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Origin of the Species
Comparing Hostage-Takers
Philip E. Johnson
Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley
[In this article Johnson puts forward a case
for theism. He rejects Biblical authority, but his stand is more consistent
than that of many who claim to respect the Scriptures but accept scientific
orthodoxy as a higher authority. He says he has no doubt that God could have
created by fiat, but identifies himself as a theistic evolutionist. One might
wonder why a creator with the power to work in a far more efficient way did not
do so. Nevertheless, his insights into the naturalistic establishment and
Christian compromise are valuable. PRS]
Howard Van Till, Davis Young and Clarence Menninga are science professors from
Calvin College who have recently collaborated on a book titled Science Held
Hostage. For convenience I will refer to Van Till as if he were sole
author, which is appropriate because he personally wrote the chapters with which
I am most concerned and he has advanced the same line of reasoning in his
earlier book, The Fourth Day. Van Till's most important premise is that
science properly understood is autonomous, in the sense that it can be carried
on without regard to the personal religious or philosophical beliefs of
scientists. Some scientists may be theists who regard the physical world as
subject to the governance of God, and others may be materialists who regard God
as a virtually meaningless concept, but all can participate in science without
either compromising their beliefs about God or imposing them upon the scientific
enterprise.
Autonomous science is possible, according to Van Till, because science does not
deal with either the "ultimate origin" of the physical universe or its
"governance." Except when it is being held hostage, science restricts itself to
describing regular patterns of behavior in the physical universe which are the
same for all observers. Whether to attribute these patterns to a nature which is
as autonomous as the science which describes it, or to a nature which is "theonomous"
(i.e. God-governed) is a question outside the domain of science.
From that premise Van Till goes on to explain that the autonomy of science is
being threatened by two sets of ideologues. These hostage-takers are on the one
hand "scientific creationists" such as Henry Morris and Duane Gish, and on the
other hand "evolutionary naturalists" such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and
(occasionally) the evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma. According to Van
Till, what these two groups have in common is that both have tried to capture
the authority of science as support for an extra-scientific religion or
philosophical position, and both have thereby failed to respect the appropriate
boundaries of the scientific enterprise.
It is important to be clear about how the categories are defined. Van Till
defines scientific creationism as the doctrine that it is possible to employ
scientific research to confirm that the universe was created recently and in a
mature form. To put it more specifically, a creationist is a Biblical literalist
who tries to use scientific evidence to show that creation took place in a
single week a few thousand years ago. This use of the term is common, and
therefore understandable, but it confuses analysis by implying that the
fundamental point at issue is not whether God creates but how long a time He
took to do it.
In the most important sense a creationist is a person who believes in creation,
and that includes people who believe that Genesis is a myth and that creation
involved a process called evolution and consumed billions of years. The
essential point is that the Creator actually did something important to control
the process by, for example, applying intelligence to make one thing happen
rather than another. A "First Cause" who merely sets the natural mechanism in
motion and then leaves everything to chance is not a Creator, just as a person
who sets an automobile in motion downhill but neither steers nor brakes is not a
driver. As we shall see, this definitional point is not a quibble, but an
essential step towards understanding what is most fundamentally in dispute.
Van Till defines naturalism as the philosophical and religious doctrine which
asserts that "nothing but" the material world exists, there being no divine
being capable of influencing physical phenomena. Evolutionary naturalism asserts
more specifically that the scientific concept of evolution provides a sufficient
basis for rejecting the religious idea that natural processes are governed by
God. Some other authors use the terms "materialism" and "scientific materialism"
to express the same concepts. The point of the modifier "scientific" (or
"evolutionary") is to imply that the philosophical position (naturalism or
creationism) can be proved by scientific investigation.
Understanding the terms is so important that I ought to provide a concrete
illustration of what naturalism means in practice. George Gaylord Simpson was
one of the founders of neo-Darwinism, a pure evolutionary naturalist, and a
gifted writer who made his points clearly. The following passage from Simpson's
The Meaning of Evolution is a typical statement of evolutionary
naturalism:
"Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that
all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by
purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word,
materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of
differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern
conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the
known processes of heredity. ...Man is the result of a purposeless and
natural process that did not have him in mind." [rev. ed. 1967, p. 344-45]
Naturalism is not necessarily opposed to "the existence of God," provided that
God is understood as a First Cause and not as a Creator. Here again is Simpson:
"There is neither need nor excuse for postulation of nonmaterial
intervention in the origin of life, the rise of man, or any other part of
the long history of the material cosmos. Yet the origin of that cosmos and
the causal principles of its history remain unexplained and inaccessible to
science. Here is hidden the First Cause sought by theology and philosophy.
