7 Theological Issues: Evolution 1 Discuss: What are your initial thoughts about evolution and faith? Are they compatible? Why or why not? What is a Christian to do with the theory of evolution? Theory of Evolution: This is a scientific model that claims that the mechanisms of evolution (see below), operating over a long period of time explain common ancestry and the patterns of change which occur over time. Some people today would argue that evolution is just a scientific theory along the same lines as theories about the weather and that it ultimately has nothing to do with questions associated with religion. Others, however, argue that there is a deep linkage between the theory of evolution and religion. Here is how the thinking usually goes: If evolution is true, then Christianity must be false Because evolution is true, then Christianity must be false Because Christianity is true, then evolution must be false 3 Worries along the way: 1. Evolution directly contradicts Scripture 2. Evolution indirectly contradicts Scripture 3. Evolution inevitably leads to a bleak and atheistic worldview that undermines Christianity and erodes morality and human dignity Review: The Context of Darwin s Theory of Evolution By the late 18th-Century, with the development of geology, scientists began to think of the earth as being much older than they had originally considered. This was reinforced by the discovery of fossils, in particular, the fossils of dinosaurs around 1842. 1 This lecture is drawn from many sources, but primarily two: John Lennox, God s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2007), 98-138; and Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3-64.
In the nineteenth-century, the concept of evolution or progressionism was introduced to describe how life-forms changed over time. As early as 1784, Erasmus Darwin (Darwin s grandfather) outlined a theory of how life-forms change through successive adaptations resulting in higher forms of life. Many believed that this was congruent with the concept of Divine Providence. Jean Baptiste Lamarck put forward an early form of evolution before Charles Darwin William Paley introduced the concept of natural theology - that there were designs within creation which pointed to the existence of a Grand Designer. A scientific theory aims to explain what a person observes. For Darwin, it was the existence of what are known as vestigial structures, that is parts of a body that has no obvious function that really caught his attention. Darwin, while critical of some aspects of Christianity, never does embrace atheism (though towards the end of his life, he described himself as an agnostic). Darwin also struggled with the problem of evil especially with the amount of suffering he witnessed in the world when he travelled on the Beagle. And yet, with the second edition of Origin of the Species being published, Darwin put in three significant quotations which suggest a more complex picture of how he understood his theory as it related to questions of faith: Events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws. William Whewell What is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once. Joseph Butler [Nobody should think] that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God s word, or in the book of God s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficiency in both. Roger Bacon Three Core Principles to Evolution: 1. Variation - when living things reproduce, there is variation 2. Selection - some of the differences in your children - some will be helpful, some will be not so helpful. This gives an advantage over generations.
3. Continuation - when living things reproduce, there is continuity. There is variation, but not too much. That s it. That s the basis for evolutionary theory. Taking DNA in consideration: 1. Through reproduction, through environmental influences, through mutations, there is a shuffling of the genetic material from generation to generation 2. Some of those variations are harmful to the offspring and some are advantageous leading to slightly higher reproduction 3. Advantageous variations gets passed on to the next generation and become more common in the population Everything alive has been shaped by these three principles. More Definitions... 1. Change, Development, Variation this simply describes change without implying what kind of mechanism or intelligence lay behind this change. 2. Microevolution - small changes will take place in species caused by the mechanisms of evolution laid out above. Over decades or centuries, these changes add up allowing species to adapt to a changing environment and sometimes even splitting and forming into two or more species. 3. Macroevolution this refers to large-scale innovation and the coming into existence of new organs, structures and qualitatively new genetic material. "No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature...no vital forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature." 4. Artificial selection in plant and animal breeding involves a lot of intelligent input. Not an unguided process at all. Stephen Jay Gould 5. Molecular evolution the emergence of the living cell from non-living materials (not therefore a Darwinian process in the strict sense, but more the result of the neo-darwinian synthesis). It attempts to answer the question: How does life begin? 6. Evolutionism a worldview and ideology which, among other things, holds to the conclusions which proponents of the theory of evolution come to regarding God and
faith. Evolutionism asserts that there is no Creator who cares for the world, humans arose through natural processes without guidance or input from God, there is no higher purpose to life, there is no absolute morality. All life exists due to blind, random chance. "Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution...[these biological discoveries] make it impossible to accept any system...that assumes a master plan of creation." Jacques Monod A couple observations: In evolutionism, what is understood as random - which technically means "unpredictable" (no scientist can predict when a mutation will happen or what form it will take) is put forward as implying "a lack of meaning or purpose." This is clearly an ideological input rather than a scientific one. This is essentially a worldview belief that mutations in evolution are "blind" and therefore purposeless. But is this what random really means? Discussion: Looking at these different pictures of evolution, if someone asked you if you believed in evolution, how would you answer this question? Where Christians Agree and Disagree about Evolution 2 1. Young-earth Creationism a. Accept microevolution b. Say that the earth is young c. Reject that the fossil record shows a pattern of change over time d. Reject common ancestry e. Reject the theory of evolution f. Reject evolutionism 2. Progressive Creationism a. Accept microevolution b. Say that the earth is old c. Accept that the fossil record shows a pattern of change over time d. Are split on the question of common ancestry e. Reject the theory of evolution as a complete model for biological history, saying that while some evolution did happen, God must have miraculously guided or intervened at various points f. Reject evolutionism 2 Cited from Deborah B. Haarsma & Loren D. Haarsma, Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids: Faith Alive Christian Resources, 2011), 187-188.
