I’m strongly tempted to label God-driven evolution this way: Theistic Evolution™, since it’s becoming as common as Sophisticated Theology™. But I’ll call it TE for the nonce. And TE is dominating the conversation over at the accommodationist outfit BioLogos, for they’ve recently pushed it heavily as a way to bring evangelical Christians to Darwin. But we know that that hasn’t worked, and it won’t work, for it demands that you see part of the Bible as metaphor and the rest as literally true, without knowing how to tell these parts apart. Moreover, the things that TE requires adherents to take as metaphor—God’s creation of life and the existence of Adam and Eve—cannot be seen metaphorically by Christians because they debase God’s action in the world, making him a a puppet-master pulling the strings of natural selection, and also completely removing the rationale of salvation from original sin brought by the crucifixion of Jesus.
Theistic evolution is also, of course, the way that accommodationist organizations like the National Center for Science Education have chosen to go, claiming that there’s no real difference between TE and “real” naturalistic and scientific evolution, which proceeds in an unguided fashion. But there is a difference, of course, just like there’s a difference between radioactive decay that happens without “cause” and radioactive decay that happens because God determines when to tweak an electron. It’s like telling Irish people that evolution is consistent with leprechauns because the LITTLE PEOPLE could be guiding it invisibly.
Imagine telling chemists that their field is compatible with the Bible because God could be behind every chemical reaction! That’s not necessary, of course, because (unlike biology), chemistry doesn’t conflict with religious feelings or dogma. The only reason that TE even exists, unlike “theistic physics” and “theistic chemistry,” is that biology is uniquely placed to hit religion in the solar plexus.
At any rate, a new post on BioLogos by Ted Davis, “Science and the Bible: Theistic Evolution,” lays out what Davis sees as TE’s core tenets. Davis explains the audience:
This column presents one type of TE, a type favored by many evangelical scientists and scholars. For example, the people I will discuss all accept (as far as I can tell) the Incarnation and Resurrection—that is, they are Trinitarian Christians who believe that Jesus was fully divine (and fully human) and that the disciples went to the right tomb, only to find it empty, before encountering the risen Christ in diverse places. They also believe in creation ex nihilo, the classical view (illustrated at the start of this column) that God brought the universe into existence out of nothing.
Classically, of course, creation ex nihilo didn’t just mean only the Big Bang, but the view God made the earth and its inhabitants as described in Genesis: animals, plants, water, stars, and humans were instantly poofed into existence (well, it might have taken a day for each one). So evolution is at the outset in conflict with Scripture unless you see “creation” as meaning only the Big Bang. But on to the tenets (indented; my comments are flush left).
Core Tenets or Assumptions of Theistic Evolution
(1) The Bible is NOT a reliable source of scientific knowledge about the origin of the earth and the universe, including living things—because it was never intended to teach us about science.
This reflects not only modern scientific knowledge, but also (more importantly) modern biblical scholarship. Peter Enns and some other evangelical scholars have recently stressed this point, initiating a firestorm in the evangelical academic community that, so far, has confirmed my view that evangelicals in general are just not ready to deal with this, even though it is consistent with the classical notion of accommodation. My own comments about the magnitude of the problem, written before the firestorm started, can be found here.
This is a base canard: of course the Bible was meant to teach us about science, insofar as there was science in those days: it was the attempt of a prescientific (and largely preliterate) people to explain why things were the way they were—how the universe, Earth and Earth’s inhabitants came into being, why there were plagues and diseases, and where the stars were. It just turned out to be wrong. Trying to make a virtue out of necessity (the habitual practice of theologians), we’re now told it wasn’t really written to give us facts about the Earth. That’s not only wrong, but offensive to those who have studied how the Bible was interpreted over the millennia. It is intellectually dishonest to pretend that literalism was never intended or construed. It’s no wonder that evangelicals “aren’t ready to deal with this,” for they sense the dishonesty.
(2) The Bible IS a reliable source of knowledge about God and spiritual things.
