Posted on 12/12/2005 8:01:43 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Occasionally a social issue becomes so ubiquitous that almost everyone wants to talk about it -- even well-meaning but uninformed pundits. For example, Charles Krauthammer preaches that religious conservatives should stop being so darn, well, religious, and should accept his whitewashed version of religion-friendly Darwinism.1 George Will prophesies that disagreements over Darwin could destroy the future of conservatism.2 Both agree that intelligent design is not science.
It is not evident that either of these critics has read much by the design theorists they rebuke. They appear to have gotten most of their information about intelligent design from other critics of the theory, scholars bent on not only distorting the main arguments of intelligent design but also sometimes seeking to deny the academic freedom of design theorists.
In 2001, Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez’s research on galactic habitable zones appeared on the cover of Scientific American. Dr. Gonzalez’s research demonstrates that our universe, galaxy, and solar system were intelligently designed for advanced life. Although Gonzalez does not teach intelligent design in his classes, he nevertheless believes that “[t]he methods [of intelligent design] are scientific, and they don't start with a religious assumption.” But a faculty adviser to the campus atheist club circulated a petition condemning Gonzalez’s scientific views as merely “religious faith.” Attacks such as these should be familiar to the conservative minorities on many university campuses; however, the response to intelligent design has shifted from mere private intolerance to public witch hunts. Gonzalez is up for tenure next year and clearly is being targeted because of his scientific views.
The University of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho, is home to Scott Minnich, a soft-spoken microbiologist who runs a lab studying the bacterial flagellum, a microscopic rotary engine that he and other scientists believe was intelligently designed -- see "What Is Intelligent Design.") Earlier this year Dr. Minnich testified in favor of intelligent design at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial over the teaching of intelligent design. Apparently threatened by Dr. Minnich’s views, the university president, Tim White, issued an edict proclaiming that “teaching of views that differ from evolution ... is inappropriate in our life, earth, and physical science courses or curricula.” As Gonzaga University law professor David DeWolf asked in an editorial, “Which Moscow is this?” It’s the Moscow where Minnich’s career advancement is in now jeopardized because of his scientific views.
Scientists like Gonzalez and Minnich deserve not only to be understood, but also their cause should be defended. Conservative champions of intellectual freedom should be horrified by the witch hunts of academics seeking to limit academic freedom to investigate or objectively teach intelligent design. Krauthammer’s and Will’s attacks only add fuel to the fire.
By calling evolution “brilliant,” “elegant,” and “divine,” Krauthammer’s defense of Darwin is grounded in emotional arguments and the mirage that a Neo-Darwinism that is thoroughly friendly towards Western theism. While there is no denying the possibility of belief in God and Darwinism, the descriptions of evolution offered by top Darwinists differ greatly from Krauthammer’s sanitized version. For example, Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins explains that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In addition, Krauthammer’s understanding is in direct opposition to the portrayal of evolution in biology textbooks. Says Douglas Futuyma in the textbook Evolutionary Biology:
“By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”3
“Evolution in a pure Darwinian world has no goal or purpose: the exclusive driving force is random mutations sorted out by natural selection from one generation to the next. … However elevated in power over the rest of life, however exalted in self-image, we were descended from animals by the same blind force that created those animals. …”5
Mr. Luskin is an attorney and published scientist working with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash.
A refined Gilgamesh would give even more precise results, if you had enough memory.
Why did that post twice? Perhaps a ghost in the machine made me do it.
What bothers me about this article is that it encourages people to see this as an "either or" situation. In point of fact, both Creation and Evolution are completely consistent, and the pursuit is to understand how the Creational dyanmic unfolds through the generations. Certainly it is an ongoing phenomenon.
William Flax
Natural Theology, Chance, and God
by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
Part I
Introduction
The preceding excellent essay ["Kepler's Anguish and Hawking's Queries"] by Professor Owen Gingerich [see note] was delivered at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton. Its title refers to Kepler, a sixteenth-century astronomer, and Stephen Hawking, a twentieth-century cosmologist, both of whom make copious references to God, but only one of whom was a person of Christian religious faith.
In the title Professor Gingerich gave his essay, he added: "Reflections on Natural Theology." In that essay, he set forth scientific reasons for supporting the arguments of certain Christian natural theologians against chance and in favor of design in the natural processes of cosmological development and in biological evolution.
I mention all these things because in the first place, I think natural theology, as it has been developed in the nineteenth century, following Bishop William Paley in modern times, is not sound philosophically. It should be regarded as Christian apologetics, which is the use of reason to defend the truths of the Christian religion and to reconcile Christian faith with scientific knowledge. The truths of Christian faith are much more clearly and competently presented in dogmatic or sacred theology, as that was formulated in the great Summas of the Middle Ages.
