiques about peppered moth research were full of
errors, but soon it became clear that he was intentionally distorting the literature in my field.
He lavishly dresses his essays in quotations from experts (including some from me) which
are generally taken out of context, and he systematically omits relevant details to make our
conclusions seem ill founded, flawed, or fraudulent.” Bruce Grant
•
On Monday, 11 March 2002, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute
submitted the following Bibliography of Supplementary Resources to the Ohio State Board
of Education. These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and
puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students
should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution. Discovery Institute has made every
effort to ensure that the annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the
publications
NSCE sent copies to many of the authors
•
Jonathan Wells and
quotations out of context
•
"When I first encountered his [Jonathan Wells] attempts at journalism, I thought he might be
a woefully deficient scholar because his critiques about peppered moth research were full of
errors, but soon it became clear that he was intentionally distorting the literature in my field.
He lavishly dresses his essays in quotations from experts (including some from me) which
are generally taken out of context, and he systematically omits relevant details to make our
conclusions seem ill founded, flawed, or fraudulent.” Bruce Grant
•
On Monday, 11 March 2002, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute
submitted the following Bibliography of Supplementary Resources to the Ohio State Board
of Education. These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and
puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students
should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution. The publications are not presented
either as support for the theory of intelligent design, or as indicating that the authors
cited doubt evolution. Discovery Institute has made every effort to ensure that the
annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the publications (red words
added on website later)
Jonathan Wells and
quotations out of context
•
"When I first encountered his [Jonathan Wells] attempts at journalism, I thought he might be
a woefully deficient scholar because his critiques about peppered moth research were full of
errors, but soon it became clear that he was intentionally distorting the literature in my field.
He lavishly dresses his essays in quotations from experts (including some from me) which
are generally taken out of context, and he systematically omits relevant details to make our
conclusions seem ill founded, flawed, or fraudulent.” Bruce Grant
•
On Monday, 11 March 2002, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute
submitted the following Bibliography of Supplementary Resources to the Ohio State Board
of Education. These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and
puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students
should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution. The publications are not presented
either as support for the theory of intelligent design, or as indicating that the authors
cited doubt evolution. Discovery Institute has made every effort to ensure that the
annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the publications. (red
words added on website later)
Eugene V. Koonin (coauthor of [12]): “...the conclusion that this is ‘a hypothesis quite
unexpected on neo-Darwinian (common ancestry) assumptions’ is (i) not taken from our
paper and (ii) not at all compatible with the data or ideas presented in the paper.”etc, etc..
...
Unfortunately, all the evidence suggests that these misquotes do not rest on ignorance
•
•
ID and the sirens of populism
• a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering
actually existing situations -- Noll
• Effect among Christians:
• Many preliminary arguments presented as if well established
• this leads to false confidence
• Ard at ... “What about the information?”
• For lay people it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff
• Use of polemic language and new definitions for words like naturalism
• books like The Case for the Creator by Lee Strobel
• Temptation to “ends justifies means” (Dover, of Pandas & People)
• Energy used to fight public battles instead of investing in careful
research
ID and the sirens of populism
•
a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually
existing situations -- Noll
•
Effect among scientists
•
•
most scientists will see these violations of the humility principle, and throw
out the baby with the bathwater
Even if they do listen, many examples (flagellum, information, etc..., chosen
for populism?) are seen as weak problems by biologists because of tapestry
arguments (e.g. Golemization).
ID and the sirens of populism
•
a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually
existing situations -- Noll
•
What might have been a stimulating new approach, to be evaluated
carefully over time in Christian community, has been hijacked by
polemicists and, ironically, lost touch with the very Christian principles it
was thought to uphold. This tragedy was facilitated by the scandal of
the evangelical mind
biological complexity?
• Basic problems are still unresolved, and will
remain so for a long time.
the key: look carefully at the Bible, e.g.
Oliver Barclay, Science & Christian Belief 18,
49-61 (2006)
-- thanks for listening
•
some recent books that I found helpful: Most are available from
www.cis.org.uk/resources/books/books.shtml
• Francis Collins, The language of God, Free Press (2006)
• Darrel Falk, Coming to Peace With Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and
Biology (IVP, 2004) --Collins and Falk are biologists who write clearly about how their
evangelical faith and their science interact.
