"If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for," says biologist.
Ronald Bailey | April 29, 2008, 10:29am
The anti-evolution "documentary" Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (which alerts viewers to its subject matter with its subtitle), opened little more than a week ago. Supporters are claiming that its opening weekend is either "the second largest gross box office receipts on opening weekend of any political documentary ever" and/or it "is now #26 on the all-time box office list of documentaries. Among those documentaries, only Fahrenheit 9/11 and Tupac The Resurection had better opening weekends." Total receipts for the weekend: $3.2 million.
One the movie's shticks is to grill atheist advocates of biological evolution as a way to warn viewers about the corrosive effects on science on religious belief. But are faith and reason incompatible? Not all scientists think so.
The New York Times has a nice profile of evolutionary biologist, National Academy of Sciences member, and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Francisco Ayala who spends a great deal of time trying to explain evolutionary biology to the public. From the Times profile:
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.
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.”
Despite his religious training, the Times notes:
Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer.
My review of Expelled here. Some of my thoughts on the two non-overlapping magisteria argument. The Times' Ayala profile here.
Addendum: Charles Darwin was also troubled by the cruelty of nature. He cited the example of the ichneumon wasp which paralyzes caterpillars live and lays its eggs in them. Its offspring then dine off the tasty live caterpillars as they mature. In his 1860 letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote:
"With respect to the theological view of the question: This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance."
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Fluffy | April 29, 2008, 12:19pm | #
The existence of pain (in humans or animals) doesnt imply sadism. The pain involved (in say a female insect eating her mate) isnt pain for pain's sake, there is a reason behind it.
No, silly. No one is saying that the insects are sadists. The insects are just being themselves. They are the ones with a "reason" to inflict the pain.
The one with no reason to inflict the pain is God. God is the one who is a sadist, if every creature existing reflects his intended design. If he can create whatever he wants, every aspect of creation reflects part of his choice. He could have designed those insects in some other way and decided not to.
Or, as any little sunday school kid could tell you, another option is that we live in a Fallen world, and that death, and sickness happen as a result of a broken universe. Perhaps these broken cosmic shards are not the way everything was intended. They show enough design to give us a picture of how things might have been.
We're talking about reconciling the available evidence to a theory of creation, and whether intelligent design is more compatible with traditional views of God than evolution is.
That means we have to deal with the fossil record we've got, and not some fantasy one that we would have had if the fall hadn't happened.
The intelligent designers and the creationists look at the fossil record and look at biology and say, "We see here evidence that all this was designed by an intelligent creator."
If that intelligent creator had created something different, that should also be part of the available evidence for intelligent design. Where are the fossils of all the perfect animals that came temporally before the fall?
The whole point here is that grasping on to intelligent design theory makes the Christian template of God less likely, not more. Because if you accept the premises of intelligent design, a different God than the Christian one seems to fit that act of creation best.
The reason this is amusing is because the entire reason intelligent design theory exists is as a post hoc rationalization to attempt to protect belief in the Christian God.
grylliade | April 29, 2008, 12:46pm | #
I'm not against evolution per se. The evidence for design is resoundingly clear to me.
Which is odd, because the evidence
against design is resoundingly clear to me. Were humans better designed for walking upright before the fall? Were we less prone to hernias?
Did mammals have lungs more like birds', which are more efficient for respiration? If so, why did birds retain their better lungs after the fall, while mammals lost theirs?
Why do birds have two wings and two legs? Wouldn't it have made more sense to design birds with four legs and two wings? For that matter, why do ostriches and other flightless birds retain their wings? Why are they birds at all, rather than mammals adapted for their ecological niche?
Why don't most mammals regrow their teeth, as sharks do? This would seem to be a useful thing for
any animal to have. Why do sharks have it, but mammals don't?
Why don't fish and reptiles have better hearts? I mean, having a four-chambered heart certainly wouldn't
hurt them, even if it evidently isn't absolutely necessary.
Frankly, to explain all these bad designs as evidence of a fallen world seems to strain credulity. Did ostriches lack wings in the Garden, and then grow them afterwards? Did fish and reptiles have four-chambered hearts, then lose them afterwards?
To stereotype religious people who believe in intelligent design (the vast majority of scientists and philosophers in history) as knuckle-dragging idiots, is to me silly, sad, and shows a level of paranoia that makes me wonder about the bigots' supreme certainty.
Most religious people who believed in intelligent design didn't have all the facts. To believe in intelligent design pre-Darwin was just common sense; all the evidence wasn't available to them. Even after Darwin, there was an excuse for not believing in evolution for a while.
And even now, you don't have to believe in evolution. If you want to believe in intelligent design, go right ahead. If you want to believe in young-earth creationism, fine by me. No skin off my nose. Just don't try to tell me it's
science, because it just isn't. There is no evidence that ID proponents will allow to count against it. It doesn't explain the available facts as well as evolution, even if evolution were itself a poor explanation of the facts.
Ken Shultz | April 29, 2008, 1:33pm | #
"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."
Actually, my interpretation is that the bible would have the entry and exit of sin in the world as the begining and end of the harsher aspects of evolution. The book has the first people not killing animals until God does it himself, and ends in Revelations with a picture of heaven as a place where lions and lambs lay down together.
...I don't think that's "lay down" in the biblical sense.
This isn't odd to Christianity. It's Vedic
rta, Zoroastiran
asha, Buddhist
dharma and in Christian tradition, it's Greek
logos. All of these represent the moral and physical laws by which the universe was formed. In Greek myth, for instance, if the king killed his father and married his mother, then the crops wouldn't grow, etc. It's the root of our word "logic".
"In the begining was the
logos (KJV "Word"), and the [Logic] was with God, and the [Logic] was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made."
John 1:1-3
Later in the chapter we get, "...and the
Logos became flesh and dwelt among us..."
You're going to have a hard time convincing me that the Bible--just like those other major world religious traditions--isn't telling us that the very laws of nature haven't been corrupted by "sin" AKA rebellion against this Logic/God.
Maybe it has something to do with how a religious person accounts for original sin. Some religious people, some Muslims I've spoken to actually, seem to look at all the terrible things that happen in the world and see it all as part of God's plan. But there are others who see people born in some awful dungeon in the bottom of some basement in Austria and think that if there is a benevolent God, that can't possibly be what he had in mind if he created us. ...to those people, the creative destruction side of evolution is perfectly compatible with faith.
As for whether faith is compatible with science, I suppose it matters what you're talking about when you talk about faith. I think of faith as that part of a theory that remains uncertain pending further testing and conclusive results. And with that definition of faith, I'd say that unless a scientist, no matter his personal bias, is dealing honestly with his own uncertainty (or faith), whenever he's working on something regarding that uncertain theory, what he's doing isn't really compatible with science.
