Ann Gauger's latest salvo against Dennis Venema's arguments against an original pair of human beings

Faith & Science Conversation
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The “Adaptionist Trap” is something that biologists have found themselves in many times. It is wrong to assume that everything we see in biology is a positive adaptation, and many “just so stories” fall into this trap. It is entirely possible that some features are neutral changes or even slightly deleterious changes that hitched a ride with a much more beneficial change (i.e. spandrels).

However, the danger of planting your flag on a specific hill is that someone may conquer it, as you hint at in your post. While evolutionary psychology may not be that great right now, it may be much better in the future. What then? Pull up the flag and find a new hill to plant it in?

At least to me, drawing any battle line results in a God of the Gaps mentality, where God is found in our ignorance and is chased away once we gain new knowledge. It would seem to me that limiting God to what nature can’t do is unnecessary and dangerous. At the same time, perhaps it is a bit foolish for an atheist to tell Christians what their theology should be. :wink:

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I’m a believer and I think you’re right! We should never use God as a place-holder for scientific ignorance. Especially since the gaps in our scientific knowledge have historically become smaller, which in turn makes God seem irrelevant and even pathetic.

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Agreed; instead of viewing the God of the Gaps as a dangerous attempt at a proof of God’s existence, I view it as His challenge to eliminate an area of current human ignorance. This is how I view the current evidence for the sudden appearance of humankind (as a Great Leap Forward which occurred much more rapidly than can be accounted for by changes in the Homo sapiens genome). God has given humans the intelligence to know that a scientific problem currently exists, and he patiently awaits for science to solve it (perhaps finding an epigenetic mechanism which passes on learned behavior.) My anthropomorphic view is that He is amused at our efforts, especially if anyone thinks these scientific successes somehow undermine a belief in His existence.
Al Leo

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This is a separate topic, but I don’t see how this is the case at all. The Great Leap Forward could more be related to a change in the environment or some new technology instead of some magical tweaking that can never be tested by a Supreme Being. Otherwise though would agree with some of your thinking here.

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I’m absolutely inclined to agree with you. (In fact, I would typically be the one making your points there about God of the Gaps.) I was just struggling to process through what Ann was saying, and to find potentially productive directions for discussion. It bothered me, what she said about her son, as I hadn’t seen it from that perspective before. As you can see from several of my other posts, I typically think it’s more productive to look at how theological and scientific explanations can complement one another rather than be in competition. That’s certainly hard, though, because it does leave one in a place where God cannot be proven rationally and sometimes seems hidden. This position takes more faith, as I see it. But for whatever inscrutable reason, I think this is the world God has put us in.

I think it’s altogether appropriate for you to chime in with your thoughts on these matters, by the way. If you don’t do it here, I’ll face less friendly atheists saying the same thing face to face. =) So thanks.

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@agauger

Wow! I found that sentence to be hugely troubling! That is very much a YEC sentiment.

When some scientific effort doesn’t work out, we have a choice between wondering:

  1. if we have grasped the relevant natural laws sufficiently ,

Vs.

  1. Did this part of nature happen because of a miraculous act of God.

If the answer is the latter, this is not a reason to abandon Evolutionary science. But this is how a YEC interprets I.D.

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I agree. The reason scientists look for natural explanations for natural phenomena is that they would never find these explanations if they didn’t actively look for them. No tobacco plant ever said, “I cause cancer!” And no epileptic ever said, during a seizure, “It’s a problem with my brain!”

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Isn’t it time to think a little more deeply about what worldview you’re commiting to when you throw the “God of the Gaps” explanation at people?

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Some of us think “If you believe in gravity you’re a deist” isn’t a very convincing argument.

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Then “some of us” ought to read more carefully before spouting off.

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Thank you for hearing me.

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Since you asked me to reply, I will. You have badly misrepresented what I said and misrepresented what ID is. So I guess this is how an EC interprets ID. Poorly.

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We know what we’ve read. We’ve read it many times, put many ways, and it’s always the same.

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ECHOECHOecho…

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Hello Jon,

I always appreciate your contributions to the discussion. (Sincerely, as I also said to Ann.) Thanks for piping in.

I can see why my discussion of God’s action being hidden would lead you to think that I’m in the target audience of your article. I suppose that’s understandable. In my defense, the enigma of God’s seeming hiddenness is hardly a problem limited to evolutionary creationists, as everyone from the psalmist(s) to St. John of the Cross will attest.

