Right. Hence the carefully worded paragraph: “Please note that several people on this list had complex ideas about evolution, which cannot be reduced into a single quote. Some were skeptical about the strength of the science, or had questions about how evolution could fit with Christian doctrine. I’m not claiming that their views are exactly the same as those of BioLogos. But they all affirm that God’s creative power could be expressed through an evolutionary process. None of them see an intrinsic conflict between evolutionary science and Christian faith.”
And it isn’t even like Dennis’ view is the only “Biologos view” anyway. Christians have differing opinions about the extent God’s sovereignty, design, and creative will interact with the natural process of evolution.
Do you think all of them believed in guided photosynthesis or unguided photosynthesis?
Put differently: I don’t know exactly what each person thought about divine action and creation, but I do believe that asking the question in the way in which you asked it is unhelpful.
I think we can make a distinction between the normal operations of nature, such as photosynthesis, which follow a law like pattern, and the supposed stochastic events that the current scientific view insists was how evolution occurred.
If God or other beings (C.S. Lewis thought that Satan had a lot to do with it) guided the events of evolution, this would be contrary to the current scientific view.
I’m willing to believe that God could have used a stochastic process (though to me it looks like he didn’t always do so). I suspect that most of the people on your list wouldn’t be as wiling. This is important. For example, you could include Michael Behe on your list. He accepts common descent (he even argues for it in The Edge of Evolution) and natural selection. He is even willing to give a large role to random mutations. He’s just not willing to buy the idea that random mutations can explain all of evolution.
So do you want to include Michael Behe on your list?
Do you consider him a “famous Christian”? Just curious. I wouldn’t put him at the same level of name recognition as C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, or Pope Francis.
I would put him at the same level of “famous Christian” as Francis Collins. And given that Behe is usually contrasted with Collins and BioLogos, wouldn’t it be a feather in your cap to point out to everybody that he is an Evolutionist?
But Francis Collins wasn’t highlighted in this article.
Unless you are talking about the list of people that influenced Brad personally mentioned here: “How did I change my mind about evolution? … The list of these Christians includes Francis Collins, Tim Keller, John Walton, and N.T. Wright, among many others.”
But that is a personal list, not a generic “famous Christians who accept evolution” list.
The list in the article is B.B. Warfield, Karl Barth, Billy Graham, C.S. Lewis, John Stott, Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis. I don’t really see Michael Behe fitting in with that list.
Evolution is emphatically not a “completely stochastic process”, nor have I advocated it as such. Bilbo, you need to read my posts on natural selection and / or convergent evolution again, both of which are non-stochastic parts of evolution.
You’re right. For the purpose of brevity only I ignored that part. But unless you are willing to assign a very large role to convergence, I don’t think most of the “famous” Christians in the above list would be comfortable with the part you assign to randomness.
You’re right. Behe isn’t that famous. On the other hand, do you think Brad would put Behe on that list if he was that famous? Or would the fact that Behe is an advocate of Intelligent Design mean that Behe would forever be excluded, even though he accepts most of evolutionary theory?
I suspect the latter. But then I suspect most of the “famous” people on Brad’s list would be more comfortable with guided evolution, as opposed to one where random mutation played the major role. And that means they would be closer to Behe’s position as opposed to current scientific opinion.
As I noted in my comment about Billy Graham, which I’m sure also applies to the others on this list, involvement in the origins debate is not what any of them are largely known for. Whereas speaking for myself, I never would have heard of Michael Behe except for the origins debate.
This is a good example of the line of thinking I find unhelpful. You are dividing nature into “normal/law-like” and “stochastic” parts. That seems exceptionally hard to apply to nature in a consistent way. Are mutations and natural selection a normal or non-normal part of nature? How about weather?
Second, you indicate that science can tell us the sort of processes that a divine being can/cannot (or does/does not) “guide.” This reminds me of a line I hear frequently from ID folks: “God cannot guide an unguided process.” How exactly can science tell us what an “unguided process” is? Wouldn’t a much better response—especially from those supposedly concerned about the metaphysical overreach of the sciences—be to say, “science is not equipped to tell us what sorts of processes God can or cannot guide, and if it does, that’s a metaphysical overreach”?
So, funny story. I actually attended the same homeschool group as Michael Behe’s children, for several years. I have a newspaper clipping of me standing with Behe’s son Leo accepting a prize for the Homeschool Spelling Bee. I idolized Michael Behe during my ID days. He came to the homeschool group a couple of times and I got to talk with him about how stupid evolutionists were (and thank him for helping me realize that).
It wasn’t until I read Darwin’s Black Box in High School that I had the foggiest idea that Behe accepted Common Ancestry. I remember exactly where I was when I read it for the first time, and being shocked and confused because why would someone like Behe believe something as stupid as “macro-evolution”? And I think the fact that it took me several years in the ID movement to realize that Behe accepted common ancestry, is pretty telling.
But the main reason Michael Behe isn’t on the list is because he is not a leading theologian, Church leader, or apologist, which also ruled out Francis Collins.
