The Grand Metaphysical Story of Evolution, November 8, 2009
By
Randy A. Stadt (Edmonton, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Darwin on Trial (Paperback)
In a culture that supposedly places a high value on open-mindedness and healthy criticism, evolution has somehow been a sacred cow, beyond the reach of serious analysis. Dissent has been effectively marginalized through the use of a caricature which assures us that all educated people recognize that evolution is a fact, even if there are in-house disagreements about the details. We are told that the only dissenters are Biblical fundamentalists who insist on a narrow, literal reading of Genesis and therefore come to the preposterous conclusion that the earth is only six thousand years old. But reasonable people of faith will find that their theism is not threatened by the theory of evolution.
Phillip Johnson argues that this caricature is grossly misleading and false. Evolution is a fact only if one starts with a prior commitment to materialism, the belief that the physical world is all there is. With materialism as the starting point, some form of evolution must be true; there is nothing else to explain the origin and history of life. Though the primary claim of the theory of evolution is the blind watchmaker thesis, that an unguided, purposeless process of mutation and natural selection is the means by which the complexity of life arose, it is not necessary (we are told) to be too precise when speaking of just what evolution is. Evolution can mean "changes in gene frequencies in a population," and so dog breeding, for example, is evolution, as is variations from year to year in the average size of finch beaks in a population of finches. Or evolution can mean "relationship." All living things are made of the same biochemical stuff, and that is a relationship we call an evolutionary relationship - that's evolution.
Evolution is just a thing to be believed, and to accept one part of it is to accept the whole package. It is a matter of logical deduction, if one starts with the premise that materialism is true. And it is here that Johnson puts his finger on the central locus of the debate over evolution. Evolutionary science is operating by two definitions of science - science as empirical research but also science as applied materialism. Everyone is candid about the first definition, but almost noone will admit to the second, which is actually the more important of the two. This becomes evident when a scientist, doing empirical research, comes to conclusions that don't conform to materialistic philosophy. Then the second definition trumps the first, and the practitioner is said to no longer be doing science.
What is at stake here, then, is a commitment to materialism. Discussion of evidence is important, but in a sense it is secondary, because all the evidentiary problems are not troubling to Darwinists who see everything through the glasses of materialism. But take away that prior commitment and it becomes a legitimate question to ask: if we don't know how evolution happened, how can we know that it happened? When a scientist like Niles Eldredge can on the one hand say, that based on his empirical observations, evolution "never seems to happen" but nevertheless refers to himself as a "knee-jerk Darwinist," this suggests a willingness to believe in spite of the evidence. His confidence in evolution appears to reside less in his findings as a paleontologist and more in his philosophical commitment.
Regarding the second aspect of the caricature, Johnson believes that it is just so much double talk for promoters of evolution to say that evolutionary science has nothing to say about religion, when in fact it is loaded with anti-theological implications. Darwin's theory was successful primarily because it gave to biology a mechanism - descent with modification - that seemed to get rid of the need for a creator. But in so doing, not only was the creator banished from biology, he was effectively banished from reality. Thus if God exists at all, he is more like Aristotle's First Cause than the God of the Bible. Such a being is thoroughly inscrutable, utterly irrelevant, and certainly not worthy of worship. So if science has nothing to say about religion it's because science also has nothing to say about Zeus. It is not that we gain knowledge from science and knowledge from religion, but rather it is understood that knowledge comes exclusively from science, whereas religion gives us meaning and morality, which do not constitute knowledge but merely subjective belief.
With this in view, Johnson doesn't see theistic evolution as a viable solution to the evolution/creation controversy. First of all if it is genuinely theistic, if God did anything, then it's not evolution as the scientific community defines the term. It's not purposeless and unguided. And if it is purposeless and unguided, then it is not in any meaningful way theistic. It seems that theistic evolution is convincing for Christians only if they are vague about the definitions and are convinced that naturalistic philosophy is only an unnecessary addition to an otherwise sound theory. If, however, Johnson is right, and on its own merits the mutation-natural selection mechanism is inadequate to explain the history of life, then why would we want to reconcile our theology with a theory that is false?
Having said all this, Johnson isn't discounting a naturalistic theory of evolution out of hand. He is willing to hear evidence that mutation and selection, or any other naturalistic mechanism, can do the job of creation. But he's not willing to assume that it's the only possibility. Currently it's a closed system: if materialism is true, Darwinism is true, and it doesn't matter what the evidence is. But if you're willing to put the materialism in doubt, then the evidence really appears to be inadequate.
Just getting the issue of materialism on the table of mainstream academic discourse is the hard part. Once that happens and the scientific culture is reoriented towards the truth instead of towards materialism, Johnson is confident that the scientific story will change dramatically.