3. Theistic evolution (Evolutionary Creationism) a. Accept microevolution b. Say that the earth is old c. Accept that the fossil record shows a pattern of change over time d. Accept common ancestry e. Accept the theory of evolution as a scientific model f. Reject evolutionism What Evolution is and is not Natural selection is not creative it is a weeding out process that leaves stronger offspring Natural Selection is made from already existing entities it is not describing a creative process Natural Selection has no innovative capacity it eliminates or maintains what exists Natural Selection doesn t purport to explain the origin of parts, innovation, or morphological organization (modification or loss of parts) Natural selection, by its very nature, does not create novelty. John Lennox This contradicts Dawkins assertion that natural selection accounts for the form and existence of all things What is the extent of microevolution? Questions 1. Is macroevolution (large morphological changes or speciation) simply the cumulative outcome of microevolutionary mechanisms? Or does macroevolution require some different mechanism? (John Lennox, 103) 2. Can evolution explain not only the variation in say, finch beak lengths and superbugs but also account for the existence of finches and bacteria in the first place? 3. Where are the boundaries between microevolution and macroevolution? Is it simply the same process but with different time scales? Microevolution looks at adaptions that concern survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. Therefore, though Darwin s famous work is entitled, Origin of the Species, the origin of the species, from an evolutionary perspective, is still elusive. There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time; there is also no empirical evidence that this happens. John Maynard Smith & E. Szathmary (both Darwinists)
What about Genetic Mutation? The vast majority of mutations observed in the laboratory have deleterious effects. Lennox (God s Undertaker, 107) If the mutations were random, the chances that 5 non-deleterious mutations [that is, beneficial] could occur (it is unlikely that fewer than 5 genes could be involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure unknown to the organism) is 1 in 10 to the power of 15 (million billion). And yet Daniel Dennett writes that Darwin s Dangerous Idea is that every feature of the world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction. But, basically his argument (along with Richard Dawkins ) is tantamount to saying that blind, unguided natural selection is not astronomically improbable. Therefore, the argument looks like this: P is not astronomically improbable Therefore P Needless to say, this is not an impressive argument. Why macroevolution struggles to be fact Process is unobservable nobody has seen birds come out of non-birds Not only is the process unobservable, it cannot be an observation that is repeatable (unlike microevolution) Macroevolution and molecular evolution are not open to the methods of inductive science and therefore, we must use the same tools we use when looking at, say, history. And that s ok and even valid, but we just need to be clear on its limits and possibilities. Well, as common sense would suggest, the Darwinian theory is correct in the small, but not in the large. Rabbits come from other slightly different rabbits, not from either [primeval] soup or potatoes. Where they come from in the first place is a problem yet to be solved, like much else of a cosmic scale. Sir Fred Hoyle, Astrophysicist and mathematician
What say the fossil records? It is interesting to note that some of Darwin s strongest objectors from the outset were palaeontologists. There seems to be a noticeable absence of the transitional forms in the fossil record. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology. Stephen Jay Gould What does the fossil record show? 1. Stasis. Most species disappear looking pretty much the same as they appeared 2. Sudden Appearance. Species doesn t appear gradually, but at once and fully formed. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is the idea that long periods of stasis are broken sporadically by sudden and large macroevolutionary jumps. But, again, what caused these jumps? Common Ancestry? Connected with the overall theory of Darwinian evolution is the common ancestry thesis, that is, we all have one common family tree. It is the theory that life originated at only one place on earth, and that all subsequent life is related by descent to those original living creatures. This thesis essentially argues that we are all cousins of each other horses, bats, bacteria, trees and even poison ivy. Why not suppose that life has originated in more than one place, so that we needn t all be cousins? This suggestion is occasionally made, but the usual idea is that life originated just once if only because of the astounding difficulty in seeing how it could have originated (by exclusively natural processes) at all. Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Lies, 9. A genealogical tree can often be constructed on a computer based on the structure of the DNA sequences in a collection of organisms. Often this is used to show a full common ancestry of all living things. Does this point us to common descent? Zoologist Mark Ridley makes an important point when he writes, The simple fact that species can be classified hierarchically into genera, families, and so on, is not an argument for evolution. It is possible to classify any set of objects into a hierarchy, whether their variation is evolutionary or not. Again, this is not so much an argument to dispute evolution but rather to nuance what is actually being put forward in regards to common ancestry.