• Graeme Finlay, God’s books: Genetics & Genesis TELOS (NZ) (2004) -- Finlay
discusses genetic evidence for evolution
• Ernest Lucas. Can we believe Genesis today? (IVP, 2006) -- an introduction to
interpretation of Genesis and creation.
• Denis Alexander, Rebuilding the Matrix (Lion, 2001) -- a tour de force covering much
of the science/faith debate
• Neil A. Manson (ed.) God and Design: The Teleological Argument and. Modern
Science. (Routledge, 2003).--a good overview of philosophical arguments around
design
• Alister McGrathDawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell
2004) --- an example of a robust response to common anti-Christian arguments used
by popularisers of science -- the focus is on the key theological/philosophical issues
• William Dembski and Michael Ruse (eds), From Darwin to DNA (CUP, 2004) -- a good
overview of the US based ID debate.
• Ronald L. Numbers The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design
(Harvard, 2006) -- the best historical overview of the creationist movement.
--------------------------------
Design in Nature
• Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia
Of Pandas and People
Supreme Court’s 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision ruled
that creationism was not science
Advice from Augustine
In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in
the Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very
different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In
such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our
stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth
justly undermines our position, we too fall with it. We should not
battle for our own interpretation but for the teaching of Holy
Scripture. We should not wish to conform the meaning of Holy
Scripture to our interpretation, but our interpretation to the meaning
of Holy Scripture.
Calvin
• 1534: The whole point of scripture is to bring us a
knowledge of Jesus Christ -- and having come to
know him (and all this implies), we should come to a
halt and not expect to learn more. Scripture provides
us with spectacles through which we may view the
world as God’s creation and self-expression; it does
not, and was never intended, to provide us with an
infallible repository of astronomical and medical
information. The natural sciences are thus effectively
emancipated for theological restrictions.
Advice from C.S. Lewis
When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may
have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of
plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the
first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet for an organism fit to
receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing.
Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power
inherent in itself has produced spirituality.
(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)
Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal radically different
beliefs under an identical form of worlds? Certainly not. For what they agree on is the
substance, and what they differ about is the shadow.
Advice from Schaefer
• We must take ample time, and sometimes this will
mean a long time, to consider whether the apparent
clash between science and revelation means that the
theory set forth by science is wrong or whether we
must reconsider what we thought the Bible says.
• Francis Schaefer
Advice from Westminster
Theological Seminary
The Westminster Confession's doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (1:7) goes hand in hand with
its inspiration, infallibility, and authority. Yet it implies that not all parts of the Scriptures are
equally clear or full. Here we must follow Calvin's great motto that where God makes an end of
teaching, we should make an end of trying to be wise.(11) With Augustine and E. J. Young, the
revered teacher of our senior faculty members, we recognize that the exegetical question of the
length of the days of Genesis 1 may be an issue which cannot be, and therefore is not intended
by God to be, answered in dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes dangerously close to
demanding from God revelation which he has not been pleased to bestow upon us, and
responding to a threat to the biblical world view with weapons that are not crafted from the words
which have proceeded out of the mouth of God..
http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html
Advice from Billy Graham
"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the
Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many
times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't
meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible
is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a
book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I
believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created
man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain
point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not,
does not change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way
God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's
relationship to God.”
• - Billy Graham quoted by David Frost
•
Source: Book - Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (1997, p. 72-74)
YECS
•easiest to rationalise with Genesis
•Motivated by desire to uphold scripture
• Either the Bible is true, or evolution is true (HM Morris: Science
and the Bible)
• This can lead to heated rhetoric
But can't we be Christian evolutionists, they say. Yes, no doubt it is possible to be a Christian
and an evolutionist. Likewise, one can be a Christian thief, or a Christian adulterer, or a Christian
liar! Christians can be inconsistent and illogical about many things, but that doesn't make them
right.
-- HM Morris, 1980, King of Creation, pp.83-84
•Conflict metaphor
Church fathers
• "Now what man of intelligence will believe that the
first and the second and the third day … existed
without the sun and moon and stars?”