Philosophical theology, which must never be confused, as it so often is, with natural theology, is strictly a branch of philosophy, and totally apart from any religious faith. As I have made clear in my recently republished book, entitled How to Think About God, it is theology written by pagans for pagans who are similarly deprived; that is, by and for persons without any religious faith. The theology in Book Lambda of Aristotle's Metaphysics is philosophical theology as thus defined; it is defective in its conception of God, as will be pointed out presently. [The Summa contra Gentiles by Aquinas does not replicate the Summa Theologica, nor is it a work in philosophical theology. It is, strictly speaking, a work of Christian apologetics, written to persuade the Jews and Moors in Spain of the truth of the Christian religion.]
In the second place, I think that the argument for design that is presented by Aquinas in his fifth argument for the existence of the God in whom Christians believe is an unsound teleological argument, unsound because it is based on Aristotle's error of attributing the operation of final causes to the processes of natural motions or actions, whereas they properly belong only in the production of human works of art. This erroneous argument is later presented in Paley's Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1816), in which the watchmaker's design of the time-piece he makes is proposed as the model in terms of which we should think of God's relation to the universe he creates. The creator is not an artist making an artifact; the created universe is not a work of art. In the third place, as I have shown in How to Think About God, the presence of chance in the universe, both in cosmological developments and in biological evolu-tion, lies at the heart of an indispensable premise in the only sound philosophical argument for the existence of God.
That argument, occurring in philosophical theology, not in Christian apologetics, does not prove the existence of the God in whom Christians believe, whom they worship, and to whom they pray; but most, though not all, of the properties attributed to the God that Pascal calls the God of the philosophers are identical with the properties attributed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the Christian religion, as well as of Islam.
This, as I pointed out above, cannot be said of the God of Aristotle's Metaphysics, who is a prime mover and a final cause, but not the sole creative cause, or "exnihilator" of a universe that did not come into existence with the Big Bang, but preexisted the Big Bang.
In the fourth place, it is necessary to point out that according to sacred, dogmatic Christian theologians, there is no incompatibility between the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God, eternally (that is, time-lessly) existing, and the presence of chance occurrences in natural process and human acts of free choice, acts which those physicists, who are both materialists and determinists, deny because they cannot explain them in terms of their understanding of the causal and statistical laws of their science.
In the fifth place, what has just been said requires me to call attention to Hawking's serious errors in his A Brief History of Time, which Professor Gingerich fails to criticize. The Lucasian professor of physics at Cambridge University, holding Newton's chair, is undoubtedly a great physicist and cosmologist, but his understanding of God and creation is woefully deficient. He is philosophically naive and theologically ignorant, both with respect to sacred theology and with respect to philosophical theology, while at the same time referring to God and to God's mind frequently in his book, a book in which, for reasons I will point out, his own principles should prevent him from ever mentioning God.
Furthermore, if the Big Bang were the exnihilation of the cosmos studied by physicists, there would be no need for proof of the existence of God. On the contrary, any philosophically sound argument for the existence of God, in order to avoid begging the question, must assume that the physical cosmos had no beginning.
Both Aquinas and Kant give philosophically sound arguments showing that neither of these two assumptions -- a beginning for the cosmos and of time, on the one hand, and an everlasting cosmos without a beginning or end in time, on the other hand-- can be proved. Unless we accept the second hypothesis we cannot avoid begging the question. Hence, any sound philosophical argument for the existence of God must include the assumption that time and the cosmos are everlasting, i.e., have no beginning or end.
Hawking could have avoided the error of supposing that time had a beginning with the Big Bang if he had distinguished time as it is measured by physicists from time that is not measurable by physicists.
Here let me call attention to the error made in quantum mechanics of thinking that its uncertainties with respect to subatomic motions indicate an indeterminacy in nature or reality rather than indeterminability by us, caused by the intrusive action of our measurements. This is combined with the error made by some theoretical physicists, such as Arthur Holly Compton at the University of Chicago, the error of thinking that quantum indeterminacy in reality may help to explain human free choice. This is philosophical nonsense, no worse of course than the philosophical nonsense in Hawking's popular book.
