The election of Barack Obama has brought the issue of fundamental Christianity and its inabilty to interact with modern culture back into the limelight. Much has been made of Dr. Dobson’s vituperative objection to Obama, and his insistence that Obama is not a true believer because of how he interprets the Bible, especially the story of creation in Genesis. On the other side of the issue, Sarah Palin came in for her share of media ridicule for her understanding of a literal six day creation. Now that the election is over, perhaps a discussion of this issue can be held. I invite your response.
The Globe and Mail’s Robert Fulford, in an excellent series of essays entitled The Triumph of Narrative devotes a chapter of this collection to “Master Narratives and the Patterns of History.” He states that “Each society develops a master narrative to which it frequently refers,” and goes on to point out that countries use such narratives as “the only sure source of righteousness and moral certainty available in times of national crisis.”
But it is not just countries that have such narratives. Ideas, whether political, philosophical or religious have master narratives as well. Part of the reason why Christ is able to penetrate all cultures so effectively is the power of His narrative. It is such a compelling story: that the Creator God would step into history to redeem fallen mankind and provide through his sacrifice and triumph over death a way to heaven, is electrifying in any language.
But make no mistake, Evolution has succeeded as a scientific theory not because it answers all the issues regarding the development of life, (Read Michael Behe’s excellent book Darwin’s Black Box for an excellent summary of evolution’s clanging errors), but rather because it also is a compelling story. Evolution is a darn good ‘read’, and Christians, who know first-hand the power of narrative in their own lives, should be the first to recognize that.
However, I am by no means aligning myself with those who fail to see that the Bible oftens wraps spiritual truth in metaphor, analogy and parable, and this does not decrease its historical and empirical truth one bit. If I give Pam flowers, or bring her a cup of coffee in bed in the morning, that is just as much a way of expressing my appreciation and affection for her as saying “I love you.” Strict literalists of Bible interpretation who insist that it cannot be an expression of affection because the words ‘I love you’ weren’t imprinted on the flowers are too simple-minded to have any effective witness in the world.
Yes, of course God created the world. Even Stephen Hawking, an avowed atheist, writes in his A Brief History of Time that the overwhelming weight of evidence points to a divine creator of the universe. But he, unlike Richard Dawkins and many other evolutionary idealogues, is transparent enough to admit that he personally finds this answer objectionable, and is searching for an alternative. However, if the overwhelming evidence is that God created the world, it is equally apparent that God can use any means within His unlimited power to do so. Nor is it deliberately deceptive of Him to tell us briefly the narrative of how this was done using metaphor and analogy. If ‘flower’ can stand as a metaphor for ‘love’, cannot ‘God made’ stand as a metaphor for ‘God used a combination of amino and deoxyribonucleaic acids in a saline/protein environment’?
Narratives have power. God recognizes that, and has wired our brains to be receptive to truths being conveyed in such a manner. After all, isn’t this how Christ conveyed truth in the story of the Prodigal Son, The Good Samaritan and The Wise Steward? To insist that the story of creation be written in technical scientific jargon or rejected as ‘untrue’ is to reject the possibility that there is in fact a God, whose master narrative includes the salvation of mankind through His own loving sacrifice.
Home Thoughts From Abroad 
November 23, 2008 at 4:51 am
I am interested in where you are getting Hawking’s supposed evidence for the designer. Except for one statement about “knowing the mind of God”, which is meant entirely metaphorically, I do not recall anything of the kind in the “Brief History”. It’s been years since I read it, of course. As an astrophysicist/astrobiologist myself, I must say that I do not see any kind of overwhelming evidence for an intelligence behind the scenes, only more of mundane (but not really! they are very exciting!) naturalistic processes. And please, people, before quoting and/or referencing Behe with approval, read the specific critiques against him. He really has no legs to stand on, not even flagellae…
November 23, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Jorg thanks for commenting. It is interesting that you mention flagellae, for Behe notes a relevant fact: “The general professional literature on the bacterial flagellum is about as rich as the literature on the cilium, with thousands of papers published on the subject over the years. This isn’t surprising; the flagellum is a fascinating biophysical system, and flagellated bacteria are medically important. Yet here again, the evolutionary literature is totally missing. Even though we are told that all biology must be seen through the lens of evolution, no scientist has ever published a model to account for the gradual evolution of this extraordinary molecular machine.” (Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 72)
November 23, 2008 at 11:24 pm
I mentioned flagellae for that reason specifically, since possible evolutionary pathways for their development have been elucidated quite well since Behe wrote his first book. The are not so “irreducible”, after all! The funny 9and quite distasteful) thing about it is the fact that Behe continues to claim that flagellae are irreducibly complex, even after being shown that he is incorrect on that. He simply ignores any evidence to the contrary; not a promising trait in a scientist.