• Origen 185 - 254
Calvin on using science
•
As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that Galileo had any direct knowledge of Calvin's writings.
Nevertheless his understanding of the nature of the language used by the Bible when referring to the
natural world is the same as Calvin's as the following quotations from the Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina show.
•
B1. These propositions set down by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes
in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. (p.
181)
•
B2. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to
speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is
concerned. (p. 182)
•
B3. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or
which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon
the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. (p. 182f)
•
B4. ...having arrived at any certainties in physics, we ought to utilize these as the most appropriate aids in
the true exposition of the Bible and in the investigation of those meanings which are necessarily contained
therein, for these must be concordant with demonstrated truths. (p. 183)
•
The first two quotations express the same 'accommodation' understanding of biblical language as Calvin
adopted. The third recognises that, as a result of this, the literal sense of the biblical text may sometimes
be at variance with the scientific understanding of the natural phenomenon described. In the final quotation
Galileo makes the point made by Prof. McKay that one reason why biblical interpreters should take
scientific knowledge into account is that it will help them to recognise when the biblical writers are using the
language of appearance or cultural idioms, and so help them avoid the kind of misinterpretation made by
those who condemned Galileo.
http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/lucas/lecture.html
le
• 1: Isis. 2000 Jun;91(2):283-304.
B. B. Warfield (1851-1921). A biblical inerrantist as evolutionist.
• Livingstone DN, Noll MA.
• School of Geosciences, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
•
The theological doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the intellectual basis for modern creation
science. Yet Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, the theologian
who more than any other defined modern biblical inerrancy, was throughout his life open to the
possibility of evolution and at some points an advocate of the theory. Throughout a long career
Warfield published a number of major papers on these subjects, including studies of Darwin's
religious life, on the theological importance of the age of humanity (none) and the unity of the
human species (much), and on Calvin's understanding of creation as proto-evolutionary. He
also was an engaged reviewer of many of his era's important books by scientists, theologians,
and historians who wrote on scientific research in relation to traditional Christianity. Exploration
of Warfield's writing on science generally and evolution in particular retrieves for historical
consideration an important defender of mediating positions in the supposed war between
science and religion.
James Orr
• One of the original “Fundamentalists”
• There is not a word in the Bible to indicate that in its view death
entered the animal world as a consequence of the Sin of man.
• When you say there is the “six days” and the question whether
those days are meant to be measured by the twenty-four hours
of the sun’s revolution around the earth -- I speak of these things
popularly. It is difficult to see how they should be so measured
when the sun that is to measure them is not introduced until the
fourth day. Do not think that this larger reading of the days is a
new speculation. You find Augustine in early times declaring
that it is hard or altogether impossible to say what fashion these
days are, and Thomas Aquinas, in the middle ages, leaving the
matter an open question.
C.S. Lewis
When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a
vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern
Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final
appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both
mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by
some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality.......
Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal radically different
beliefs under an identical form of worlds? Certainly not. For waht they agree on is the
substance, and what they differ about is the shadow. When one imagines his God seated in a
local heaven above a flat earth, where another sees God and creation in terms of Professor
[Albert North] Whitehead’s philosoph[loosely, process theology], this difference touches precisely
what does not matter.
(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)
Westminster Theological Seminary
http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html
The Westminster Confession's doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (1:7) goes
hand in hand with its inspiration, infallibility, and authority. Yet it implies that
not all parts of the Scriptures are equally clear or full. Here we must follow
Calvin's great motto that where God makes an end of teaching, we should
make an end of trying to be wise.(11) With Augustine and E. J. Young, the
revered teacher of our senior faculty members, we recognize that the
exegetical question of the length of the days of Genesis 1 may be an issue
which cannot be, and therefore is not intended by God to be, answered in
dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes dangerously close to
demanding from God revelation which he has not been pleased to bestow
upon us, and responding to a threat to the biblical world view with weapons
that are not crafted from the words which have proceeded out of the mouth
of God.
• www.discovery.org (Discovery Institute)
• www.arn.org (Access Research
Network)
• http://www.iscid.org/ (International
society of complexity information and
design)