Remember the quip that Galileo attributed to Cesare, Cardinal Baronio, “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.” (We discussed this earlier in the series). Evolution was not an issue in Galileo’s day, but this platitude is frequently quoted by advocates of TE—and often without proper attribution to Baronio. Commonality obviously lies in the attitude, not the topic. Many critics of TE are willing to adopt Galileo’s approach when it comes to the Solar System, but not when it comes to evolution: they are anxious to keep Galileo out of the garden of Eden.
Yeah and Cardinal Baronio was trying to make the best of a bad job since science was beginning to dispel one Biblical notion after another. And how, exactly, do we know that the Bible is a reliable source of knowledge about God and spiritual things? Is it—really? Is the stuff in the Old Testament about the vindictive, mean-spirited, and arrogant God “reliable”? Is the God who ordered nonvirgin brides stoned, and the death of many children for making fun of a prophet’s baldness a “reliable” characterization of Our Deity? What about all the horrible morality in the Bible—morality ignored when people cherry-pick the “good morality” like “don’t kill”?
No, the Bible cannot be a reliable guide to spiritual things because so many theologians—both evangelical and liberal—simply reject the characterization of God given in the Bible as well as many of the moral “lessons” in scripture.
(3) Scientific evidence is irrelevant to the Bible—it is simply not a science book.
See above. This needs to be stated separately, since some believers look to science for “proof” of the Bible, just as some unbelievers look to science for “disproof.” Proponents of TE stress that science and the Bible aren’t like apples and oranges; rather, they are more like apples and rocks: you can hold one in each hand without tension, but they have very little in common. We wouldn’t look for God in the phone book, or in an automobile repair manual. Don’t look for science in the Bible. In principle, scientific theories neither support nor threaten the Bible.
The Bible was meant to be a science book in the sense that it was meant, and interpreted by nearly everyone except the few people always cited by accommodationists (e.g. St. Augustine, who was a still a literalist in many ways), as a true account of the origin and diversity of life. If you argue that the Bible wasn’t meant to be a science textbook simply because it doesn’t comport with what modern science has found, then you must also argue that the Bible is not a textbook about God and morality since most modern people have rejected the characterization of God and much of the morality in scripture. How many of us think that nonvirgin brides should be stoned to death, along with blasphemers, disobedient children, and those who violate the Sabbath? If we don’t accept these as guides to moral behavior, in what sense is the Bible a “reliable guide to spiritual things”?
(4) The creation story in Genesis 1 is a confession of faith in the true creator, intended to refute pantheism and polytheism, not to tell us how God actually created the world.
This is meant to echo what we said about the Framework View. It is not necessarily true that all TEs accept the Framework View or something like it, but many do. Most would probably say that the Bible is not contradicted by any specific scientific theory of biological diversity—unless that theory oversteps its philosophical boundaries and functions as a kind of religion, what Conrad Hyers called “dinosaur religion.”
See above. Read Genesis 1 and 2 and see if you don’t see them as literal (and conflicting) accounts of creation. Where, oh where, do theologians get the idea that the Bible doesn’t really mean what it says in plain language, and actually means something much more arcane? If God, either the author or inspirer of the Bible, meant to tell us that in Genesis, why didn’t he just say it straight out? He could have said (or inspired a writer to say) “There are no other Gods but me, and I’m sort of like you humans but a lot more powerful, kind, and smart.” That would be all he had to say in Genesis to convey the message Davis says is really there. Why the impossible-to-interpret metaphor?
(5) The Bible tells us THAT God created, not how God created
Again, this sounds like the Framework View—or, at least, it should. Belief in God the creator is consistent with science, and even supported by some aspects of science; but, it is not a substitute for scientific explanations.
Here Davis is simply telling evangelicals the correct way to interpret the Bible, and the interpretation is not the way the Bible sounds to them. Davis is telling them tha God actually created life through evolution, although Genesis plainly says otherwise. The Bible says nothing about natural selection or the transformation of species.
Is it no surprise, then, that BioLogos has had no success in converting evangelicals to Darwin? To do so means getting them to reject many tenets of their faith, forcing them to figure out what the Bible really meant when there’s no obvious way to do that, and making them admit that the sacrifice of Jesus was metaphorical since there was no Adam and Eve to sin.
