In science we use a concept called parsimony which is similar to Occam’s Razor. It boils down to not inventing supernatural causes when natural explanations are sufficient to explain the process, and only including natural processes that are sufficient to explain the observations.
Once again, the lottery is a good example. If the odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 100 million it isn’t surprising if someone wins if 150 million people bought a ticket. Random chance is sufficient to explain the outcome. Does this mean God is not involved in some way? No.
At one point while we were writing the Integrate curriculum, I pointed out that none of the CQ’s directly addressed, “What is EC?” and we needed one for the students. I wrote a short draft that was expanded into this CQ:
I once heard that as a comment on quantum physics to a student who was struggling with the idea that orderly behavior can emerge from basic randomness. This was from a professor who had attended lectures by Stephen Hawking and whose ‘explanation’ of how the universe began was “There was nothing, and it began to spin” (to which a student once objected that the statement was ridiculous, and to that the professor asked, “You think that God can’t make nothing spin?”; in turn the student objected, “That doesn’t make sense!” and the professor replied, “Not to you, maybe not to anyone human”, raising his eyebrows, tilting his head, and giving a tiny shrug).
Last year sometime I was talking with someone who objected to the Gospel, saying, “That makes no sense!” I replied, “Exactly – no one would have made it up”. “But they were primitive!” “That doesn’t mean they were boneheads.”
But it’s not really about probability is it? By definition it’s possible that a winning ticket will be picked in a lottery. But dead bodies dont rise by natural means. It is intrinsically impossible in nature. My point is perhaps the same applies to life itself. You could wait trillions of years and life would not start. It takes, by definition, a divine ‘spark’.
It is about probability. In fact, probabilities (i.e. statistics) underpin a massive part of science. The basic form of a scientific hypothesis is “if my idea is true, then you will see A and you will not see B”. In the case of the lottery, if we hypothesize that the winners are chosen by random chance then we could predict how many winners there will be over a set number of drawings and set number of tickets sold. We then see how the results match the predictions.
Science isn’t observing bodies rising from the dead, so it isn’t something science can really comment on. With science, it starts with a set of reproducible and regular observations. I think this is an important part of explaining how Evolutionary Creationists (ECs) approach these questions, at least according to my understanding from interactions on these forums. Some people accuse ECs of rejecting the idea of miracles. This isn’t true. ECs believe in miracles, including the Resurrection and the other miracles described in the Bible. These are irregular and sporadic events that science just can’t tackle. These are matters of faith, not science. The same isn’t true of evolution and biology. We have plenty of regular, objective, and repeatable data to work from. However, we don’t have evidence for how life first emerged on Earth, so it exists in gray area.
I think most ECs shy away from God of the Gaps explanations.
‘ECs believe in miracles, including the Resurrection and the other miracles described in the Bible. These are irregular and sporadic events that science just can’t tackle. These are matters of faith, not science.’
The beginning of life is probably irregular and sporadic. If the resurrection of Lazarus actually happened as a fact of history, within the space-time continuum, has science nothing to say about it? If not, then perhaps in the end science will have nothing to say about the beginning of life, as it turns out there is no naturalistic explanation. I dont think it’s unreasonable to say that is a possibility.
It probably is. What would be interesting is if life started in other places in our solar system, such as on Mars or one many moons that are suspected of having large water oceans. If life did start independently in these different places then we would expect to see different genetic systems. But I agree with you, there isn’t any evidence for science to dig into where it concerns the beginning of life on Earth.
The best we can do is see if life emerged in other places, and see if there are chemical pathways that can lead to life.
What objective, empirical data do they have to work from? Ultimately, the goal of science is to explain what we observe in nature. If something isn’t observed then science doesn’t have what it needs. At least with the beginning of life, we have a fossil record to work from so we have a good idea of when life first emerged (which was pretty early in Earth’s history).
If we insert God into the gaps in our knowledge then God will get smaller and smaller the more we learn about nature. That’s the danger most ECs see in the God of the Gaps argument. It’s the same problem Dennis Venema sees when it comes to abiogenesis.
"Personally, I am reluctant to ascribe to miracle what is not yet well studied scientifically, since more work may reveal a “natural” explanation "–Dennis Venema
‘What objective, empirical data do they have to work from? Ultimately, the goal of science is to explain what we observe in nature. If something isn’t observed then science doesn’t have what it needs.’
Perhaps. Although noone actually observed Jesus being resurrected, to quote All The President’s Men:
'If you go to bed and there’s no snow,
and you wake up and there’s snow…
…you can say it snowed,
although you didn’t see it.’
The resurrection is a reasonable if surprising explanation, particularly for the beginning of the church. Other ‘logical’ explanations do not make sense. I agree it is probably subjective but then truth has sometimes only subjective evidence. One could argue science is not purely objective as it is humans ‘doing’ science and who may therefore draw different conclusions from the evidence. And of course noone has observed the beginning of life on earth and I suspect noone will observe the beginning of new life, without intervention, human or otherwise. Which also raises the question - will humans simply continue into eternity with the belief that life started ‘naturally’ when there are no observations and no good evidence of such? Per your quote from Venema, ‘may reveal’ but what if it never does?
I am open to the possibility that life may have started ‘naturally’, as you will notice I often used the word perhaps in my postings. I am pushing back on the insistence that it did. To quote again ‘life finds a way’, perhaps but only once it has started in the first place.
