“Theistically Guided” Evolution as God’s Incarnational Work | The BioLogos Forum

Faith & Science Conversation
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I agree that in principle it could be possible, but I don’t expect it to be the case. It’s clear enough that adaptive mutations are the rarest class. There’s no apparent bias in the direction of adaptive mutations - indeed the opposite is true. Still, I don’t think it is possible to demonstrate that all the mutations are random with respect to fitness.

As I said in another comment, you can’t do a God-free control to see how things would work. No experiment, natural or humanly contrived can guarantee that God didn’t do any little miracles, so you have no way to do the definitive experiment or observations. I think ID is driven by the hope that they can “prove” God’s miraculous activity. I agree that design is a good intuition looking at the universe in general, and remembering that we are reasoning from what human design looks like to what divine design looks like, and there’s not much reason to expect them to have that much in common. Also, this is not heaven - there’s no reason to expect perfection.

As usual, I agree with Pascal, in that God is not so interested in compelling the mind as he is in the decision of the will. Faith isn’t unreasonable (I’m not a fideist, who believes that reason has nothing to do with it, or a hyper-fideist who thinks that we should believe against the evidence) but reason is not the whole story in very many of our decisions, and surely not what we do about religious belief or disbelief. I don’t agree with George Murphy on some things, but I did learn from him that natural theology tends to get out of hand, and I think the ID movement reflects that.

As to less rigorous tests of ID predictions, I’m not enough of a population geneticist to be able to assess that. I’m pretty sure that if I was, I wouldn’t invest my time on it. You have to pick your battles, and there is a reason my blog is called The Art of the Soluble (borrowed from Peter Medawar, the Nobel immunologist.)

When you set out to “prove” God’s activity, you’re trying to find a way to compel people to believe. Compulsion is politics, culture war, and the first casualty of war is honesty. The DI has asked me before to sign their manifestos, but I didn’t, because I knew what use they would be put to, and I wanted no part of it.

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Like you, Preston, I don’t think there will ever be evidence for such things-- as you know, I don’t think there is any evidence for any kind of god, and especially not the Christian one. But it seems to me that if (contrary to fact) it were really true that unguided evolution was demonstrably insufficient to produce the observed results, and if “tinkering” were real, with the primary aim of producing man, then the tinkering should leave an observable fingerprint, as I explained in my other comment. Lineages leading to man should have longer branch lengths than other lineages, and the lengths of each lineage should depend inversely on how long it separated from the human lineage. The fact that there is no such fingerprint strongly suggests that there is very little or no tinkering.

Experiments are not the only way to learn about nature. As you say, nature does its own experiments. I agree we can’t ever prove that little miracles didn’t happen, but using the lineage experiments that nature has done, we might be able to prove that they DID happen, if they happened often enough. On the other hand, if we can show that they are so rare that they are undetectable, then we have also shown that we don’t need them to explain what happened.

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Vance, the Neandertals may not have found modern humans all that appealing either - scrawny little nerds fresh out of the U. of Africa and too smart for their own good. :slight_smile:

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@loujost

"… interventions by a god are scientifically detectable in principle."

You keep making statements such as this, and then follow them with

“… I don’t think there is any evidence for any kind of god”.

I cannot help but think you are very confused!

FYI by definition, the God Christians discuss cannot be scientifically (or by any other human device) detected. You may not accept this, but at least show a civilised attitude by accepting that, and then criticise or reject what is a given for Christianity. I am still surprised people take your remarks seriously on this site - this is not a nasty comment but an accurate reflection of the essence of your remarks related to the Christian faith.

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“…this is not a nasty comment…”

OK, no problem.

“FYI by definition, the God Christians discuss cannot be scientifically (or by any other human device) detected”

Tell that to Robin and Ted; I was agreeing with them.

Do you believe the Exodus was real? Then there are thousands of scientifically detectable Egyptian skeletons and chariots buried in the mud in the Reed Sea. I think you believe in special creation of many species. If that had been true, we could conceivably detect too many de novo proteins in each species to be explained by naturalistic evolution; we could detect that gene orderings generally did not follow phylogenetic relationships; we could detect lots of out-of-order fossils; we could detect a lack of biogeographic order (closely related organisms tending to live close to each other); we could detect different, idiosyncratic amino acid codings in many different organisms, etc. Do you believe in the miracles of Jesus? If so, these could have been documented by enough contemporary independent observers that they would have to be taken seriously.

I think all Christians who frequent this site think that their religion makes some empirical claims about the world (not necessarily all the ones I just mentioned, though–you are one of the few who believe in special creation). Empirical claims are, at least in principle, testable.