You don’t know me, but part of my story (which I don’t believe I’ve told here on the Forum) is that my faith was saved from the clutches of a smothering scientific positivism by Lesslie Newbigin’s short, lucid book Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. Many have reviewed this work as being “Polanyi Lite,” referring of course to the Hungarian-British philosopher whose work influenced Kuhn’s. (By the way, I have also read Kuhn, as part of an undergraduate course in the history of science taught by a celebrated Christian astronomer, and I make regular reference to Kuhn in describing my own field.)

It was Newbigin that opened the door for me to celebrate the fact that science doesn’t have all of life’s answers and that I could explore the possibility that, for instance, Scripture could have actually been inspired by God, rather than written by people who just needed to take a little Zyprexa or Wellbutrin (I had Ezekiel particularly in mind…).

To the point, I think your reading of people who use “God of the Gaps” terminology is uncharitable. When I say “God of the gaps,” and I don’t think by any means that I’m the only one, I’m not imagining that science will soon explain everything that there is to explain. Using Polkinghorne’s image, science will not explain that the kettle is boiling because he’s intending to making a pot of tea but only that the water has reached its boiling point (etc.).

What I mean by “God of the Gaps,” rather, is that there are currently gaps in proximate explanations of phenomena that lie within the realm of scientific inquiry, and I don’t think it’s wise to stake our belief in God on those particular gaps. I suppose it never occurred to me that I needed to spell that out, because I thought it was obvious from my broader discussion that ultimate explanations, as well as explanations of the many, many things that do not lie within the realm of scientific inquiry (like, say, a resurrection or two, or even the existence of consciousness), could not possibly be “gaps” that science will soon “fill.”

Furthermore, if you’ve read all my comments (which I would never assume, of course), you’ll know that I allow for the possibility that design could be detectable even within the realm of science. I just haven’t seen it yet, and of course I readily admit that (with zero biology training above the BA-elective level) I am forced to rely on reviews of ID claims by other non-ID biologists, which of course is not without challenges.

On that note, in a comment I started but abandoned because it was already far too long, I actually empathized with Ann for the bind that her movement finds itself in, a sort of stepchild of science and philosophy, because no philosophy journal is going to want to publish an article about the finer points of folding proteins, but no biology journal is going to touch something about intelligent design. This, along with the demonstrably strong anti-ID bias in the biology guild, makes peer review a very difficult bar to clear.

In conclusion, I’m always up for “thinking more deeply” about these matters — that’s why I’m here on the Forum. But I don’t think I’m committing to the worldview that you think I’m committing to, and I don’t think that my use of “God of the Gaps” means what you think I think it means. But I’m always up for hearing your rejoinders.

Thanks again for the iron-sharpening.

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Hi Ann,

Sorry for my late response. I agree that the full flowering of human culture postdates the arrival of true human beings by a long interval, but language is another matter. A race of beings without language would not be truly human. (Ditto for a race of beings without any notion of the supernatural, or without any kind of art at all.)

Here’s a picture of the oldest hand-axes ever discovered, made by early Homo erectus:

It’s not very artistic. I have to say I don’t think you’d need language skills to pick up the art of making these tools. (Later Acheulean hand-axes were more advanced.) As for religion, the oldest suggested date for its emergence appears to be around 300,000 years ago. There is very little evidence of either artwork or
ritual behavior in Lower Paleolithic contexts before about 300,000 years ago:

The latest genetic evidence suggests that the ancestors of modern man, Neandertal man and Denisovan man diverged about 800,000 years ago, or shortly before the Kathu Pan hand-axe was made. If someone could show that a new species of hominin emerged then, who was descended from but more advanced than Homo erectus, then I’d be open to that suggestion for the dawn of true man. But the latest thinking appears to be that Heidelberg man, far from being a common ancestor of the three species, was actually just an early Neandertal, which takes us back to square one.

Any ideas, Ann?

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@agauger,

Here is my prior post:

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@agauger

Wow! I found that sentence to be hugely troubling! That is very much a YEC sentiment.

When some scientific effort doesn’t work out, we have a choice between wondering:

  1. if we have grasped the relevant natural laws sufficiently ,

Vs.

  1. Did this part of nature happen because of a miraculous act of God.

If the answer is the latter, this is not a reason to abandon Evolutionary science. But this is how a YEC interprets I.D.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Would you please explain where I have badly misrepresented what you said?
I quoted a very short sentence. What did you mean to say when you wrote:

“We would also stop wasting money on research that won’t go anywhere because it’s based on [E]volutionary [P]rinciples.”

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@AMWolfe

I wasn’t especially targetting you in particular - just the use of “God of the Gaps” as if it were an argument. If anything I was aiming at those who aren’t interested in the arguments but assume they’ve heard it all before. After all, nobody except the most extreme occasionalist or a lunatic would explain the boiling kettle only in terms of God’s final purpose, let alone his efficient causation: the issue is more subtle than that.