Nevertheless, Templeton keeps throwing money at BioLogos. Their initial $2 million dollar grant was renewed this year to the tune of $1,929,863, the project being “Celebrating the harmony between mainstream science and the Christian faith” (do read their grant proposal, though it may raise your blood pressure). The new grant, if spent instead buying the food product Plumpy’nut™ for malnourished African children, could provide sixty-four thousand months of treatment for children, saving many lives and preventing the damage that comes with malnutrition.
What would you rather spend two million dollars on: saving the lives of children or engaging in a futile attempt to reconcile Jesus and Darwin?
God, this is priceless!
It’s so sad that debunkings like this are on a non-influential blog which nobody reads and will reach no one. It will not be on any TV of major influence or newspaper.
There will still be millions of dollars siphoned into it and no public of any size will know anything about it.
Sometimes I wonder why am I even reading this blog.
Yeah, me too. I suggest you go read something else. And by the way, we have 20.000 views per day. No, it’s not television, but we all do what we can.
🙂
It reaches you, Arnie, and it reaches me and a good many others. Maybe you should spread the word about what an excellent website it is, and then more will come and learn about Biologos and much else. Post links. Tell your friends. Don’t just whine — it doesn’t help.
I understand the frustrating. But people do read this. And the book associated with it. How can websites like this not make a difference? Just seeing the book title of WEIT in the bookstore makes a difference, to say nothing of the people who actually read it. Expressing doubt openly to one’s friends makes a difference. And this website leaves a long trail on the web for people to follow long after the posts are put up. Christians, for all their faults, do Google things, and often that Googling will take them here where they will not find what they were taught to expect, a bunch of hateful baby killers, but thoughtful and nice people who happen not believe in their fairy tale.
I am convinced that if attitudes about religion significantly change in this country in the next few decades, it will be mostly because of the influence of the web, by the rich an thoughtful resources that people will find when they Google religion or evolution. When I was growing up, the only source of information I had about atheists was what preachers told us from the pulpit, almost all of it lies. The major networks didn’t touch it. The local book store didn’t have any books on atheism that I recall seeing. In a small town like mine, atheists seemed almost as unreal as witches or Leprechauns. Things are totally different for children growing up today, and that is largely because of the tireless efforts like this one. I am optimistic.
Frustration.
*website
FTFY
I still don’t know what this writer means by Theistic Evolution:
“the belief that God used the process of evolution to create living things, including humans”
‘Used’? Is this suggesting a god that thought “random variation and natural selection will produce a wide variety of organisms, including, sooner or later on some planets, intelligent ones that can contemplate gods, morality and more, and these will be of particular interest to me”? Or “I will intervene when I want to, nudging DNA here and there to produce the animal I want, through gradual generational change”?
The latter seems more like ‘intelligent design’. But if they want to keep away from that, and lean to the former, then I’d like them to talk about how they see Jesus as a vital part of theology – do they contend that any intelligent organism would need ‘saving’ by the incarnation of the god; and, if so, what was so special about the point in human evolution that made their god choose that place and time (and wouldn’t it have been better to ‘save’ humans when we were all in one place on the African veldt)?
Given that the cross is a fundamental part of Christian symbolism, I have always wondered what would be the equivalent if the intelligent beings that God intended and evolution produced were not bilaterally symmetric bipedal quadrupeds, but instead something squid or insect-like…
Here’s your answer:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2361
Clever! On a related note: one of my favorite jokes:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/lenny_bruce.html#ehRlFlHXRF2C0UBp.99
Back in the late 1960’s, someone published a parody of Christianity that had its prophet born to a “virgin Buick receptionist.” Instead of a guiding star, there was a supermarket opening with floodlights pointing up to the sky (a common occurence in those days in Southern California). Ultimately, the prophet is executed in the electric chair, so his followers get into a sitting position and shake to make the sign of the Electric Chair. The book came with its own version of astrology, the “Signs of the Cardiac”–with posibilities such as Honda with Harley-Davidson rising.