In the sections to follow, I will amplify -- and in the course of doing so, undoubtedly repeat -- what I have just briefly outlined: first, with respect to sacred theology, philosophical theology, and natural theology, or Christian apologetics; second, with respect to the philos-ophical unsoundness of the teleological argument for God's existence, and the misconception of God as an artist like the watchmaker; third, with respect to the reason why I say that chance in cosmological developments and in biological evolution lies at the heart of the one sound philosophical argument for the existence of God; and here also why that argument must assume everlasting time and a cosmos without beginning or end; fourth, why there is no incompatibility between the eternal existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God and the occurrence of chance events and human free choice in time; and fifth, with respect to the central error to be found in Hawking's A Brief History of Time, an error shared by many other great physicists in the twentieth century, the error of saying that what cannot be measured by physicists does not exist in reality.
The Domain of Theology
Theology began in Greek antiquity, in Book X of Plato's Laws and in Book Lambda of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Both Plato and Aristotle were pagan philosophers without any faith in the Olympian polytheism of Greek mythology and, of course, unenlightened by the divine revelation in which the Jews believed, and later the Christians and the Muslims.
Aristotle regarded theology as the highest grade of human knowledge, the highest level of abstraction reached by metaphysics, or what later came to be called philosophia prima. Let us call this discipline "philosophical theology" to avoid its confusion with what in modern times came to be miscalled "natural theology." Aristotle's cosmology viewed the physical cosmos as a universe eternally (i.e., everlastingly) in motion. For him, the word eternal as applied to the world did not refer to the timeless and the immutable but to the everlasting and forever in time.
Aristotle never asked the existential question: What caused the everlasting cosmos in motion to exist? He asked instead: What caused the everlasting cosmos to be forever in motion? His answer to that question was: God, the prime mover, but not as the prime efficient cause from which the motion in the world first sprang as an effect, rather as the ultimate final cause, the object of desire which everlastingly motivated the observed changes in the cosmos.
Aristotle's philosophical theology contains an error that is also present in his physics; i.e., the error of attributing final causes to natural change or motions. This error improperly attributes to natural processes the same teleology that is properly attributed to works of human art.
There is no doubt at all that final causes operate in human artistic production. The carpenter who makes a chair is not only its efficient cause, as the wood out of which it is made is its material cause, but the carpenter also has in his mind a formal cause (the design of the chair to be made) and a final cause -- the purpose for which the chair, when made, will be used. In natural processes, there are only three causes -- material, formal, and efficient -- but no final cause. Teleology is not present in nature as it is in art.
The other work of purely philosophical theology in antiquity is to be found in the Enneads of Plotinus. It represents the flowering of neo-Platonic philosophy in the Hellenistic period. In the centuries of the Middle Ages there is one other work, written by a Christian -- Anselm the archbishop of Canterbury. The first three chapters of the Proslogium, containing an argument that has been called "the ontological argument for God's existence," does not employ any article of Christian faith. It could have been written by a pagan and it was intended for pagans -- the fools that Anselm is trying to argue against when they deny God's existence. Anselm wrote other works, such a Cur Deus homo?, which could only have been written by a person of profound Christian faith.
I shall explain later why the so-called ontological argument fails as proof of God's existence. It was dis-missed by Aquinas and later by Kant as a flawed proof. I will give better reasons than they gave for dismissing it. But the reasoning in those first three chapters of the Proslogium, must be retained in any well-constructed philosophical theology as an explanation of how we must think about God as the one supernatural Supreme Being, who should be thought of as necessarily existing, i.e., as a being incapable of not existing.
With this one exception in the Christian Middle Ages, a new type of theological writing emerged with authors in the Patristic period, notably Augustine and Chrysostom, who were Platonists; and in the later Middle Ages with Albert the Great, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, who were Aristotelians. [For the sake of brevity, I will deal only with Christian authors in this period. An expanded account would, of course, include Jewish authors, such as Maimonides, and Muslim authors, such as Avicenna.] These were all persons of religious faith -- Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. Their theology should be called "sacred dogmatic theology" because its first principles were articles of religious faith, based on interpretations of Sacred Scripture.
Strictly speaking, with the one exception aforementioned of Anselm's Proslogium, there was no purely philosophical theology in the centuries from the first to the seventeenth. As I have already pointed out, the Summa contra Gentiles written by Aquinas was not a work in sacred dogmatic theology. It reveals itself to us plainly as a work in Christian apologetics, written by Aquinas for the purpose of persuading the Jews and Moors in Spain of the truth of the Christian religion. Purely philosophical theology does not appear in early modern times with the Meditations of Descartes and the Theodicy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. They wrote philosophically as apologists for their Christian faith. The exception is the Ethics of Spinoza. That is a work in purely philosophical theology. Its pantheism and its denial of a God who created the cosmos were so obviously contradictory of the Jewish faith that it was condemned by the rabbis of Amsterdam as heretical, and Spinoza himself was excommunicated.