You appear to think there is a bright line between non-life and life. So what do you consider to be “life?” There is a gray area between organic chemicals and self-replicating RNA/DNA.
good question. I tend to think of organic chemicals as the building blocks of life rather than life itself. Perhaps a functioning cell? Maybe a biologist would like to comment.
For example, how crystals form in cooling lava – it’s freaky that quantum processes are involved, but they are!
Maybe not as dramatically as the fact that fusion in the sun’s core is totally a matter of quantum behavior, but it’s still there, and quantum behavior is by its very nature a matter of probabilities.
But the fact that numbers are no chosen by random chance is also a factor, yes?
A report from a revival in Indonesia comes to mind: an entire village affirmed that one among them had been dead but was raised again, and a scientist was asked to comment. He said essentially that (1) he hadn’t been present to make any observations and take notes, and (2) since the person at present showed no signs of having been dead, there was nothing for him to investigate.
That’s an impressive display of sticking to what science can speak about!
Interestingly, a Cambridge scholar I met did a statistical analysis of the frequency of miracles as recorded in the Bible and reached some notable conclusions, two of them being that there are no times when miracles can be ruled out, yet the closer in time one is to a major redemptive event the more likely one is to experience or observe a miracle. He got a lot of flack for applying statistics to scripture, but the results were actually very informative!
Not really – the scientist involved in the miracle I noted in Indonesia got it pretty much right.
I hold that there is no naturalistic explanation, but I hold that on a naturalistic basis. OTOH, I cannot deny that the argument that among billions of galaxies with quadrillions of stars and at least trillions of rocky planets, Earth just might be the place that got lucky has a certain potency.
In fact I read an article back in 2023 where a cosmologist asked the question of if a natural beginning of life is extremely improbable, how big a universe would be required to expect it to happen at least once, and he arrived at a universe slightly more heavily populated in stars and planets than we presently observe – a result that he found surprising and leaves me in wonder.
YHWH-Elohim forms the Sun and it begins to shine.
Gabriel: Father Yahweh, the pressure and temperature in the core of that aren’t high enough to cause fusion and give light!
YHWH-ELohim: Right, Gabe, but watch this–
Poof! < quantum mechanics >
God is everywhere/everywhen, so He’s already in the gaps – no insertion needed. The key is to recognize that science can push God aside no more than art critics can push the artist aside.
Nice – and not the first time I’ve seen that quoted in a theological context.
You consider the possibility, or the probability, of our Earth being the one place, among the billions of places in the Universe, lucky in having the right conditions for life. But if we are considering whether life is a result of special super-natural action, then “the right conditions” are not needed. The supernatural makes life regardless of the natural restraints.
If the appearance of life needs supernatural action on Earth, then pointing to the billions of places making it seem likely that another place is Earth-like - it is irrevelant, We cannot say when, where, how, or why the supernatural acts in making life appear - or not.
I am not a scientist, just an interested layerson,but ISTM that it would be more productive in the search for other life, to spend time in investigating more places on Earth, deep in the oceans, under icecaps, and deep in the ground Might we find varieties of life, perhaps other than the three domains, or even totally unrelated forms, with a different begining? It might tell us about possibilities of complexity other than life, or help us to understand what life is. It would be epensive, but ISTM cheaper than rockets. Or, who knows, it might even turn up reasons to say that there is no natural origin of life?
We have found life in the oddest places here on Earth, such as deep underground. However, every organism we find uses the same basic metabolic pathways and genetic molecules that all life uses (e.g. codon usage). It could be we will some day find a species that is different, but it isn’t expected at the moment.
It’s chemistry all the way down as far as we can see within the limits of science. Vitalism was once a thing, but we discovered that we can synthesize the same molecules life uses, the first being urea if memory serves. Since then, vitalism has taken on more of a faith based role where the soul is considered separately from the physical body.
The whole point of the exercise was asking how big the universe needed to be to have just one place where life would appear. The astounding thing is that the guy’s result was a universe close to the size of what we see.
A nice aspect of that is that it gives an answer to the question, “Why did God make such a big universe if we’re the only ones in it?”, which links to the fine-tuning argument.
It also does not make the Earth “lucky”, it makes it inevitable: the universe was the right size to get one place where life would show up, and Earth is the place where it did. That doesn’t make Earth “lucky” any more than knowing that a winning lottery ticket has been sold and saying that someone out there has that winning ticket – since the ticket was sold, the probability of someone having it is 100%.
I don’t understand the question, “Why did God make such a big universe if we’re the only ones in it?” It seems to ask for the constraints that the supernatural operates under. Rather than that the constraints that occasioned the appearance of life were created by God.
It sort of starts as an argument against God inasmuch as it is suggesting a waste of effort. If the answer is that it is a natural conseequenceof creaton that might suffice, but it still seems sort of iinadequate. If the answer is that we are not unique but practicalities make interaction impossible then it becomes an aspect of God that He wanted more variety than one world could provide.
On a more pragmatic level, for a long time, the distances between areas on this earth were not traverable so the existance of other Nations or peoples was hypathetic at best. Genesis would seem to suggest that it was not even hypathetic, but never even considered. Perhaps one day we will traverse such vast distances? And to what end? Early settlers did God little favours depite claiming to be Christian. Even if we do not do it first there is no certainy that visitors from afar woud not behave the same as we did when “finding” America.
The net result is still hypathetics. An interesting thing to consider but until or unless proven , of little practical use. (Perhaps some people think the same of God Himself?)