The First Cause is not known and I suspect it will never be known to living
man. We may, if we are so inclined, worship it in our own ways, but we
certainly do not comprehend it." [p.279]
A problem with Van Till's even-handed condemnation of young-earth creationists
and evolutionary naturalists is that the latter group includes some of the most
influential leaders of the scientific community, and the former consists
entirely of outsiders whose ability to affect science in the slightest degree,
let alone hold it hostage, is doubtful. That Gish and Morris are misguided in
pursuing the young earth thesis I do not dispute, and I can understand that
science professors at Christian colleges may feel threatened by fundamentalist
influence among trustees and alumni. Otherwise, however, the scientific
creationists are thoroughly marginalized figures who are excluded by law from
the public schools and who appear in the secular media only as targets of
attack.
Carl Sagan, by contrast, is a powerful leader of the scientific establishment as
well as an effective propagandist for naturalism with vast public resources at
his disposal. His television series Cosmos has been seen by millions of
school-children, with strong official endorsement. When those children heard
that "The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be," they learned
that the most authoritative voice of science endorses naturalism. The National
Academy of Sciences is not likely to pass a resolution correcting this
misunderstanding, if it is a misunderstanding. The imbalance of power and
prestige suggests the question: If Henry Morris and Carl Sagan are both holding
science hostage, why does the hostage object in one case and not in the other?
I infer that Van Till's answer would be that evolutionary naturalists who
maintain a high scientific reputation practice good science, up to the point
where they start to draw explicit conclusions about theological questions such
as ultimate origins and governance. The young-earth creationists distort the
scientific evidence to make it appear supportive of their Biblically-derived
position, whereas the evolutionary naturalists paint the scientific picture
accurately and then draw unwarranted philo-sophical conclusions. To satisfy Van
Till, Gish and Morris would have to abandon altogether their futile effort to
reconcile the scientific evidence with literal Genesis. Sagan and Simpson would
only have to restrain themselves from stating explicitly their belief that the
evidence of science discredits the notion that the universe and its living
organisms owe their being in any meaningful sense to the plan of a Creator.
The question I want to examine is whether the influence of naturalist philosophy
upon science is really as limited as Van Till implies it to be, or whether
scientists under the influence of naturalism have distorted the scientific
description of the physical universe to support their philosophy, much as the
scientific creationists have done. To explore that question I must confront
evolutionary naturalism with its true opposite, which I will call theism.
As a theist I believe that God exists and that God creates. Although I insist
that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new
forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead
employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection. I
have no preconceived idea about how long God took to produce the universe and
all its forms of life, and no objection to the possibility that the process was
sufficiently gradual to be termed "evolution." Most importantly, I agree that
the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific
evidence --experiments, fossil studies and the like. Given these
presuppositions, what should be my attitude towards the contemporary
neo-Darwinist theory of evolution?
The final sentence of the first passage from Simpson provides as explicit a
denial of God's governance as one could ask for. "Man is the result of a
purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." The first two
sentences provide the picture of physical reality that supports that conclusion,
and the picture is simply a summary of neo-Darwinism. All the observable
phenomena of life can be explained as products of naturalistic processes,
especially chance mutation and natural selection. For Simpson it follows that
after the ultimate beginning there was never anything for a Creator to do, and
it is pointless to discuss such a superfluous entity about whom we can have no
knowledge. If those of us who understand Simpson's logic continue to call
ourselves theists, is it because we think that God actually did something to
bring us into being or because we are content to believe in a God who never
seems to have made a difference?
In commenting upon a statement by Douglas Futuyma that is very similar to what I
have quoted from Simpson, Van Till insists that "from a theological perspective"
God predestined humans to come into existence, and that "human beings, on the
Christian view, are not solely the product of these [material] mechanisms." So
far I agree, but what did God ever actually do to bring this predestined plan to
completion? When things get to this point naturalists do not usually try to
prove that God does not exist; they are content to rest upon the observation
that this shadowy being never seems to have found gainful employment. They speak
of an "infinitely lazy" Creator, a deity whose style of governance is the
ultimate in "hands off" management.
Van Till writes that evolutionary biologists are not necessarily hostile to "the
idea of God." There is no need for them to be. To philosophical materialists God
is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea.
Compassionate evolutionary naturalists are not hostile to the human weakness
that causes people to cling to outmoded concepts like "God," because they
recognize that it takes more courage than most people can summon to embrace
fully the naturalistic implications of contemporary science. As long as they are
assured that the theism in "theistic evolution" is reserved for private life,
and has no application in science (where we talk about what really happened),
they see no need to fight.
Let the theist threaten to make trouble, however, as by proposing that the
cell's genetic information may be the product of pre-existing intelligence
rather than random processes, and the profession will quickly close ranks and
repel the intrusion. Some theists in evolutionary science acquiesce to these
tacit rules and retain a personal faith while accepting a thoroughly
naturalistic picture of physical reality. I respect such persons for their
tenacity but I am not surprised that there are very few of them, and very many
evolutionary naturalists, among persons who take neo-Darwinism seriously.