Other works of Christian apologetics should be mentioned here. In antiquity there was a work by Boethius entitled On the Catholic Faith. In early modern times there were Pascal's Pensees and Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity. In the nineteenth century there was Cardinal John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent. None of these authors would have mistakenly thought of their works as being in the category of "natural theology."
So far as I know, that mistaken denomination of a work in Christian apologetics begins in the nineteenth century with Bishop Paley's book entitled Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1816). Clearly, this was not a work in philosophical theology, written by a pagan. Clearly, it was a work in Christian apologetics, and a poor one at that, as I will point out later.
Works written by Christians for Christians or for nonbelievers are clearly not works in philosophical theology, and just as clearly they are not works in sacred dogmatic theology. They do not represent faith seeking understanding. Instead they represent faith offering reasons for the truth of its beliefs.
I have already suggested the epithet "Christian apologetics" as the correct denomination of such works to replace "natural theology," term which came into use only in the nineteenth century. A very recent book written by John Polkinghorne, chaplain of Trinity Hall Cambridge University, and entitled Science and Creation (1989) has an opening chapter entitled "Natural Theology." While still retaining that denomination, Polkinghorne's book is a fine work in Christian apologetics, not a work in philosophical theology. It is of great interest to us because of its explicit repudiation of the erroneous denials of chance and contingency in Bishop Paley's Natural Theology. I will quote the relevant passages from Polkinghorne's book in a later section of this essay.
The Central Error in Modern Christian Apologetics
In the domain of theology, there are only three alternative categories of work: philosophical theology, dogmatic theology, and Christian or Jewish or Muslim apologetics. What has very recently come to be called "natural theology" is not a fourth alternative, for it is nothing but Christian apologetics.
In the light of what has just been said, one exception must be noted, a great Christian theologian, Aquinas was also a brilliant Aristotelian philosopher. In the Summa Theologica of Aquinas there are many philosophical insights that he might not have formulated had he been merely a pagan disciple of Aristotle. However, these insights are not derived from or dependent on any article of Christian faith. For that reason they can be regarded as contributions to philosophical theology, even though they are not the work of a pagan mind.
I wish to call attention to one such insights because it is pivotal to the proof of God's existence as that is formulated in purely philosophical theology. It is the insight that being or existence is the proper effort of God. The italicized word "proper" signifies that God and God alone, is the cause of being or existence. In the causation of being, he is not the first cause, because there are no second or other causes. All other causes, all of them natural causes, are causes of becoming or perishing. Only what is being itself can cause existent entities to exist. Such causation is supernatural. It does not occur in nature.
When God is understood not only as the Supreme Being but also a the creator (or exnihilator) of the cosmos, he must also be understood as a supernatural being and as a supernatural cause. This involves a philosophical analysis of causation that makes a sharp distinction between the causation of being and the causation of becoming. That goes along with the differentiation between the operation of final causes in the processes of becoming that are productions of human art and the nonoperation of such causes in the phenomena of becoming that are natural processes.
The insight about God as the sole cause of being is unlike the proposition that the perfection of God as the Supreme Being includes moral as well as ontological perfection. Anselm's purely philosophical argument is that the Supreme Being -- a being than which no greater can be thought -- entails all the ontological perfections. Only a person of Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) faith would add God's moral perfection. That additional affirmation is an article of religious faith in a loving and benevolent God. It is totally beyond the reach of reason or purely philosophical thought.
If we put together these two contributions to purely philosophical theology made by Anselm and Aquinas we should be able to see the radical difference between the God of Aristotle (only a prime mover and only a final cause) and the God of Anselm and Aquinas (a creator ex nihilo of the cosmos). Understanding that difference should help us to realize the inappropriateness of using Aristotelian arguments in the five ways advanced by Aquinas in Question 2, Article 3, of his Summa Theologica.
Any logically valid argument for the existence of God must choose one of two assumptions: either the world and time had a beginning, or they always existed and never came into being out of nothing. Neither of these two assumptions can be proved true on rational grounds, as Aquinas and later Kant argued. The first assumption is an article of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith. But to make that assumption in purely philosophical theology begs the question, for if we assume that the cosmos and time came into being out of nothing, we are also assuming that it was created ex nihilo, and that God as creator (exnihilator) exists, which was the proposition to be proved. Hence, to avoid begging the question, any purely philosophical proof of God's existence must assume that the world and time always existed and exists everlastingly. In other words, only if we assume that the world and time never began or came into being out of nothing, do we have a genuine problem of proving God's existence as the preservative, not originative, cause of the existence of the cosmos at every moment of its existence.
