Posted by I have often commented that it is the arguments of theistic evolutionists, as opposed to those offered by Creationists, that have convinced me that evolution and Christianity can not be reconciled in any reasonable way. A good case in point is Francisco Ayala.
Via Ed Brayton I came across this profile of Ayala from Tuesday’s New York Times. In it we find items such as this:
Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”
Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all.”
Or consider, he said, the “sadism” in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates’ genitals, along with all their other parts.
So far, so good. I’m assuming that a “personal” God refers to an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity. It is certainly true that ID, in the form proposed by the Dembski/Behe crowd, really ratchets up the problem of evil. Behe, in a rare fit of intellectual honesty, admitted this forthrightly in The Edge of Evolution. If you have God constantly intervening to tinker with his creations, a flagellum here a blood clotting cascade there, then all of the nastiness and cruelty of nature is placed right at his feet.
But how does evolution solve the problem?
For the midges, Dr. Ayala said, “it makes evolutionary sense. If you are a male and you have mated, the best thing you can do for your genes is to be eaten.” But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”
That is also the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion” (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). In it, he writes that as a theology student in Spain he had been taught that evolution “provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world” — a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence, despite the existence of evil.
“As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life,””he writes. “They were not a result of a deficient or malevolent design.”
I think it is highly debatable whether floods and drought are a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world. (Note that necessary has to mean logically necessary if this is to serve as a resolution to the problem of evil.) Leaving that aside, how does recognizing awfulness like “predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases” as inevitable consequences of evolution somehow absolve God of responsibility?
God, after all, set the evolutionary process in motion. It was He who decided that the appropriate way to create a species with human-like intelligence was several billion years of evolution by natural selection (helped along by numerous mass extinctions, we should add). If we find it unlikely that a benevolent God would directly create parasites and the rest, why should we find it likely that God would set in motion a process that has parasites as a near-inevitable consequence?
The only way out of this is to argue that in some way God was logically compelled to create through evolution. He grieves regularly over the general awfulness of nature, but accepts it as the price He had to pay to achieve His goals. Ken Miller takes some steps in that direction in Finding Darwin’s God. He writes:
Clearly, many people look at the string of historical contingencies leading to our species as something that diminishes the special nature of humankind. What they fail to appreciate is that the alternative, a strictly determined chain of events in which our emergence was preordained, would require a strictly determinant physical world. In such a place, all events would have predictable outcomes, and the future would be open neither to chance nor independent human action. A world in which we would always evolve is also a world in which we would never be free. (pp. 273)
I’m sorry, but isn’t that paragraph just obvious nonsense? Strict determinism is hardly the necessary consequence of human inevitability. A human baby is the inevitable result of purely material processes playing out during the nine months of pregnancy, but that baby eventually grows up and becomes a free and independent person. God could simply have brought us into existence instantaneously, and then, His creation finished, could have granted us the freedom to explore our world at will.
I find it interesting that Miller’s fellow theistic evolutionist Simon Conway-Morris bases his theological views on precisely the opposite premise. From the preface of his book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe:
Contrary to popular belief, the science of evolution does not belittle us. As I argue, something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability, and our existence also reaffirms our one-ness with the rest of Creation. Nevertheless, the free will we are given allows us to make a choice. Of course, it might all be a glorious accident; but alternatively perhaps now is the time to take some of the implications of evolution and the world in which we find ourselves a little more seriously.
Well, which is it?
Unless Ayala can explain why God felt compelled to create through evolution by natural selection, I’m afraid he has done nothing to resolve the problem of evil.
People like Ayala, Miller and Conway Morris are surely among the best theistic evolution has to offer, yet their arguments represent the crassest sort of desperation and special pleading. Ayala’s argument for why evolution resolves the problem of evil is afflicted with obvious holes. (Lest you think that the Times article was too short for him to develop his argument seriously, let me assure you this is not the case. I have read his book, and he does not provide any additional illumination there.) Miller’s argument is based on an obviously false premise, and even taken it at face value does not explain why Darwinian evolution specifically had to be the mechanism through which God created. Conway Morris’ argument is almost certainly false biologically, but even leaving that aside it leaves us in no better position theologically than the ID folks. If we can not explain why God directly creates nasty creatures, we also can not explain why he sets in motion a process that inevitably leads to nasty creatures.
Why are such intelligent people willing to tie themselves into these knots? Why not simply acknowledge the more likely branch of Conway Morris’ dichotomy? The reason the relentless march of science seems so constantly to menace religion is that we are, indeed, just a glorious accident?
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