There is a better way to deal with the problem, but it requires that we screw up
our courage to challenge not just the explicit philosophical conclusions of
neo-Darwinists, but also the far more important implicit philosophical premises
that enable them to produce a theory that explains all life as the product of
material mechanisms. Philosophical naturalism is not merely a gratuitous
conclusion that neo-Darwinists draw from their scientific theory; rather, it is
the powerful metaphysical basis of the theory itself. How do Darwinists know
that natural selection, in combination with random mutations, can produce such
apparent wonders of design as the wing, the eye, and the brain? How do they know
that preexisting intelligence was not required to produce life in the first
place, to guide unicellular life in its progress to more complex forms, and to
develop eventually the human mind? In fact Darwinists do not know these things
by experiment, or by any other form of scientific investigation. They know them
by philosophical presupposition, because their naturalism tells them that nature
cannot be affected by anything outside nature. Darwinism is not merely a support
for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.
If the matter were considered open to question, there would be plenty of reason
to doubt that natural selection has the vast creative powers Darwinists
attribute to it. What we actually know from scientific investigation is
information like the following: artificial selection can produce diverse
varieties of dogs and monstrous fruitfly variants; the relative frequency of
dark and light peppered moths in a population was observed to vary as the trees
became lighter and darker; differential survival causes bacterial populations to
develop resistance to antibiotics; living forms share a common biochemical basis
and genetic code; new body plans tend to appear in the fossil record fully
formed with no record of the transitional intermediates that should connect them
to presumed ancestors; and finally, the prevailing pattern of fossil species is
stasis, meaning that observed evolutionary change is limited and directionless.
These observations and others like them do not compel the conclusion that random
genetic change and selection can or did produce a flower, a moth, and a human
from a common microbial ancestor. When Darwinists affirm that natural selection
has the kind of creative power formerly attributed to God, they are describing
not what the evidence shows but what their naturalistic philosophy demands.
Unless the material Cosmos really is all there is or ever was, there is no
reason to believe that the naturalistic alternative to creation is true. No
wonder Henry Morris gets brickbats, and Carl Sagan gets money to carry the
message to schoolchildren.
In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the
scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have
been infinitely more effective in getting away with it. The philosophical
confusion that has permitted the kidnapping to succeed is a misunderstanding
over what it means to say that science is limited by its methods to studying
natural or material processes. No doubt it is true that science cannot study
God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything
that scientists want to study. Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent
limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon:
because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot
know cannot be real. Genetic information cannot have an intelligent source
because the source might be the kind of thing science cannot examine.
Philosophical naturalists therefore know a priori that life and mind are the
product of random chemical combinations, and the only task for science is to try
out the various possibilities and discover which is the least unlikely.
What I have just described is sometimes called scientism, which is another name
for scientific materialism or evolutionary naturalism. Scientism is vulnerable
to criticism when it is stated explicitly, but it can be extremely potent when
it is silently assumed as "the scientific outlook" and then used as a basis for
generating descriptions which appear to be the independent products of
autonomous science. That is the technique employed in the National Academy of
Sciences' 1984 pamphlet "Science and Creationism," which assumes naturalism
throughout and then blurs the religious implications with the bland reassurance
that there is no "irreconcilable conflict" between religion and science because
"many religious leaders and scientists accept evolution on scientific grounds
without relinquishing their belief in religious principles." When evolutionary
naturalists say something like that, they mean that some people reconcile the
conflict by basing their religion on evolution rather than God (Dobzhansky,
Julian Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin), and other religious people are untroubled
by self-contradiction.
I hope I have made it sufficiently clear that nothing in this analysis is meant
to be anything but respectful towards Van Till and other scientists who have
been trying their best to be faithful both to God and to the integrity of the
scientific method. Christians who are scientifically inclined have been faced
with an apparently hopeless dilemma: either accept a rigid Biblical literalism
or accept a science whose assumptions are fundamentally naturalistic, whether
those naturalistic assumptions are explicit or implicit. What any sensible
person wants to do in such a situation is to find a third alternative, and it is
in that spirit that Van Till attempts to separate an autonomous realm of science
from its association with naturalism.
The intention is admirable, and Van Till's critique of naturalism is excellent
as far as it goes, but to do the job we need to cut deeper. Much of what passes
for empirical knowledge, at least with regard to neo-Darwinist evolutionary
biology, is established not by scientific testing but by deduction from
naturalistic philosophy. When a Darwinist insists that "science knows" that
natural selection can craft complex organs that look as if they were the
products of intelligent design, he is saying that differential survival is
naturalistic philosophy's most plausible substitute for that unacceptable
intelligent designer. And when George Gaylord Simpson spelled out the conclusion
that man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have
him in mind, he was not saying anything that was not already implicit in his
description of the power of natural selection.
This paper was published in the first issue of The Pascal Centre Notebook
(Redeemer College, Ancaster, Ontario).
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