November 24, 2008 at 1:00 pm
What consitutes “quite well?” 140 years of evolutionary science came up with not a single explanation (up to the time of Behe’s first edition, there are other editions on the market by now) for the evolutionary processes involved in flagellae and now they are explained “quite well?” Yet you offer no citation or reference to this “quite well” solution.
Don’t get me wrong: I do not discount the possibility that “God made” life means that He made it through evolutionary processes. It is just that I am not so easily pursuaded that the problems facing this theory have all been satisfactorily dealt with. As Behe points out, flagellae are the least of evolution’s problems. He notes regarding the blood clotting cascade, which requires a dizzying number of proteins interacting with each other, that “…. the third problem in the blood coagulation scenario is that it avoids the crucial issues of how much, how fast, when and where. Nothing [theorized] has been said about the amount of clotting material initially available, the strength of the clot that would be formed by a primitive system. the length of time the clot would take to form, what fluid pressure the clot would resist and a hundred other such questions. The absolute and relative values of these and other factors could make any hypothetical system wildly wrong. If only a small amount of fibrogen were available, it would not cover the wound; if a primative fibren formed only a blob, it would not be effective. If the initial action of antithrombin were too fast, or thrombin too slow, or Stuart factor or Christmas factor or antihaemophilic factor (some of the 23 proteins that must all be fully ‘evolved’ and simultaneously present for blood to clot) bound too loosely or too tightly, then the whole system would crash.”
However, Behe is not done, for he goes on to point out that “the most serious and most obvious objection is that natural selection (the engine of evolutionary theory) only works if there is something to select – something that is useful right now, not sometime in the future. If tissue factor does ‘show up’ (as predicted in one attempt to explain the blood-clotting cascade) what happens while it is sitting around with nothing to do? In the next ‘step’ proto-prothrombin would also be twiddling its thumbs until at last a hypothetical thrombin receptor ‘appears’ and fibrinogen ‘falls into place.’ Plasminogin ‘appears’ but its activator TPA ‘appears’ much later. But the situation is actually much worse: if a protein ‘appeared’ in one step with nothing to do, then natural selection would tend to eliminate it. Since it has no function, its loss would not be detrimental, and the production of the gene and protein would cost energy that other organisms aren’t spending. Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection would actually hinder the formation or irreducibly complex systems such as the clotting cascade.”
Behe is relentless, as he goes on to calculate the odds of just one protein and its activator ‘appearing.’ “We calculate the odds of getting TPA alone to be one-tenth to the eigtheenth power; the odds of getting TPA and its activator would be one-tenth to the thirty-sixth power. Such an event would not be expected to happen even if the universe’s ten billion year life were compressed into a single second and re-lived every second for ten billion years.” (Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 93-96)
I have lived long enough to know that while some things in life have to be taken with a certain amount of faith (my wife’s love, my plans for what I will do tomorrow, my relationship with an eternal, loving God), there is a limit to what should be a reasonable leap of faith. The theory of evolution, as presently formulated, requires a monumental amount of faith, and I am not prepared to go there. Only the presence of an Intelligent Designer solves the problems implicit in this theory, and in my view it is long past time there was a renewed dialogue between science and faith on this issue. In my own small way I am seeking to promote that.
November 24, 2008 at 1:02 pm
This debate is interesting to me, at least passively, because its so irrelevant to our daily lives, so unquantifiable, and yet so passionately debated.
The fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, that 6 days was literal, and when God spoke things into existence, they were created without any scientifically observable process (despite the fact that we see nothing in our world now created without a scientifically observable process), to me, hearkens back to the flat earth viewpoint of Christians centuries ago. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue with the theory that the earth was round, the only people that disagreed with him were the uneducated and the fundamental religious. The latter, holding the belief that somehow, if the earth were round, that would disprove the existence of the Creator, putting their faith system at jeopardy.
St. Augustine argued bitterly against the notion of a round earth, likely leaving thousands of subscribers to his teaching totally disillusioned when it turned out he was wrong. Christians made such a big deal out of debating the ’round earth’ theory, that they viewed the pursuit of science as being anti-religious.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth#Early_Christian_Church)
On the other hand, the secular scientist has become so passionate in his attempts to disprove a loving creator, that its become an almost ridiculous religion for them as well. They’ll bravely hold to the most unprovable of theories, and blame random chance for the most intricate of creation, just because they, with as much desperation as their ardently religious Creationist colleagues, are desperate to be right.
(http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-to-an-intelligent-creator)
I think we’d all be in better shape if we’d acknowledge that:
1) This universe we inhabit is vastly more complex and perfect for us to live in than random chance could have created
2) God needn’t explain to us exactly how He put it together. If He did it in a literal six days, great. If six days to Him is 6 million years, that’s not a problem for the message of Christ.
What both sides fail to understand is that the pursuit of science IS the pursuit of God. He arranged the order and complexity and beauty of life, so that we could use our brains and understand it. That the more we understand, the more we realise that creation is greater than we can ever understand.