The chief error that I am concerned to expose in many works of modern Christian apologetics is the error of supposing that in order to defend Christian faith they must show that there is nothing contingent in cosmic processes and in biology and evolution; in other words, that nothing happens by chance or coincidence. Instead it is thought necessary to assert that everything happens according to a fully worked out design in the mind of God.
The underlying root of this error is an inadequate analysis of the processes of becoming. (1) If God created the cosmos, that is exnihilation -- bringing the cosmos into existence out of nothing. (2) Biologic; procreation is a mode of becoming, one in which no cause of being operates. (3) Artistic production, or human making, is unlike both exnihilation and biological procreation.
When this threefold differentiation is fully under-stood, it will be see that Bishop Paley's profound error was to regard God's creation of the cosmos as like a watchmaker's production of a timepiece. That is not only a false analogy but grossly anthropomorphic. The cosmos is not work of art on God's part any more than it is a work of procreation.
On the contrary, the cosmos is something other than the mechanist of a clock, all of whose motions are necessitated by the design impose upon it by its human artificer. God is not the divine artificer, and the cosmos is not a work of divine art. Moreover, if nothing happened by chance and there was nothing contingent in the cosmos, no valid proof of God's existence could be philosophically constructed. I will explain why this is so in the next section.
A Sound a posteriori Argument: From a Radically Contingent Cosmos to an Exnihilating Deity
Concepts are abstracted from sense-experience. They are all empirically derived. Hence we cannot have a concept of God. But not all the notions with which the intellect operates in thinking are concepts. There are, in addition, theoretical constructs, fictions of the mind that in the Middle Ages were called entia rationis. As in physics black holes an neutrinos are theoretical constructs, so in theology God is a theoretical construct.
Since all concepts are empirically derived, they do not raise question about the existence of their objects. The concept of dog or cow abstracted from perceptual instances of dogs and cows, and so we do not ask whether what we have in mind when we use the word dog or cow actually exists.
But when we are dealing with theoretical constructs in mathematics. physics or in theology, the question of existence is inescapable. Do black holes really exist? Do neutrinos? Does that which we have in mind when we use the word God exist in reality?
Anselm mistakenly thought that because we cannot think of God as nonexisting while thinking of him as the Supreme Being, therefore God exists. The non sequitur is obvious. Anselm has instructed us about how to formulate a theoretical construct for the proper name "God", but the question still remains whether what we have in mind with this theoretical construct is only a fiction of the mind or a really existent being -- an ens reale, not just an ens rationis. On the other hand, unicorn is a fiction of the mind that, so far as all the evidence goes, just that. There are no perceptual instances of unicorns and no proof that they exist, even if not perceived.
With respect to theoretical constructs, the rule of inference by William of Ockham operates in theology in the same way that it operates in physical science. Ockham's rule -- and razor -- is that unless the existence of what is signified by our theoretical constructs is indispensable to explain observed phenomena or exist-ences, the theoretical construct being thus tested is merely a fiction of the mind. Ockham's razor cuts out all unnecessary entities. It prevents us from committing the fallacy of reification -- of adding to the world of real existences by positing entities that we have no reason to think exist. Ockham's rule is a principle of parsimony.
When we have the theoretical construct of God in our mind, even a God that is thought of as necessarily existing, we have to give reasons for positing the existence of the entity named. Since we cannot affirm the existence of God a priori by saying that God's existence is self-evident because we must think of the Supreme Being as necessarily existing, only an a posteriori argument for God's existence is valid. It is reasoning from the nature of the cosmos to the existence of God. Obeying Ockham's rule, we can posit the real existence of God, of whom we have a theoretical construct in our mind, because the existence of God is necessary to explain the existence of the cosmos.
The only valid argument for the existence of God is thus the inverse of the a priori ontological argument. It is reasoning from the nature of the cosmos to God, not from the nature of God to God's existence. The crucial point in this a posteriori argument is the radical contingency of the cosmos. Let me now explain how that is different from merely superficial contingency. We usually think of the physical entities that come into being at one time and perish at another as contingent beings. If they existed necessarily, they could not come into being at one time and perish at another. But they are only superficially contingent. They do not come into being out of nothing, and when they perish, they do not pass into nothingness.