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I forgot to mention prayer–if Christian prayers were answered often enough, even secular people would notice. Belief in the efficacy of prayer is an empirical claim about the world.

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I appreciate your careful attention to that statement of Robin’s, Lou, but perhaps it wasn’t quite careful enough. In the latter part of the paragraph from which it comes, Robin indicates from his citations what he is really saying. In the context of that paragraph and in context with his expertise, both as a philosopher of science and a philosopher of mind (he has both, not to mention expertise in philosophy of religion),considering classical Darwinian explanations of our ability to form highly abstract understandings of nature that map very well onto our perceptions of nature, he finds them inadequate. This is a philosophical critique of the situation. He’s not substituting God for science; he’s saying that we need to supplement the reductionistic thinking of neo-Darwinism with other ways of thinking. It’s scientisim, not *science, that he finds unsatisfactory.

Note especially his reference to Paul Davies. Are you familiar with any of Davies’ work? To the best of my knowledge, he is not religious in any conventional sense, but at the same time he realizes that our knowledge of the universe as a whole, which includes cosmology (his field) and ourselves as inquirers into it, shouts out for the fundamental importance of mind or intelligence or something akin to it, as an irreducible part of the picture. As an historian of natural philosophy myself, I have tremendous respect for Davies’ work. He’s intellectually honest, very careful with facts, philosophically astute, and deeply insightful.

You might well still say that most biologists don’t agree with such an assessment, but if so I wouldn’t be surprised. Davies takes this deeper than biology (while understanding biology quite well, as far as I can tell from my own quite limited knowledge of biology), asking questions that biologists seem not to want to ask in quite this way. If you know his work at all, I’d be interested to hear what you think.

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@TedDavis

When we are discussing how God guides evolution, why do we seem to ignore the obvious way which God has guided evolution? Everyone knows that the extinction of the dinosaurs made it possible for mammals to emerge from their shadow and become the top of the food chain.

Everyone also should know that the extinction of the dinosaurs had nothing to do with genetic change and everything to do with climate change, that is ecology. Now it is true that mammals were smaller, warm blooded, and better equipped to adapt to the colder climate, but the primary reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs was the disappearance of their ecological niche.

So we have a huge incongruity. The most important event in evolutionary change which allegedly is determined by genetic change is a event which was not genetic change and did not clearly cause genetic change.

However who is to say that God the Creator of the universe did not cause an asteroid hit at the right place and the right time and the right size to make the climate change which had the desired effect.

And what about the Ice Age which also influenced the development of modern humans over against the Neanderthals.

In the closing paragraph of the article entitled Climate Shocks in Discover, Sept 2014, p. 53, we find there is "new evidence for a series of rapid climate cycles and two large shifts that established the African savanna we know today. Some evidence indicates that our most successful forebears had the flexibility to adapt to these changes." I agree.

Another articles in this issue indicate that cooperation within the family and outside the family strongly contributed to this ability to adapt. The ability to adapt to the environment gives humans the ability to dominate our planet. This ability came from the growth of our brain and our ability to think and communicate.

The fact that humans have an evolutionary advantage as the result of our ability to think, communicate, and share prove that the universe favors these abilities and guides life toward them. It should be clear from human history that if we insist on not using these abilities, as it seems common today, we could well become extinct.

When we have a situation where we have two parallel lines of change, we need to examine the connections if any between them. On one hand we have the evolutionary development of life on earth. On the other hand we have the physical development of our planet from a molten ball of iron to the highly diverse landscape and climate that we have today. Maybe evolution has transformed the earth on its own, however it is much more likely that the physical conditions on earth provided the foundation and direction needed for the life to flourish and develop.

Is there evidence that God uses physical conditions to encourage life? That is what God did on the first 4 days. Does God work through history? I was taught that God created just the right environment for the coming of the Messiah, through the Pax Romana, the unique Hellenistic common culture of the world of His day, the building of the new Temple by King Herod, the development of the Pharisee movement, John the Baptister, etc.

Theistically guided is best understood as how do life forms grow and adapt in relationship to the environment God created for them, much as humans do the same.

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Ted, this distinction does not make sense to me. “God did it” could be a scientific explanation if there were evidence for it. Reductionism is open to refutation, and doing so does not require “other ways of knowing”. There is just “knowing” and “not knowing”.

I haven’t read Robin’s thoughts on the evolution of rationality. I don’t see anything problematic about the evolution of rationality; on the contrary, its limitations and characteristics bear the strong fingerprints of its evolutionary origin.