First, for some reason the leadership here at BioLogos keeps insisting, even after a decade of being corrected, that ID is all about proving that God designed life. It isn’t. Science accepts the idea of looking for intelligent causes when it comes to SETI by making a distinction between natural and intelligent causes. An electromagnetic emission from space having too narrow a bandwidth is immediately suspect of being caused by an intelligent source, instead of a natural source. ID doesn’t claim to be able to tell the difference between natural and supernatural causes. It just claims to use the same sort of criteria as other sciences use to tell the difference between natural and intelligent causes.
Second, yes, the modern scientific community is able to overstep its metaphysical bounds, by resorting to Occam’s Razor. Can the event be explained by randomness? Then there is no need to suppose the event is guided. So unguided evolution is taught. If people want to continue to believe it is guided, even though they have no evidence that it is, the scientific community can’t stop them. But they better keep their beliefs out of the scientific community.
Third, science is able to make predictions about nature by averaging out large numbers of stochastic events. But when it comes to single stochastic events in the past, it is not able to make predictions. And if it does make correct predictions, then we suspect the event in question is not stochastic. Thus, it is right and proper to make a distinction between how nature operates and describing unique stochastic events in the past.
Fourth, regardless of what Behe might have said to your homeschool group, he publicly wrote in DBB that he accepted common descent. And he argued for common descent in EoE. I understand that the ID community would like to cover this up. I suspect that they get a lot of their support from YEC Christians and would prefer the truth about Behe not be known. But then, I think that you would prefer that the truth about Behe’s public, published views on evolution not be known, also. It’s much easier to vilify the man if you don’t mention how much he has in common with you. For proof, I merely refer you to Dennis Venema’s review of EoE, which gave the impression that Behe didn’t accept, much less argued for common descent. I find the hypocrisy of both groups rather tedious.
Even if Behe were “famous” in the sense you mean it, I doubt very much that you would want to point out to people that he believes in evolution. Prove me wrong. Write an article pointing out how much Behe agrees with BioLogos.
Personally, I use Behe and Tim Keller as an examples of people who accept common descent all the time when I am talking to people in the homeschool world. They are trusted figures there and sometimes pointing that out makes people less hostile to the idea of Christians accepting evolutionary theory. But most of the time I get the shocked and confused reaction Brad described. Or people chalk it up to Behe being Catholic, which is a black mark in many conservative Evangelical’s minds and explains why he can’t totally be trusted on matters of theology. Tim Keller they don’t quite know what to do with other than assume he got corrupted by all those New York liberals he hangs out with.
Pardon me, but if all you wanted to do was talk about your hobby horse of ID, why didn’t you just start a new thread? This is only ever so tangentially related to the actual list of actually famous Christians who accept some form of evolutionary theory. (Besides, threads with “ID” in the title always seem to get tons of traffic, so it would be to your advantage anyway, right?)
Why would you suspect this? Do you know Brad personally, that gives you somehow the right to impugn his motives as your brother in Christ? I think you’re being quite uncharitable. So, I understand you find one of Dennis’s reviews hypocritical and itself uncharitable, and that gives you the right to paint Brad with the same brush in return. This seems to be your reasoning. But isn’t that precisely what you’re railing ID critics for, when they paint Behe with a YEC brush?
@Lstrite,
Lisa, I have seen quite often the ID movement referred to as “ID Creationists”, or similar, which will often be interpreted as Young Earth Creationist. Michael Behe clearly accepts deep time and common descent so he is definitely not a Young Earth Creationist. However he has concluded that Neo-Darwinian mechanisms can’t explain common descent, and you can read his books for a full explanation of how he came to that conclusion.
If you want Lisa to see this, I recommend you tag her username in your comment with the @ sign. Her part of the thread is from well over a year ago, so she’s probably not checking it regularly anymore. Brad just moved the more recent Behe discussion of the past few days onto the tail end of Lisa’s thread because it fit better there than it did with a list of famous Christian pastors and theologians who accept evolution.
I don’t know exactly what @Bilbo is referring to, but to my best recollection I’ve never reviewed either of Behe’s books. I do mention them briefly in reviews of Stephen Meyer’s work. I’m not sure why Bilbo thinks those brief comments are misleading about Behe and common ancestry, but I don’t know what specific comments he has in mind. A brief comment about Behe’s work is not going to delve into minor details - and common ancestry is very much a minor detail in Behe’s work. It’s barely mentioned at all, and only to dismiss it as trivial. So yes, Behe accepts common ancestry, but his work is focused on trying to refute the mechanisms within it.
The problem is that the physical laws you are talking about are inherently stochastic. Photosynthesis occurs at the quantum level where the chances of a photon striking chlorophyll molecules is stochastic, as is the entire chain of biochemical reactions that give rise to carbohydrates after that point. The laws of thermodynamics are the poster child for stochastic processes, and they govern both photosynthesis of carbohydrates and their metabolism in us humans.
Behe seems to be a mixed bag. He seems to argue that some mutations would have been too unlikely to have happened. However, Behe has yet to really find such a mutation, at least a specific one. Overall, Behe seems to be much closer to the BioLogos side of the spectrum than the YEC/OEC side of the spectrum. It would be interesting to hear what Behe has to say about BioLogos and the overall position that christians within BioLogos have taken.
