Evolution
In a mildly-ironic almost-coincidence with JTA’s concern about blinkered fundamentalism, I am once again embroiled in a defence of evolutionary theory against the endless onslaught from creationism.
I have finally identified the difficulty with the arguments in which I am engaged; daily, the fundamentalists can come up to me and ask me how a certain narrow aspect of apparently-improbable evolution came to pass (”How did eggs evolve from live birth or vice-versa?”, “How have we got sexes and asexuality in various creatures and how did one arise from the other?”, “How did this bacterium with this crazy motor mechanism evolve of which none of the constituent parts are of benefit individually?”, “How did bombardier beetles evolve their explosive mixture of chemicals without themselves exploding in the past?”). Daily, I fail to respond. In some cases, I can find an unsatisfactory answer, in others (for example, sexes, the bombardier beetle) I have none.
So why am I still an evolutionist? Creationism explains all of these phenomena without difficulty. The problem is that I don’t see these as being evidence against evolution; it is merely an example of the current limits of the understanding of biology, and the difficulty the human mind has in evaluating non-linear evolutionary processes. Richard Dawkins makes the analogy of constructing an arch from bricks where you are only allowed to move one brick at a time; impossible, as you can never insert the keystone without first watching your initial stages of the arch crumble, unless you first build some kind of scaffold with the bricks, then assemble the arch, and then demolish the scaffolding.
Our forty-seven-cunning-moving-parts bacterium is probably just such an example. The ability to move presumably conferred evolutionary advantage as it slithered pitifully away from predators or other ‘bad stuff’, and successive generations moved faster and faster, eventually replacing the original motion mechanism with something significantly better, but very difficult for the human mind to assimilate ‘one brick at a time’ from the starting point.
My difficulty? That, conversely, it is impossible to sway the creationist. Any empirical observation will be explained away with “well, that’s just how God made it”. My favourite plausibility arguments are the argument by bad design (why did God make us so badly by, for example, making the cells on our retina point away from the incoming light they are positioned to detect?), the argument by common junk DNA (why do we have so much DNA in common with bananas?) and the argument by ‘why bother?’ (why create the Universe six thousand years ago and scatter evidence [not restricted to evolution] that it is much older? Who are you impressing?!).
I will confess that it is impossible to logically distinguish between a Universe created fifteen billion years ago and a Universe created even a microsecond ago; for all I know, I have been brought into existence with all my memories just moments prior to now, and this is no less logical than making that microsecond six thousand years.
To accept this, however, is to deny the fundamental principle of scientific reason, and is ridiculous in much the same way as accepting that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe was in the early twentieth century. We had no direct evidence, such as space probes, but went for the theory that explained the observation so much better. Evolution is a theory similar in its wide-ranging explanation of phenomena and should not be discredited by human incredulity.
The biggest flaw in evolution? That it seems so well-equipped to breed creationists.
January 31st, 2005 at 14:23
When I first became a Christian, creationism was what everyone fancied trying to get me to reject my faith to. (Not sure what they expected - it wouldn’t be a very good faith if I thought - “Oh yeah, evolutionary theory is right, therefore this God that I know must be completely fake. Silly me, I’ll just stop believing… Done.”)
As an empiricist, I have enough difficulty believing in anything based on theory in the first place. To be honest, it’s not my area of interest, so when something green turns red when heated (or microwaved), I just see that as an occurence of green-to-redness. I guess that doesn’t quite work with a physicist’s mindset…
Either way, I run with what I’m sure would be called the ‘relevance theory of epistemic disinterest’ or something by any famous philosophers… If it’s impossible to know whether evolutionary or creationist theory is correct, then it’s not worth striving after an answer. It’s a bit of a cop-out, but there’s no real alternative. At least for me, what’s important is that I know that I exist and I know that God exists. I am assured of the Bible’s infallibility, but whether the Genesis story of creation etc. is literal (I’m sorry, but it’s hard to imagine that sin began with a literal fruit - I’m all up for imagery in that case) or not cannot be of particular importance. We might as well work and search for truth in those areas where it’s actually possible. (Which, without God, seems to imply absolute scepticism. [shrugs] )
(Apologies for my high propensity to use parantheses and ‘…’s - I think in clauses
Right, back to a great fun essay)
January 31st, 2005 at 17:33
I certainly wouldn’t use evolutionary theory to argue against the existence of God. He might’ve started it all off, be it by stirring the primordial soup or lighting the match at the Big Bang. My belief in evolution is not at odds with a belief in God; indeed, I’m sure many Christians would take the elegance of the theory as another example of God’s brilliance in Universe design.