I wish I knew where my copy is. It was mimeographed, without an author’s name. You would see an ad for it in the LA Free Press and just sent a few dollars to a PO Box to get it.
If the Bible simply meant what it said, what would be the use of Sophisticated Theology™? The theologians would be out of business. So they want us to believe a scenario in which iron-age priests initially concocted incredibly Sophisticated Narratives™ which were then dumbed down deliberately into the primitive and murky fairy tales that we have today. The original Sophisticated Manuscripts™ were presumably destroyed afterwards.
Presumably, ST says that *God* dumbed everything down to fairy tales, knowing full well that they would be taken literally.
I’ll stick to the default assumption: That the Bible (at least the OT) was indeed written by ignorant iron-age priests who meant exactly what they wrote.
Plantinga somewhere had an interesting comment on Biblical interpretation: the proper interpretation of passages is NOT 1) what the human authors intended, nor 2) what they were trying to communicate. Rather, it is what God intends for the passages to mean, which may or may not accord with 1) or 2). And (I guess) in accord with the protestant priesthood of the believer doctrine, it’s up to each priest-believer to decide what God meant.
In the fond belief that Jerry will overlook crass profanity in his blog, I call bullshit on Plantinga’s nonsense.
Do people like him realize what asses they are making of themselves in public?
But I suppose theologians are like clergy: if they lose their jobs, they have no marketable skills. So naturally they work very hard to act like they’re doing something meaningful.
If you have a reference for what you said about Plantinga there, I’d appreciate it. I haven’t seen his thoughts on that issue.
Thanks,
jac
Googling “alvin plantinga bible” turned up “Two (Or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship” which seems to at least imply or suggest what I said.
It seems to me that according to this line of thinking, the Bible amounts to nothing more than a giant set of Rorschach inkblots, except that God knew ahead of time, and intended, what your interpretations would be. Whatever conclusion you arrive at after reading the Bible must be what God intended you to believe. So, apparently, being a Christian consists of the following steps:
1. Read the Bible.
2. Ignore what the Bible literally says, and simply decide what you think it “meant” to say.
3. Treat your own subjective, self-serving interpretation as the direct word of God, and treat anyone who disagrees with you as contradicting God.
This pretty much nails it. It also explains why what commentators and religious people say the bible says says more about the commentators and religious people than it does about the bible (note: this applies to many other influential literary works as well).
Which makes the neo-fascist theocrats of the republican right-wing even scarier–when they cherry-pick, they pick out the repressive, violent, and/or misogynistic parts as normative, while passing over parts that could, with the good will that they don’t have, be of possible use in constructing a decent ethical system. Paraphrasing Sam Harris in his book Free Will, that’s just the kind of people they are.
Re your first para., this.
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I think that a lot of different passages in the Bible consist of different genres, and they have to be read in accordance with this. For example, any passage concerning beginning and end times is usually highly figurative, and is seen that way because of the choice of language. There are guidelines on interpreting the bible followed consistently by most theologians, but people tend to ignore the clues that the first three chapters of Genesis are figurative.
When I saw the title I momentarily thought they were talking about the evolution of Theism(and theistic thought). Silly me
Oh, come on, the Templeton grant is richly deserved. After all,
How come you can’t see that?
The one thing I have never been able to understand is how people can claim that TE is not creationism?
BioLogos goes to great lengths to differentiate themselves from ID, but then any version of TE that fits the Christian narrative is essentially equivalent to ID, if not more creationist than that (at least ID allows for the provisional possibility that it wasn’t the Christian God that did it) – you have to posit that God intervened in evolution at least once, when he put souls into humans (for which you also have to posit the existence of souls, which itself puts you directly in conflict with all of modern science as the existence of souls is not really compatible with the very foundations of modern physics, and physics if the foundation for everything else in science), and if you are to account for the influence of random events on the outcome of evolution (drift, etc.), you basically have to posit that God either predetermined the trajectory of every elementary particle in the universe from the very beginning or he intervened multiple times to insert point mutations, indels, rearrangements, etc. into the genome (you won’t see that point made because none of these theologians dares touch the topics of neutral processes and their role in evolution, but such interpretation necessarily follows if humans are to be certain to appear as a product of evolution).