The Origin of Life Amino acids make up the building blocks of life, but how did they arise? In 1952, Stanley Miller conducted a famous experiment and passed electrical charges through a chemical mixture simulating what was thought to be the atmosphere of the early earth. In the end, this experiment produced all but one of the 20 amino acids necessary for life. Problems have emerged though: Consensus on how earth s atmosphere was composed has changed. Now, it seems that the atmosphere of the early earth would have been hostile to the formation of amino acids The formation of protein from amino acids is an extremely complex process. Making a protein simply by injecting energy is rather like exploding a stick of dynamite under a pile of bricks and expecting it to form a house. You may liberate enough energy to raise the bricks, but without coupling the energy to the bricks in a controlled and ordered way, there is little hope of producing anything other than a chaotic mess. Paul Davies Blind chance will not do the job of organizing the building blocks of life in a way that produces life Are some systems Irreducibly Complex? To be irreducibly complex means a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. Michael Behe (Darwin s Black Box, 39) Michael Behe argues that complex structures and phenomena could not have come to be through a Darwinian gradual step-by-step evolutionary process. Further, Behe argues that there is no publication in scientific literature that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even how it may have occurred. How did complex structures come to be?
Genetics In the area of genetics, again we need to make a very important distinction, namely, the information-bearing DNA macromolecule is not life itself, but plays a fundamental role in the whole business of life. Stores information that is needed to build proteins into a functional organism Unguided natural processes do not generate language-type information found in RNA and DNA. The information requires a source. Any adequate explanation for the existence of the DNA-coded database and for the prodigious information storage and processing capabilities of the living cell must involve a source of information that transcends the basic physical and chemical materials out of which the cell is constructed. John Lennox (Seven Days that Divide the World, 174) Genome consist of a complete set of genes. They are very large. The DNA of an E. coli bacterium is about four million letters long. The human genome is over 3.5 billion letters long and would fill a whole library. The actual length of the DNA tightly coiled in a single cell of the human body is roughly 2 meters. The total length of DNA in a human body is 20 trillion meters. Human genome contains only 30000 40000 genes There are some genes to account for the incredible complexity of our inherited characteristics, let alone the differences between humans and say, plants. Classical science, with its preferences for reduction to a few controlling factors of causality, was triumphantly successful for relatively simple systems like planetary motion and the periodic table of the elements. But irreducibly complex systems that is, most of the interesting phenomena of biology, human society and history cannot be so explained. We need new philosophies and models, and these must come from a union of the humanities and the sciences as traditionally defined. Stephen Jay Gould A chimp may share 98% of its DNA with ourselves but it is not 98% human: it is not human at all it is a chimp. And does the fact that we have genes in common with a mouse or a banana, say anything about human nature? Some claim that genes will tell us what we really are. The idea is absurd. Steve Jones, geneticist Having seen how DNA shores and manipulates tremendous amounts of information and uses this information to control life, we are left with one big question: what created DNA was it perhaps the power, thinking and will of a supreme being that created this self-replicating basis of all life? Amir Aczel, mathematician