“…our ability to form highly abstract understandings of nature that map very well onto our perceptions of nature…”

That ability has obvious survival value and should be selected for. If the evolutionary view is right, it should be selected for in many species, not just man, and that is what we see in various degrees. This includes lineages such as birds that diverged from the human lineage a very long time ago, so theists can’t account for it by saying that this was a natural spin-off of guiding human evolution towards rationality. Furthermore, our perceptions and intuitions are clearly evolved to reflect the level of reality at which natural selection takes place. Our ability to form intuitions about relativistic or quantum domains is, to put it mildly, very poor. The number of people who have been able to extend reason to that domain are a tiny fraction of humanity, just a few people really. It certainly doesn’t look god-given, or if it is, god is not an equal-opportunity employer.

Why does reasoning work at all? Maybe reality has to be logically consistent. Mathematics is a branch of logic, and permits the drawing out of logical consequences of observations.

I have to do some work now, but may come back to Davies later. I read his cosmology work a long time ago and all I recall now is that it was not convincing or exciting. I strongly disagree that he is very careful with his facts. He is very imaginative but has a very poor “reality filter”. He’s infamous now as one of the coauthors of a bad paper on arsenic-based life forms. Not only is the paper wrong, but his public comments about it (before it was refuted) are filled with wild hyperbole (see the Wikipedia article on him for a discussion).

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Unfortunately, Lou, I will borrow something from Paul Davies, by way of reply: “Survival depends on an appreciation of how the world is, not of any hidden underlying order. Certainly it cannot depend on the hidden order within atomic nuclei, or in black holes, or in subatomic particles that are produced on Earth only inside particle accelerator machines.” (Evidence of Purpose, p. 55)

I think Davies is spot on, while you’re not impressed by his understanding of science. I’m not surprised that we continue to differ, Lou, but I do appreciate that you articulate yourself with clarity. Davies does, too, IMO, and he also offers much to consider.

As a little side note, just for fun, let me say that Davies pronounces his name the same way I do. Hardly anyone seems to know this, but I’ve asked him directly on two occasions (one of them just 13 months ago) and he confirmed my suspicion. He’s Welsh, not American. Every time I go to the UK, I have to tell the hotel clerks to spell my name without the “e”, please. Americans can’t pronounce words correctly, but the Brits can’t spell them correctly. :relaxed:

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Ted, thanks for answering. Davies is right in that quote you give:

“Survival … cannot depend on the hidden order
within atomic nuclei, or in black holes, or in subatomic particles that
are produced on Earth only inside particle accelerator machines.”

and that is why we do not have good intuitions of those things, as I said. Only a handful of people, struggling hard, have been able to make deep discoveries about those realms. And even they often aren’t able to form an intuitive picture of those processes. Our brains evolved to deal with quotidian things, not these, and our forms of thought bear the stamp of this origin. A few people have managed to reach new insights beyond our experience, but this has been extremely difficult and often requires actively suppressing the forms of thought that come most naturally to us. Almost invariably, in physics, we have to fight what our senses and our intuitions tell us. So it seems odd to claim that a god gave us (or rather, a select few of us) these abilities. It looks much more like evolution gave us our abilities, and a few people have managed to push these beyond our ordinary limits.

So I am more impressed by the limitations of our intuitions, which clearly bear the stamp of their evolutionary origins. You and PD, on the other hand, seem more impressed that a few people can go beyond this. Why should this be possible at all? Like I said earlier, it may be that reality has to be logically consistent, and hence amenable to understanding by math, even beyond the range of our experience.

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@loujost

The fact that there is no such fingerprint strongly suggests that there is very little or no tinkering.

Lou,
I do not believe tinkering, but I do believe in guidance. IMHO God has left a fingerprint and this is called the Image of God. The clearest aspect of the fingerprint of God is intelligence. The problem that non-believers have in a non-designed, non-rational universe is determining the Source of human intelligence. In my opinion God can be the only Source since there is no way intelligence can be created by chance and there is no evidence that it was created by chance.

In my previous comments on this blog I describe the way evolution could and did create humans in the Image of God. This is not a God of the Gaps point of view, this is the God of the Logos point of view. Also I point that there is logically gaps in our understanding in terms of the Source of Reality and the End or Purpose of Reality.

One thing puzzles me is that you seem to say that if intelligence is a good survival tool then more species than humans should have that gift, such as birds. You seem to say that birds are not intelligent. Is it possible that many navigate a journey of thousands of miles without intelligence? Also is it possible that they know not to stay in the north during cold winter weather without intelligence?

One thing that modern biology has taught us is that humans have more in common with other species that we in our pride believed. Some blame this pride on theology, but I see human centered philosophy as the more likely culprit for this view. In Genesis 2 God created Man (adam) from the dust of the earth and the woman from the Man. Job said, “From dust I came, and to dust I will return. Blessed be the LORD.”