This is pure creationism, any way you look at it. So how is it better than (or different from to begin with) ID and how is it compatible with science, and how could any serious thinker, let alone the head of the NIH, make that claim????
I’ve made this point on this site before, but the difference is that creationists see evolution as impossible. Take away God, and you can’t have complex life at all. Theistic evolutionists see evolution as something that happens, but which wouldn’t necessarily lead to humans without divine intervention. Take away God, and the history of life is mostly unchanged. There may be similarities in the two positions, but they are distinct enough to merit separate titles.
I forgot to address ID. Really, that’s a bit tougher to pin down because its proponents make such varying claims, but going by the textbook, Of Pandas and People, ID sounds like straight up creationism, simply refusing to unambiguously identify the Christian god as the creator.
I frequently say that the only thing I used to say when I was a YEC fundamentalist and that I still say now that I am an atheist evolutionist is “One can only believe in theistic evolution if one does not understand two things, namely (1) theism, and (2) evolution.”
Nice.
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BioLogos: For all your special pleading needs. 3 locations, and hot dogs for the kids!
When the quality management guru, the late W. Edwards Deming, would be confronted with an arbitrary proposal for improving the quality of a product, his invariable reply was, “By what process?”
For theistic evolution to be an intelligible idea, its advocates must define the process, explain its function, derive predictions from that knowledge, and confirm those predictions by experiment. They can do none of this, since a god’s nature and processes are unknown and unknowable. Theistic evolution is therefore doomed to be forever irrelevent, immaterial, and arbitrary.
In other words, you have the absolute certitude that your senses can grasp everything that exists? You believe you have no limitation, even mental, and that only what is material truly exists?
Theistic (not necessarily christian) evolution can work like darwinian evolution except for one thing: consciousness is an uncreated phenomenon. That is it.
That is why evolution would be a process that creates more and more self-aware and creative animals.
It seems to me that this is “the Bible of the gaps”: if we know that something in the Bible is false, then it wasn’t meant literally. Only the stuff we can’t independently confirm is what’s actually meant. Of course, if you’re basing what the Bible says on what you already believe, rather than basing what you believe on what the Bible says, then you’re just using the Bible as window dressing; any statement of the form “X is true because the Bible says so” is *really* saying “X is true because I believe it”.
It seems to me that this is the theistic version of the pilot wave interpretation. “Let’s add a completely useless concept to this theory simply to make us more comfortable with it!”
How does that Galileo quote go in the original (I assume) Italian?
“No, the Bible cannot be a reliable guide to spiritual things because so many theologians—both evangelical and liberal—simply reject the characterization of God given in the Bible as well as many of the moral ‘lessons’ in scripture.”
It also cannot be a reliable guide because there is scant agreement among the religious about what it says, as evidenced by the vast number of sects which hate each other for their divergent views on “spiritual things” almost as much as they hate the atheists.
If God causes radioactive decay by tweaking an electron, he’s doing it worng! 😉
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By definition a professional requires evidence and facts. Yet, professionals of all stripes enter into activities like this with no evidence or facts.
Nothing more than word play and salesmanship/untruths.
I prefer the label Evolutionary Creationism™ since they smuggle their creators and their actions in somewhere:
As long as they don’t present a testable mechanism, it is pure belief.
If they throw in Miller’s quantum juggling, they break quantum mechanics (which has no hidden variables) and evolution (which has no variation that is coupled to selection) both.
Universes out of nothing is what must happen according to physical laws. Gods are neither necessary nor likely. (And notice how boring they are compared to the actual physics as we know it.)
How Davis can conclude that “Belief in God the creator is consistent with science, and even supported by some aspects of science” is anyone’s guess. Either he doesn’t care about modern science or he is unfamiliar with it. Maybe he should discuss his position with Krauss or Hawking.