What I object to is that creationists start from a position where they acknowledge the validity of the senses as tools for deriving information, and manage still to not reject creationism.
Science is the logical extension of your instances of “green-to-redness”. We can, if taken slowly enough, go from “I can see and touch this table”-type empirical arguments to the whole of modern science, and it is we physicists who provide the interface between mathematics and reality which all higher (or lower, depending which way up you put your heirachy) sciences trust.
So evolution doesn’t in my opinion decry God. It is entirely logically indistinguishable from an infinite number of other creation theories. What I do object to is people who see and acknowledge the evidence and completely disregard scientific rationale in assembling it.
It is this group at whom my slightly-more-specific exasperation is aimed.
February 1st, 2005 at 01:41
I sat through two tedious years of AGS A-Level Religious Studies lessons, mostly consisting of Skippy arseing about, Martha Burgess preening on the other side of the table and Miss Leigh reading out endless sheets of paper and getting us to highlight them, in the entirely stupid hope that highlighter pens somehow increase the uptake of information.
During these lessons I found out a few things, most interesting of which is that there doesn’t appear to be a single well-respected theory (now or at any point in the past) which attempted to argue the existence of God from Evolution. I suspect this is because it can’t be done.
The problem with Evolution, as I see it, is that “Stuff almost certainly evolved, and the Bible doesn’t mention dinosaurs and stuff.”
This doesn’t strike me as too much of a problem because: a) the first creation story in Genesis may not get the date of the Big Bang right, but it does have a pretty good idea of the order of creation, and, b) if you were God, talking to a bunch of random Jews somewhere left of Mt. Siani (for example) how much kudos are you going to lose by saying “O, and, incidentally, there were some really huge lizards once, but a comet landed and they all died.”
It’s not going to fill ‘em with confidence for the next forty years of wandering, is it?
As I see it, the only time you hit a problem with Evolution, from a Christian perspective, is when you’ve gone and taken the Bible to be a literal account of the Word of God, written by Him as his absolute Truth. Frankly, that doesn’t appeal to me because, firstly, I don’t think God would make quite so many self-contradictions as that and, secondly, the logical extension of that belief is that any translation of the Bible out of the original Hebrew and Greek has distorted the Word of God, and it’s no-longer accurate. (Would you trust a population that uses Microsoft software to accurately translate the precise meanings of an omnipotent being across ancient language and culture?
It’s not a problem for me, because I don’t feel my belief in God is threatened by the theory of evolution, just as I don’t feel it’s threatened by the concept of Creationism. Unfortunately, Creationists, in my experience, tend to feel very threatened by Evolution (possibly because there’s so much evidence for it) so they tend to get pretty cross and defensive about it!
Personally, I rather like the argument we got from some random woman who came in to talk to us about feminist theology (’Other than evolution, explain why an omnibenevolent God would give women monthly periods, and call it clever’) but that might just be me!
Very long comment, I apologise.
February 1st, 2005 at 07:45
No, I rather like that argument too. It’s a more everyday version of the backward-pointing retina cells and the argument by bad design. While we’re at it, given complete freedom to alter the Laws of Physics as you please, why would a God design animals which poo?
But no, I never intended this post as an inference to the existence or lack thereof of any given deity. I just think that big bang theory and evolution give a credible alternative explanation to how stuff got like it is today, and people who reject the vast quantities of evidence and say “but you can’t precisely explain eggs in a way which I’m satisfied with, therefore I’ll reject the theory” (pretty much like someone in the early c20th saying “I think I’ll reject Newtonian gravity because Mercury wobbles slightly, inexplicably”) make me mildly confused. The question of the Ultimate Cause, if cause and effect are even applicable to the Universe as a whole, is an entirely different one.
April 1st, 2005 at 14:15
What is the “Right to Life” anyway?