For the most part, ID people (certainly those like Ann Gauger) see signs of design, ie formal and final causation, behind the efficient causation that science can study. In that sense the gap (as my article says) is one that science itself has excluded from its purview. How can “the study of material efficient causes” say anything whatever about immaterial formal or final causes?

My piece also suggests the argument against GoG is legitimate if, as one of your paragraphs says, [quote=“AMWolfe, post:268, topic:36790”]
there are currently gaps in proximate explanations of phenomena that lie within the realm of scientific inquiry [/quote]

The trouble is, to quote your following paragraph, if:

In that case, as soon as even the possibility of such a gap is admitted (denying atheism and deism, I guess) one can’t know in advance what proximate explanations will lie within the realm of science, and which may not. That means any “God of the Gaps” accusation is being made entirely subjectively, based on what you believe is open to science.

As soon as you accept the possibility of divine causation (as Christians do for, say, the resurrection if they don’t for, say, evolution), you are, in principle, seeking to distinguish what is “natural” from what is “designed”. So the accusation of GoG can only really be made if a legitimate (ie demonstrated) scientific explanation has been denied in favour of a miracle. The subjectivity of even that judgement is shown by the atheist who says, “Science shows dead mean don’t rise - your resurrection is a God of the Gaps argument.” And he’s right - you just disagree where the legitimate gaps are - which is a metaphysical disagreement, not a scientific one.

But GoG accusations can’t be made a priori, as they often are, by saying “There is no known natural explanation, but one is bound to be discovered one day.” That’s simply metaphysical naturalism, not science.

Personally, I think the problem disappears once one treats science simply as the study of regular efficient causes, rather than opting for a metaphysical position using indefinable words like “natural”. In that case, you’re just studying regularities of one sort or another, and it doesn’t matter a hoot whether the kettle is considered to boil by natural laws or by God’s occasionalist activity. The maths will be the same.

That leaves those things that aren’t regular - about which science can’t make predictions anyway, in principle - to be assigned to “chance” if you’re an Epicurean, to hidden laws if you’re a Deist, or to God’s governance of his creation if you’re a theist. The observations remain the same whatever the metaphysics.

Maybe you’ll notice that doing that suddenly reveals the “hidden” God, who turns out to be active directly or indirectly in it all.

I’m very glad to hear your story (which I didn’t know). I studied Newbigin in missiology, and Kuhn and Polanyi since I came here - of whom Polanyi is probably the bigger influence in relation to matters like these, in his demonstration of how the human and the subjective can never be separated from the pursuit of science, as positivists of one shade or another fondly suppose.

Thanks in turn for the interaction.

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Hi Jon,

As I played the devil’s advocate with myself after posting, I saw the holes (gaps? :smile: ) in my argument, but I figured I’d let you make the argument, and you did it better than I would have. In particular, let me give an “amen” to all of this…

I appreciate and think I agree with your definition of science as [quote=“Jon_Garvey, post:271, topic:36790”]
the study of regular efficient causes, rather than opting for a metaphysical position using indefinable words like “natural”
[/quote]

— key word here being “regular.”

Perhaps, then, “God of the gaps” is a thorny term because of the difficulty of defining those gaps in advance. This is particularly tricky in the realms of evolutionary psychology (broadly construed), as I mentioned in a previous comment. Honestly, I’ll probably still use the term, just as I use many other fuzzy terms like “language” and “species” and whatnot.

I will say, though, that attributing non-regular causes to God does not solve the problem of divine hiddenness, because we can never be certain of that attribution. We can be reasonably confident (“properly” confident as Newbigin would say) but never certain, and that subjectivity can lead to doubt and struggling faith, depending on the observer and his or her circumstances. Hiddenness remains.

Thanks again, and all the best.

AMW

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Thanks for the reply!

I’m not sure that divine hiddenness is that much different from the uncertainty of all human knowledge - perhaps it’s just more important than most in the scheme of things.

I can be thoroughly convinced of the truth of the gospel (we’ll leave aside God in nature for now), and get a dose of flu or some trivial personal setback, and all the evidence in the world doesn’t stop doubt.

But then, even in science, if you separate “knowledge” from “blind faith”, what you thought you know can be suddenly threatened by the next Kuhnian paradigm shift (or you even experience the dubious psychology of some established consensus dismissing your findings and making you doubt your own evidence.) Scientism removes doubt in exactly the same way fundamentalism does… dangerously.

So treating nature as “evidence for God” seems the wrong way round, to me. If ones worldview is Christian, then that’s the way one ought to develop ones view of nature. If it makes theological sense, that at least reduces one source of doubt.

Jon

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