Hey, springtime in Philadelphia. Can you get your institution to pay? 😉
From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Science Today:
Update: The deadline to register for this event is Monday, April 2. We strongly advise registering now to reserve your place.
As philosophy, theology, and sociology, theistic evolution is a fascinating and extremely influential phenomenon. Less so as science, since on that score it’s basically a rebranding of traditional evolution for a religious audience. Yet the rebranding effort itself carries many lessons with it.
One of the remarkable things about theistic evolution is how resistant it is to counterarguments. Evolution News has spent weeks, concluding today, rebutting a book by prominent BioLogos author Dennis Venema, Adam and the Genome. Yet it would be entirely in character for that community to just go paddling along as if the book had not be systematically deconstructed.
“paddling along” is a good way of describing the situation, a “mot juste.”
Theistic evolution got started as a way of reconciling Christianity to Darwinism but then Darwinism started to collapse, along with the churches that embraced it. But such institutions are still funded by outside or dead sources. Could be some relationship there. More details from Klinghoffer.
What do we mean by theistic evolution (TE)? If you believe in descent with modification are you a theistic evolutionist? Most people, including YEC’s don’t believe that God specially created cocker spaniels, so they at least accept so-called microevolution. Does that make them TE’s? (Of course, the Darwinist with an airy-wave-of-the-hand just extrapolates from microevolution to macroevolution and says that explains everything even the things we can’t explain– Huh?) What about ID’ists like Michael Behe, Michael Denton and our very own gpuccio who believe in common descent? Are they TE’s because of their belief in common descent? Denton, as far as I know, is an agnostic when it comes to religion. Behe is a devout Roman Catholic. What about gpuccio? I don’t know. Maybe he can tell us.
Whatever label you put on it I think there are two ways to look at TE. First, evolution is guided and directed; or second, evolution is not guided or directed but got started by God who remains hidden behind the scene. In my opinion the second option is blatantly absurd.
JAD,
Good question. But I think the even more fundamental question is What Is Evolution?
Andrew
re 1: TE is not deism, so it is not the second option JAD mentions.
TE accepts that evolution, just like all other events in the world, manifest the will of God, but that the work of his will manifests itself to us as the work of natural processes: the ways in which he causes the world to be as he wants it is beyond our human understanding.
I was thinking of the Francis Collins/ Bio-Logos approach to TE.
John West provides a good summary.
https://evolutionnews.org/2009/06/god_and_evolution_a_response_t_2/
In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins writes, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
As an ID’ist I ask, ‘If something appears to be designed isn’t it logically possible it really could be designed?’ Dawkins argues that the “design” is only apparent. Collins, from the impression I got from reading his book, appears to lean more towards Dawkins view than the ID view. In other words, Collins believes that evolution is an unguided guided process. That kind of view is logically incoherent.
I know nothing about Collins, but the TE that I am familiar with would agree that “Evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.”
Or, as I would phrase it, “what is chance to us is not chance to God.”
I think the big point is that TE is not just a position about evolution, but rather a much broader position about God’s presence in the world. It is the theological belief that everything, from the daily events and overall course of our personals lives to the largest-scale history of the universe, is caused and upheld by God’s presence in all the natural events that we see around us.
Many a Christian has invoked this belief when they have avoided a catastrophic event (perhaps missed a plane that later crashed), and stated that it was God’s will, and part of God’s plan for them, that they miss that plane and live rather than catch the plane and die.
And yet, if we examine the course of events leading up to missing the plane (perhaps an alarm clock broke, or a wreck disrupted traffic), we as human beings would see nothing but naturally-caused events.
To the TE, what happens via natural causes, every single moment, is a manifestation of God’s presence. Just because something has a natural cause, and perhaps includes elements that appear as chance to us, doesn’t mean that God is not involved.
It’s not that the world isn’t designed: it’s that there is no distinction separating the design of some special things from the rest of the world’s event.
This is my understanding of TE.
The term “theistic evolution” has largely come to mean “Theistic Darwinism”. That may be an unfortunate equivalency (and may even be one we want to try to change), but that is what has happened. Those who call themselves TEs are unquestionably actually Darwinists, while those who believe in a guided common descent usually go under the ID banner. Technically, their views are “theistic evolution”, but in common terminology TE=Darwinism.
I know TE’s who would disagree pretty strenuously, as per my remarks in 5. TE has come to equal “Darwinism” in the minds of opponents of TE, but many TE’s see critical distinctions.
The complication is separating metaphysical and theological beliefs from tentative scientific conclusions based on human experience. Many people support the mainstream scientific theory of evolution without supporting a metaphysical commitment to materialism and yet without supporting ID. TE’s fall in this category, as do I (although from a different perspective than TE’s.)
Jay Richards offers some pertinent insights in his review of Alvin Plantinga’s book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. (It’s a book about the so-called conflict between science and religion.)
https://evolutionnews.org/2012/04/whats_in_a_word_1/
Richards also quotes Ernst Mayr:
In other words, Mayr is okay with religious belief as long as it’s just a personal subjective belief. But that is incompatible with the belief that God is the creator of the universe, life and the human soul, which means that everything was created and designed for a purpose. The Darwinian world view, on the other hand, is dysteleological, meaning there is no plan or purpose to evolution, nor is it a result of any kind of purpose or plan.
Richards comments after quoting Mayr, “Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. Since Mayr was one of the preeminent leaders of the Darwinian tribe in the twentieth century, I’m inclined to trust that he knows what Darwinism is.”
So any true kind of “theistic evolution” cannot embrace Darwinian evolution since it claims to be a ubiquitous explanation of how life evolved.
I generally don’t respond to quoted material, as those people aren’t here to respond. But I would like to respond to this quote:
Richards writes,
Yes, this is the TE position I am describing. Everything is guided, because the presence of God’s will is omnipresent. We, however, see with human eyes, and so we see the world flowing from one moment to another according to natural processes, which necessarily includes contingent events that we see as “chance” in respect to their consequences. We can’t see the continual and pervasive guidance of God in an empirical way, although the TE accepts that that guidance is there as a matter of faith.
Yes, there are prominent people like Mayr who are materialists. They think they are right when they describe evolution from a materialistic perspective, but the TE perspective I am describing would say they are confusing their metaphysical position, which can’t be proven, with our more limited human perspective.
Unfortunately, people on both sides of TE’s have come to use “Darwinism” to mean a materialistic view, which leaves TE’s in the middle: they don’t accept the materialistic metaphysics, but they don’t accept the various positions that state or imply that God has had to act in special ways in order to bring about the long history of life as we see it.
So IDists reject TE and throw them in with the materialists, which misunderstands TE, as explained above.
The issues are really theological: different (and unprovable) ideas about the nature of God and how his presence is manifested in the world.
So, JAD writes,
Yes, TE’s don’t embrace materialistic Darwinism, and materialism is a metaphysical position, not a scientific position. But TE’s can, and do, embrace the mainstream theory of evolution as the best theory of life based on what we, as limited human beings, can experience (given that we can’t see the world as God sees it.)
JAD @ 8: Good stuff. Thank you.
jdk at 9 (and earlier): Very helpful explanations of TE. Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes TEs say that evolution is guided somehow and that we were intended. But they also say that we cannot tell the difference between that and nature. We cannot know how God works or some stupid thing.
And unfortunately for Mayr evolution by natural selection doesn’t explain what he thinks/ thought it explains