Religion & Law

Theism and Evolution

By John Pieret

Elliot Sober hasn't just written the book, Evidence and Evolution, that I have been humping over the past few months, on the subject of Intelligent Design Creationism. He also has a number of scholarly articles on the subject available on the web here. One of them, "What is wrong with intelligent design?," in Quarterly Review of Biology, 2007, I've already blogged about, as well as the comical response by the Discovery Institute's pile-out-of-the-tiny-car brigade.

Another is "Evolution without Naturalism," in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, volume 3, (forthcoming). One of the questions addressed by Sober in this article is:

Does evolutionary theory have implications about the existence of supernatural entities? This question concerns the logical relationships that hold between the theory of evolution and different bits of metaphysics.

... whether theistic evolutionists must be deists. Must they hold that God starts the universe in motion and never intervenes in what happens after that?

Creationists maintain that the theory of evolution entails that there is no God. If they are right, then the theory has metaphysical implications. Atheistic evolutionists (e.g., Dennett [Darwin's Dangerous Idea] and Provine ["Progress in Evolution and Meaning in Life," Evolutionary Progress, M. Nitecki (ed.)]) often agree with creationists on this point. The conditional "if evolutionary theory is true, then there is no God" is therefore common ground. Where creationists have their modus tollens, these evolutionists have their modus ponens.

Both sides are wrong. Theistic evolutionism is a logically consistent position ... This is the idea that God uses the evolutionary process to make organisms. ... According to theistic evolutionism, God produces organisms indirectly, by setting the evolutionary process in motion.

In saying that theistic evolutionism is logically consistent, I am not saying that it is plausible or true. I'm merely saying that it isn't contradictory. Evolutionary theory is silent on the question of whether God exists. Even if you think the theory knocks the wind from the sails of the argument from design, you still need to consider the fact that there are other arguments for the existence of God. ... Evolutionary theory has no implications about the cosmological argument or the ontological argument nor does it say whether you are entitled to believe in God even if you can offer no good argument that such a being exists. Atheistic evolutionists may scoff at these other arguments and at those who believe in God while admitting that they can offer no compelling argument that there is such a being. But this is not the theory of evolution talking.

... it does not say of itself that it is causally complete. The theory is consistent with there being hidden variables, natural or supernatural.

A probabilistic model of coin tossing is consistent with the thesis that the system is deterministic. If determinism is true, there are hidden variables, not represented in the probability model, which turn all the probabilities into 0's and 1's when their values are taken into account. In just the same way, a probabilistic model of the evolutionary process is consistent with the thesis that the process is deterministic. If determinism is true, there are hidden variables that affect the evolutionary process. Evolutionary theory says nothing about whether such hidden variables exist. It therefore says nothing about whether there are supernatural hidden variables.

Theistic evolutionists can of course be deists, holding that God starts the universe in motion and then forever after declines to intervene. But there is no contradiction in their embracing a more active God whose postCreation interventions fly under the radar of evolutionary biology. Divine intervention isn't part of science, but the theory of evolution does not entail that none occur.

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on November 16, 2008 (boomark / email).