The Bible, Theistic Evolution and the Question of Origins According to Genesis 1, God has carried out a series of creation acts which came to an end on Day 7 when He rested. An implication of the Sabbath is that God continues to sustain His work of creation. Jesus says in Matthew 5:45, For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. God is both creator and sustainer of all things. We see these roles attributed to Jesus Christ. Paul writes, For by him all things were created and In him all things hold together. (Col. 1:16-17; Hebrews 1:2,3). Christianity differs from deism in that deism argues that an Unmoved Mover got things moving and then interfered in things no more. Christianity, on the other hand, proclaims that God is provident is maintaining what He brought into existence. However, it is the Christian contention that God is active in His creation that causes many scientists and biologists concern. For, the idea that God interferes with or intervenes in natural processes is unpalatable. For Theistic Evolutionists, God gave the universe certain laws and these laws themselves are sufficient to explain all that we see and experience today. Theistic Evolution argues: 1. God causes the universe to come into being 2. God sets the laws of physics and the fine-tuned initial conditions 3. God sustains the universe in being 4. The universe develops and life subsequently emerges without any more special discrete supernatural input from God, until God creates human beings 5. At a particular moment, God specially conferred his image on a hominid that had already emerged from the gradual evolutionary process. 3 Questions Why shouldn t God make several intentional creative acts in history of the universe (eg origin of life, humans) that are distinctive and that differ from what normally happens in a universe governed by natural laws? 1. First off, we can believe that God specially caused the Big Bang. 2. Secondly, we believe that the origin of human life involved some kind of supernatural discontinuity. 3. Thirdly, as Christians, along with God s role in creation, we believe that there have been recent singularities of God, namely, the incarnation and resurrection 3 John Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 2011), 163.
of Jesus Christ. These events are physical, but do not fall into the explanatory power of natural science. So then, what reason is there to say that God must not be involved in other points of creation? If we can agree with three major singularities creation, incarnation, and resurrection, why should we object to there being a few other singularities especially if there is both scientific and biblical evidence for them? Does creation solely imply that God causes the universe to exist and sustains it by introducing laws? It certainly would include this, but why should our understanding of the term creation preclude sequences of specific creative acts from God? Or let's go even further. Why should we even envision God as intervening instead of actively sustaining His creation. God is not one who periodically steps in and does something to His creation and then steps away. Genesis 1 points out clearly that life does not emerge from non-life. God gets involved directly and speaks His Word and life happens. Science underlines this point. There is an immense gulf between life and non-life. It is not a difference of degree, but of kind. Therefore: We are suggesting that the Creator s good materials cannot bring life into existence without additional direct input from the Creator. What's more, this input is ongoing, as God sustains His creation. Where does this leave us? In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, diversity. In all things, charity Christians who advocate different responses to evolution need not break their unity as believers, but continue to proclaim and live out the Kingdom of God If we present only two alternatives, for example, young-earth creationism or atheistic evolutionism, we may inadvertently cause people to not only turn away from a career in science, but more seriously turn away from God. The alternatives in how we approach our faith can be seen in these two ways: 1. Set the Boundaries: What are the boundaries to our faith? Who s in and who s out?
2. Reach for the Core: What are the key truths at the core of our faith? It takes God a long time to get us to stop thinking that unless everyone sees things exactly as we do, they must be wrong. That is never God's view. There is only one true liberty -- the liberty of Jesus at work in our conscience enabling us to do what is right. Don't get impatient with others. Remember how God dealt with you -- with patience and with gentleness. But never water down the truth of God. Let it have its way and never apologize for it. Jesus said, "Go... and make disciples..." (Matthew 28:19), not, "Make converts to your own thoughts and opinions." - Oswald Chambers 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.???????? Perhaps it is better to teach about a range of Christian positions on evolution, encouraging Christians to weigh the evidence and make choices. Discuss: Some Christians might say that God wouldn't use random mutations because such a system would be messy and disorderly. Others might say that God could select the outcome of every mutation and still others that it's amazingly beautiful that God crafted a system in which random mutations lead to well-adapted plants and animals. What do you think?