God gives flora the ability to seek light, water, and nutrients. God gives fauna a neurological system which finds its most complex expression in the human brain and mind. God does not need to tinker to obtain these results, but to guide evolution is all its facets through the earth’s developing ecology.

Some of this process has been outline in the Sept 2014 edition of the Scientific American.

You talk about physics as being counter intuitive, and I take this to mean the quantum world. Much of the problem with quantum physics is that it is the subatomic realm that humans cannot experience and the rules of the macro world do not apply. Science is based on experience and when the experience of the micro world of quantum physics it is hard to understand what is going on.

Without putting quantum physics down we have much to learn in the macro world about how to live with others, which is beyond the ken of the physical sciences. To deny the reality of the macro world because we do not understand fully the micro world would be a very serious mistake.

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One thing puzzles me is that you seem to say that if intelligence is a
good survival tool then more species than humans should have that gift,
such as birds. You seem to say that birds are not intelligent.

Roger, thanks for your comment. I think you misread or I miss-expressed my comment about birds. I was saying that some birds and other non-human animals are indeed quite intelligent, thus showing that intelligence is not a gift from a god to humans to make the imago dei. Intelligence, like most products of evolution, shows a gradient across taxa, and has arisen independently several times, even in some creatures whose brain structures are quite different from ours. Even insects show rudimentary learning and sophisticated navigation, and in some insects the navigation is learned.

I agree that QM is hard to understand because it is outside our everyday experience. That’s why evolution could not help develop our QM intuition, and why we flounder there. It is quite an intellectual struggle to make advances, and we have to suppress our most basic intuitions about reality, because these are mistaken. This is one reason I argue that our intuitions came from evolution and not from a god.

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Here is an interesting new blog post on bee intelligence:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad-science/2015/04/20/inside-the-wonderful-world-of-bee-cognition-where-were-at-now/

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@loujost

Lou,

Thank you for the clarification. We are both share the same view when it comes to God tinkering with genetics. I do not think that I agree with you about QM. QM is a particular aspect of reality which really does not normally impinge on everyday life. The problem we have with QM is

  1. We have incomplete data because we cannot measure movement of sub atomic particles, and
  2. QM is the realm of the strong force, while humans live in the realm of the weak force.

In a sense our intuitions did come from God through evolution, which enables us to adapt to the universe that God created. Science which is also an adaption teaches us not always to trust our assumptions, that which appears to be right, but to double check through careful observation and documentation to make sure what we think is true is actually true.

Thus Darwin thought that Natural Selection was based on competition for scarce resources, but he did not check this out scientifically, or he would have found out this is not the case. Other people have followed in his footsteps so science still do not know how Natural Selection works.

Without God there is no basis for the concept of objective reality outside ourselves. Humans are not the Source of rationality and reality. Humans are not the Source of the Universe. God is the Source of the Reality and the Source of the ability of humans to understand reality, but clearly our understanding of reality while based in reality to some extent is not the same as reality.

The science of evolution is not the same as evolution, nor is our understanding of God the same as God. We must be ready to adjust our ideas about reality and God as we learn more about both through theology and science.

I still do not understand why no one else does not see that the scientific way to guide evolution is through Natural Selection, rather then through Variation.

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Actually Roger the difficulties of QM are not related to the strong force (QM applies to all particles including those not subject to the strong force), nor to the practical difficulty of measuring subatomic particles. Rather, our difficulties with both QM and relativity arise because our mental framework evolved through our interactions with ordinary-sized objects traveling at slow speeds. Reality is far richer than that.

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@loujost

Lou,
You may well be right. I recently discussed this issue with Professor Hans Halverson who agree with you, however as far as I know in the macro world molecules do not act like energy at some times and like matter at other times. Nor do we have time/space entanglement in the macro world.

Where I found his understanding problematic he said that the micro world controls the macro world which is not true. In my understanding based on Emmy Noether’s Symmetry Theorem is that there are numerous different “worlds” that humans live in, including the macro world and the micro world, the physical world, the bio world, and the human worlds, all of which have their own rules, yet work together under the Sovereignty of God to make one universe with many niches.

The richness of reality is based on its many worlds within and beyond the physical world, the rational world, and the spiritual world, not our inability understand the universe we live in.

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Al,
Enjoyed reading this. Very thoughtful and insightful. Now please add in that at its core, the universe is quantum mechanical. Everything is a quantum fluctuation of some type. Random processes obeying the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle on position and momentum, and time and energy.

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@Patrick

It is not the Heisenberg Uncertainty “Principle.” It is the Uncertainty Relation.

And of course QP only applies to quantum particles, not to atoms and particles larger than atoms including you and I.