Biological progenitors cause the becoming of their progeny. They can cease to be and cease to function as causes while their progeny continue in being. When their progeny die as the result of the counteracting causes that operate against the inertia of being that has kept them alive, their perishing is merely a transformation of their matter -- dust and ashes and skeletal bones instead of a living organism. The living organism has been replaced by matter in other forms, not by sheer nothingness. In contrast to such superficial contingency, we find radical contingency in the cosmos as a whole. Unless the cosmos were caused to exist at every moment of its existence, it would be replaced by the absolute void of nothingness.
How do we know that the cosmos is radically contingent? We know that all living organisms are superficially contingent because we know that they come into being at one time and perish at another. As pointed out earlier, in order to avoid begging the question, we must assume that the cosmos has everlasting existence, without a beginning or an end in time. What reason, then, do we have for thinking that this everlasting cosmos is radically contingent and in need of a cause of its existence?
Were this everlasting cosmos a necessary rather than a radically contingent existence -- if it were incapable of not existing -- we would have no ground for positing the existence of an exnihilating deity as the cause of its existence. Only if the cosmos is capable, at every moment of its existence, of not existing at all, would we have to posit the existence of a cause of its being, a cause that exnihilates it or preserves it from passing into nothingness.
The three crucial premises in the valid a posteriori argument for God's existence are as follows:
(1) God and God alone causes being or existence. All natural cause are causes of becoming or perishing.
(2) What does not exist necessarily and does not have the ground of its existence in itself needs a cause of its existence in another being at every moment of its existence.
(3) Whatever is capable of being otherwise (because it involves event: that happen by chance or free choice) is also capable of not being at all and so needs a cause of its existence at every moment of its existence.
In the light of Ockham's rule, we are, therefore, justified in positing (or affirming) the existence of a supernatural Supreme Being as the exnihilating cause of the existence of the cosmos, which would cease to exist if it were not thus creatively caused.
Still one question remains: What grounds do we have for thinking that the cosmos could be otherwise -- that its processes involve chance or coincidence? That is a question of fact, which we will deal with in the next section. Suffice it to say here that if we find an affirmative answer to that question tenable, then the a posteriori argument is grounded in facts about the cosmos.
That school in modern Christian apologetics, which follows Bishop Paley in viewing the cosmos as if it were a work of art designed by a divine artificer, denies that anything happens by chance in the cosmos and so denies its radical contingency.
Creation, Contingency, and Chance
Whether or not contingency and chance exist in the cosmos is a question of scientifically discoverable fact. It is not a question to be answered by arguing that chance and contingency in the cosmos are incompatible with Christian faith in a morally perfect God who created the cosmos as an act of benevolent love.
Before we turn to the answer given by twentieth-century natural science, let us consider the relevance of certain questions about creation that were asked in the Middle Ages in sacred dogmatic theology. In his Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas asks the question whether God could have created other universes than this particular cosmos, and even whether he could have created a better one than this. Aquinas rejects a negative answer to the first question on the ground that a negative answer would entail the denial of God's freedom in the act of creation. Creation is an act of God's free choice, not something necessitated by God's nature.
That this actual cosmos is only one of a number of possible universes is a mark of its radical contingency, if it is true that whatever can be otherwise is capable of not being at all. The truth of that proposition is not self-evident, but I think it is true beyond a reasonable doubt, if not beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The Christian faith that God created man in his own image by giving human beings immaterial intellects and, with that, also free will is a further indication that in the course of human affairs the totally unpredictable is present. The power of free choice is the power to choose otherwise at any moment, no matter how one does in fact choose at that moment; it is also the power not to choose at all. The course of human history would be quite otherwise if human beings, exercising free will, had chosen it to be so.
The paleontological discoveries of Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould provide us with ample scientific evidence of chance at work in the course of biological evolution. Twentieth-century particle physics and its cosmology, as influenced by the general theory of relativity, provide similar evidence of chance at work in the eighteen billion years since the Big Bang; and the Big Bang itself, which is not the exnihilation of the cosmos, is itself an unpredictable event.
The doctrine of the miscalled "natural theology," beginning with Paley and coming down to our own day, represents poorly conceived Christian apologetics that has its intellectual background in Newtonian classical mechanics. It is inconsistent with the scientific facts discovered, and scientific theories formulated, in the twentieth century.
I have earlier referred to a book of Polkinghorne, Science and Creation (1989). It is a work of Christian apologetics, not a work in pagan philosophical theology. It is written by a person of Christian faith who is also a mathematical physicist. Polkinghorne is not alone. His book includes a bibliography of other works in twentieth-century Christian apologetics that tend to confirm the views that he himself advances.
For Polkinghorne, there is no incompatibility whatsoever between the presence of chance, randomness, and contingency in the cosmos and God's creation of it. Let me quote a few passages from his book.