We shouldn’t hide from science, we should dig into it, because the true scope of God’s power becomes in apparent in the discovery of how He made things work. And we shouldn’t discount a loving creator, because life without a maker, is like a story without an ending… or a beginning.
November 29, 2008 at 6:39 am
Jon really summed it up for me. Brilliantly said.
February 10, 2009 at 2:10 am
I have just been made aware of this site and as I am a colleague of Steve’s on the other side of the debate I would like to enter in.
First, let me state that I have no firm conviction on the existence of a Creator, although I lean to atheism. There are questions which cannot be currently answered by science. Some cannot be answered because we have not had the time, or the resources or the theoretical understanding to deal with them or even to formulate them. Most of these will with time and effort yield, but the existence of a Creator is unlikely to, so we should be each free to come to our own conclusions: but certainly you cannot use science at this time to justify an answer either way.
Behe’s ideas fall into the realm of the miraculous (and I did read the book, Steve, when you lent it to me) although he is knowledgable enough in the science. His ideas are miraculous simply because they indicate that there are complex entities which cannot be explained in terms of simpler ones. The philosophy of science is that all problems are in principle explicable with time and effort, including biochemical ones. Thus a scientist is not likely to like Behe’s approach for philosophical reasons: it would close off so many avenues of research. That, of course, would not matter if Behe were right and some processes are irreducibly complex. But it is actually fairly simple to find explanations on the internet for the processes he sites. I give you here the website of Kenneth Miller (I am sure you will recognize the name, but you shouldn’t be deterred by him being a strong opponent of ID – he is after all a strong Catholic Christian as well). His explanation for a possible evolutionary development of the Clotting Cascade (which you like to cite) is clear and comprehensible: http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/DI/clot/Clotting.html
Keep in mind that to refute the idea irreducible complexity all that is logically needed is a feasible pathway based in current knowledge of biochemistry and genetics: the exact pathway will never be known.
As to probabilities, the calculations as presented are not correct or applicable. The most unlikely event in the whole process is the original synthesis of a self-replicating molecule from precursors. However, in a large “soup” of small molecules, given the chemical bonding rules as we know them and chemical energetics sooner or later a molecule would be built – it wouldn’t require all the small molecules coming together simultaneously which would be improbable to the point of impossibility: rather, if the first “living” molecule required 26 precursors, call them A to Z for convenience, they might first link chemically in pairs, AB, CD, EF and so on and then in pairs again. None of these steps would be prohibitively improbable especially given the times involved. From there variation and differential reproduction take hold: this process never requires multiple elements to come together simultaneously – an existing gene, for that is what the living molecules are, is modified and acts as a template for some new protein. Evolution does not build each new protein or enzyme from the beginning, from 0, but adapts existing models, which is why the probability calculation often quoted is wrong (I know you like Hoyle who it seems introduced this calculation: a brilliant physicist but not so hot in biology). The only point in this process which is random or at least unpredictable is variation in an existing gene or chromosome, by reshuffling of component parts, or duplication of a gene, or mutation and these occur so frequently that cells have evolved sophisticated repair mechanisms
Jon Wise brings makes a point that scientists are desperate. I don’t think so, although science is under attack particularly in America, by more literalist Christians who would censor science where it disagrees with their beliefs. But scientists are interested in the question of origins, naturally, and would like naturalistic explanations. At this point there are several possible explanations for the nature of our universe, that is the setting of certain constants at values that are necessary for life, often referred to as the Anthropic Principle. Possibly these were set this way be God, possibly it is mere chance – the values could have been anything, but at the time of the Big Bang, they settled at just the right values, perhaps the universe is a multiverse, with possibly an infinite number of universes each subtly different, perhaps the universe will go through a potentially infinite number of cycles of Bang and Crunch, with each new cycle having a new, random set of values and we are of course living in one of the cycles in which it is possible for us to live, perhaps, as Lee Smolen of the Perimeter Institute, suggests, black holes within our universe act as progenitors for new universes each with subtly different characteristics. All scientists know that these ideas are not science, they are interesting speculation: no serious scientist would ever say “This is how it was or is” because there is no data. There is no real evidence for any of these hypotheses and likely never will be. Thus origins, the nature of God lie beyond us, and reason and science cannot help us without fact to work on.
My own feeling is somewhat like Jon’s. Science is a means of exploring the nature of God, however one conceives it. If there is a God, then all of Creation is a book for us to read; if not, we should continue to learn in any case.
Personally, I find evolution and quantum mechanics (especially) far more elegant than a set-piece creation. If God made it all in a particular way, and knows all, how boring that must be and pointless, since all the outcomes would already be known. On the other hand, in QM, uncertainty rules, the outcome of any interaction is fundamentally unpredicable, based on current knowledge, let alone all of them. How much more interesting it would be for God to look with curiousity and amazement at the handiwork as it developed.