Davis would be delighted to discuss his position with either Krauss or Hawking, neither of whom seems to understand the second part of the old term, “natural philosophy,” which is what they both do in their popular writings.
It’s impossible to rationally explain insanity. The only way to even TRY to do it is to cherry-pick the Babble, claim that certain passages mean something altogether different than what they say, and totally ignore any passages that are conflict or, if “run to their conclusions”, produce paradoxes. Just imagine the depth of the fear behind all of this: I was fortunate enough to not be raised in a family that convinced me that “bad” deeds would condemn me to hellfire forever. What we’re seeing here is a massive, world-wide incidence of “Stockholm syndrome” (this includes all religions)in which believers are often willing to die to defend the very belief system that holds them captive and dooms them to lives of fear, guilt, ignorance, and poverty.
There’s also a huge swath of other things in the bible that looks like it is intended as factual (and large portions of it was traditionally treated as such until recently): the history stuff. Take, for example, a relatively secular thinker like Hobbes: he spends an immense amount of time in _Leviathan_ worrying about the history supposedly presented in the OT. We know of course now (thanks to Israel Finklestein and many others) that the history there is really nothing of the kind; yet it is clearly written in the factual mode, as are the gospels, which are also increasingly regarded as fiction. I make the prediction as the realization that the historical character is also bogus, you’ll get increasing retreat into the “the whole book is a metaphor” (like Spong and those fringe guys hold) and increasing divide between them and the fundamentalists.
From my studying, including multiple classes, on the bibles, my understanding is that they were simply power-driven advertising marketing campaigns. Why I study them, in fact. The tropes are still useful.
With the OT, various Israeli, some Jewish some not, trying to gain power after many failed governance attempts, post kingships and post invasions. Various priestly sects creating ads and stories to further their power strategies.
Public narratives and story telling are always for the purpose of getting power and money by a few. One of the reasons science methods had to be invented.
The history is pretty well understood. What has confused it is the Republicans use of evangelical voters to get power by pandering to magical thinking. Apparently, the Republican big money funders don’t believe any of the nonsense but it helps them control a voter bloc.
It’s hard to say with Genesis, but a very good case can be made that the books of Job and Jonah were definitely intended to be NOT factual!!
However, it’s true that to insist Genesis is metaphor when it conflicts with science is somewhat “special pleading”.
Christians in ancient Greece and Rome could not agree whether the Genesis account was metaphorical or not, St. Basil insisting on a literal interpretation, while Origen and Augustine insisted on a metaphorical one.
The Catholic church is in a pickle since they accept evolution, but insist on a literal Adam and Eve (monogenism) back there somewhere.
You can dispense with Adam and Eve if you take the “moral influence” theory of Jesus’ atonement, or other minority views, but the mainstream view in Western Christianity (the “satisfaction” theory of atonement) requires a literal Adam and Eve.
Hector Avalos discusses evidence for Genesis having been been altered to obscure its originally polytheistic nature and that Yahweh was the son of Elyon, a separate and superior god. Avalos says Yahweh (Lord) received the portion of the earth that came to be known as Israel. Avalos also points out that Elohim was a plural noun meaning gods, and that Genesis 1 did not have Elohim creating the earth ex nihilo but rather that the story began with something already there–“a dark and chaotic mass of water stirred by a wind, presumably the very breath of Elohim.”
The origin of the cosmos is told with more panache, more imagination and versimilitude in Tolkien’s “Simarillion” than in Genesis. Too bad it wasn’t available in earlier times.
Well you do know Tolkien did base the ‘Simarillion’ and the events of Middle Earth on Biblical thought and Christian metaphor right?
Given that I think you guys mean The Silmarillion…
That would be hardly surprising given that Tolkien was just like C. S. Lewis {only with “more fucking elves”)…
But I think it’s more heavily influenced by Finnish mythology, specifically Kalevala, and just as much by Olympian and Norse mythology as by Judeo-Christian mythology.
Tolkien was endeavouring to “re-imagine” (as it would be termed today) an Anglo-Saxon creation myth, so it’s not surprising that Northern mythologies play so big a role.
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