The way that an element of randomness is seen to create openness to the future assigns a more positive role to chance in the process of the world than is acknowledged by those like Monod who see its operation as destructive of all significance....
This chapter has portrayed a world whose processes can assemble complexity within a decaying environment and where random events can prove to be the originators of pattern. Such a world is a world of orderliness but not of clockwork regularity, of potentiality without predictability, endowed with an assurance of development but with a certain openness as to its actual form. It is inevitably a world with ragged edges, where order and disorder interlace each other and where the exploration of possibility by chance will lead not only to the evolution of systems of increasing complexity, endowed with new possibilities, but also to the evolution of systems imperfectly formed and malfunctioning. The former superior entities will earn the epithet "successful" by their survival in the competition for constituent resources; the latter inferior entities will disappear from the evolving scene. It is just such a world that we live in....
In other words, God chose a world in which chance has a role to play, thereby both being responsible for the consequences accruing and also accepting limitation of his power to control...
Yet the order and disorder which intertwine in the process of the world show that the universe upheld by the divine Word is not a clear cold cosmos whose history is the inevitable unfolding of an invulnerable plan. It is a world kept in being by the divine juggler rather than by the divine Structural Engineer, a world whose precarious process speaks of the free gift of Love. We are accustomed to think of the vulnerability accepted by the Word in the incarnation, a vulnerability potentially present in the baby lying in the manger and realized to the full in the man hanging on the cross. What is there revealed of the divine in the human life of Jesus is also to be discerned in the cosmic story of creation.
To this I would only add that Polkinghorne explicitly rejects what he regards as the outmoded as well as erroneous Christian apologetics of Paley and the anthropomorphic image of God as analogous to a watch-maker, producing a mechanical work of art that is intelligible to an extent that the cosmos known to twentieth-century physics and biology is not.
Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Theology
A few Christian apologists in the twentieth-century, such as Polkinghorne, are knowledgeable in the field of twentieth-century theoretical physics. But, with the possible exception of Heisenberg, few if any twentieth-century theoretical physicists manifest any competence in philosophy and appear to be totally ignorant of philosophical theology.
One would not expect them to be persons of Christian faith or apologists for Christianity, but one would expect them to be silent about matters beyond their ken. They should at least be aware of the limitations of theoretical physics and not make unfounded remarks on the basis of their knowledge of that limited subject. Einstein was a great theoretical physicist and great human being, but not a wise man. The possession of wisdom depends to some extent on clear philosophical thought. Einstein once said that what was not measurable by physicists was of no interest to them, or had no meaning for them; he also said (in his attack on quantum indeterminacy) that God, a being not measurable by physicists, does not throw dice. He said that he did not believe in a "personal" God, using the word personal as if it meant the same thing as anthropomorphic. Man is a person because he is in the image of God, not the reverse. In theology, the word person signifies a being with intellect and free will.
Hawking is a great theoretical physicist, both in quantum mechanics and in cosmology. But his philos-ophical naiveté and his ignorance of philosophical theology fills his A Brief History of Time with unfounded assertions, verging on impudence. Where Einstein had said that what is not measurable by physicists is of no interest to them, Hawking flatly asserts that what is not measurable by physicists does not exist -- has no reality whatsoever.
With respect to time, that amounts to the denial of psychological time which is not measurable by physicists, and also to everlasting time -- time before the Big Bang -- which physics cannot measure. Hawking does not know that both Aquinas and Kant had shown that we cannot rationally establish that time is either finite or infinite. When he treats the Big Bang as if it were the beginning of time, not just the beginning of measurable time, he shows his ignorance of God as cause of being and of creation as an act of exnihilation, which the Big Bang is not.
Furthermore, Hawking's book is filled with references to God and to the mind of God, both not measurable by physicists, and so nonexistent by Hawking's own assertion about what has and what lacks reality. To discourse seriously about a nonexistent being without explicitly confessing that one is being fanciful or poetical is, in my judgment, impudence on the author's part.
Most theoretical physicists are guilty of the same fault when, in quantum theory, they fail to distinguish between a measurable indeterminacy and the epistemic indeterminability of what is in reality determinate. The indeterminacy discovered by physical measurements of subatomic phenomena simply tells us that we cannot know the definite position and velocity of an electron at one instant of time. It does not tell us that the electron, at any instant of time, does not have a definite position and velocity. They, too, convert what is not measurable by them into, the unreal and the nonexistent. The definite position and velocity of the electron at any moment of time is not measurable because of the intrusive effect of the measurements themselves, though this effect may not itself be discernible.
In view of the ever-increasing specialization in all fields of learning and therefore in higher education, we probably cannot look forward to a future in which theoretical physicists will also be persons who have sufficient grounding in philosophy and in philosophical theology, in order to avoid their making unfounded assertions about matters beyond their field of specialization. But they should at least be aware of their limited knowledge and be silent about matters beyond it. On the other hand, we should also expect Christian apologists in the twentieth century to be aware of what has been discovered in this century about the physical cosmos and about biological evolution. Only thus will they avoid the errors of their predecessors in modern times who lived in a universe that was described by Newtonian classical mechanics, which we now realize is insufficient to describe the universe we have since been able to discern.
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I wonder which subcommittee was responsible for commissioning the environmental impact statement for the common pigeon. When I have to scrape my car clean, I realize it's unintelligent design.
"perhaps you need to read my post again - slowly - your response is a non-response/"
Not in my opinion...
"I guess you believe science must be self-consistent?"
No, since "science" encompasses all sorts of things that end up turning out to be incorrect (referred to below as "failed theories", like heliocentrism).
On the other hand, science MUST be consistent with the observed universe. Anything else is not science by definition.
"IT must not contradict itself."
It must not contradict observed reality, or it becomes a "failed theory" rather than science.
"Can you agree with that? (watch out it may be a trick)"
?
It's always amusing to watch the non-scients fall flat on their behinds when trying to criticize science. It's clear that Adler hasn't a clue about how then uncertainty relations work. I'll stick with Samuel Adler's books.
When framed this way, it often means that epistemological considerations are more valued than historical events. In logic, every proposition or term has an immediate opposite and the principle of non-contradictions says it can't be both. But negations are possible for anything, even truth. Obviously we can set up false dichotomies. Happily reality and human life is more than epistemology and saves us from the tyranny of logic.
I imagine that every time you make these simple negations you have to check your blood sugar.
"God The Designer might have wanted to do that" is apparently considered a good scientific explanation and all anyone needs to know.
I wouldn't go so far as to say 'only' myths. I would venture that they are not word-for-word portrayals of actual events, however.
Are you sure it's not?
Morality can be an evolutionary advantage or disadvantage and if only the force of natural selection were in play, it should have been selected out long ago.
But it wasn't. And now morality directs change in ways that natural selection never would. Intelligently, I might add.
Bit of a conundrum there sharp.
Do you have a cite for this, -- I mean besides a creationist website, well FI; I'll even take the creationist site.
My position is that evolution is simply the religion of the secularist
I think it's ironic that you'd use the word 'religion' to denigrate the theory of evolution.
My goal is to simply expose the theory to some critical analysis
Other than the thousands of scientists who actually work in the field?
What's the big deal? Dawkins says the same thing routinely.
It's quite a bit more complicated than that.
How does your link on the history of Galileo's conflict with the church counter my point that "when religion and science have tangled, science has always won"?
Galileo was correct. The historical details are irrelevant to my first point that the Catholic church has a black eye over the incident, and is seen as having been factually incorrect.
When religion chooses to tangle with science, religion loses. It will again, but it will be the fundamentalists that have the black eye. The Catholics will escape damage, because they've staked out a non-confrontational stance vs. evolution.
This is a horrible misrepresentation. No one is "preaching" that religious conservatives should stop being religious. Good heavens, where do people get this stuff? For the record, I have no problem with prayer in school, students led prayer at commencement, school bible clubs, etc. Personally, I find praying over football games a little, well, kind of a trivial thing to bother the Lord about, but that's just me. Students have every right to express themselves and make statements of faith. I think if you ask anyone on "my side" of the issue, you'll find they have no problem with any of this, either. All I want is for biology class to teach the prevailing scientific view of biology. Nothing more. We want kids in science class to get science, not culturally-sensitive science.
"Funny man. The prediction of your supposed theory is that something will not happen?"
"Okay. I have a "theory" that pigs fly. Here's my prediction which, if false, will discredit the idea: "No human will ever be observed in the lab to grow three arms and fly into outer space while speaking in tongues." If this event is observed, my theory will be falsified."
Sometimes I get the impression I am wasting my time debating with morons. If you have a theory that pigs fly, then your theory would obviously be falsified if you ever see a pig fly. So my alternative theory, that "pigs can't fly" would be falsified if we ever observed a pig fly. My "prediction," therefore, is that we will never see a pig fly. Yes, that's a prediction that something will *not* happen. So what?
Don't bother replying. If you do, please understand that I have no time to reply to your pedantic nonsense.
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