Category: theistic evolution

Does science imply God? Harvard astronomer raises fine-tuning argument in Washington Post, suggesting a theistic explanation for human intelligence

November 27, 2016 • 10:00 am

Howard Smith is a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Astronomy as well as an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He’s also a religious Jew who spends his time reconciling science with the mystical tenets of the Kaballah. The website for Smith’s 2006 book, Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kaballah: A New Conversation Between Science and Religion, describes the author as “a traditional and observant Jew,” and adds this:

The power of the scientific method is that every single person will see and hear exactly the same thing.  Mistakes of interpretation will be found and fixed; cumulative wisdom grows, and as it does, we gain in understanding about God’s “Book of Nature.”  In contrast, our relationship with the holy is communal and personal, and is sanctified.  Together, our mind and our spirit, our shared and our personal experiences of the Divine, enable us to live in the natural world both aware of and grateful for its blessings. The psalm for Shabbat, Psalm 92, celebrates the universe that was completed with Shabbat: “How amazing is Your Creation, oh Lord, and how subtle are Your thoughts! …. An ignorant person can’t understand it; a simple-minded person won’t get it.”   Thanks to the revolution in science and religion we are reaching for new highs of awareness.  May we also reach new levels of wonder, gratitude, and holiness.

So what we have here is a religious scientist. But the religion part is completely missing from Smith’s op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post, “Humanity is cosmically special. Here’s how we know.” Or rather, the religion is implied, but is only implicit for reasons we can guess: instead of confessing his beliefs at the outset, Smith tries to use science to show that humans are “special”, and that, perhaps, there’s a Higher Intelligence behind the presence of humans on Earth.

To make his argument, Smith makes a number of discredited claims, including the “fine-tuning” argument. I’ll excerpt a few passages, all of which are wrong:

There was a time, back when astronomy put Earth at the center of the universe, that we thought we were special. But after Copernicus kicked Earth off its pedestal, we decided we were cosmically inconsequential, partly because the universe is vast and about the same everywhere. Astronomer Carl Sagan put it this way: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking was even blunter: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”

An objective look, however, at just two of the most dramatic discoveries of astronomy — big bang cosmology and planets around other stars (exoplanets) — suggests the opposite. We seem to be cosmically special, perhaps even unique — at least as far as we are likely to know for eons.

The first result — the anthropic principle — has been accepted by physicists for 43 years. The universe, far from being a collection of random accidents, appears to be stupendously perfect and fine-tuned for life.

The weak anthropic principle, that we happen to live in a Universe that allows our existence, and thus our pondering that existence, is not at issue here. That’s just a tautology. The rest of the piece makes clear that Smith is talking about the strong anthropic principle (SAP), in which physical laws were devised by some higher power to permit human life. And that argument has not “been accepted by physicists for 43 years”.

There are, of course, alternative explanations to the SAP, five of which are mentioned by another physicist, Sean Carroll, in the video below. I needn’t reprise them, but I urge you to listen to the 9-minute video to refresh your knowledge of the issues.

There’s more wrong stuff (my emphasis in the excerpt below):

The most extreme example is the big bang creation: Even an infinitesimal change to its explosive expansion value would preclude life. The frequent response from physicists offers a speculative solution: an infinite number of universes — we are just living in the one with the right value. But modern philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and pioneering quantum physicists such as John Wheeler have argued instead that intelligent beings must somehow be the directed goal of such a curiously fine-tuned cosmos.

Carroll takes care of the “big bang creation” argument in the video at 2:15 in the video, showing Smith’s ignorance of the very physics he teaches. As for Nagel, who claims that evolution can’t account for consciousness (Nagel doesn’t mention God but nevertheless suggests some unknown teleological force), my colleague Allen Orr has dispelled that view in his review of Nagel’s ideas in the New York Review of Books.

Then Smith proceeds to a biological argument:

It seems likely that exoplanets could host extraterrestrial intelligence. But intelligence is not so easy to produce. Paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee summarize the many constraints in their book “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe ” and show why it takes vastly more than liquid water and a pleasant environment to give birth even to simple (much less complex) life. At a minimum, it takes an environment stable for billions of years of evolution, plus all the right ingredients. Biologists from Jacques Monod to Stephen Jay Gould have emphasized the extraordinary circumstances that led to intelligence on Earth, while geneticists have found that DNA probably resulted from many accidents. So although the same processes operate everywhere, some sequences could be unlikely, even astronomically unlikely. The evolution of intelligence could certainly be such a sequence.

In fact, intelligence has evolved independently several times on Earth, unless you confine the definition of intelligence as “human-like” intelligence. Octopuses are intelligent, crows are intelligent, cats are intelligent. These are all independent evolutionary events. So what does that say about the “likelihood” of evolving intelligence? Simply that it’s not “astronomically unlikely”! One can easily see how the evolution of reasoning and foresight could confer enormous adaptive advantages to individuals, probably explaining the convergent evolution of intelligence in many species.

Further, it doesn’t take “billions of years of evolution” to evolve “even simple life”. The first strong evidence for life we have on Earth is about 3.4 billion years ago: bacteria that were already quite complex. And to get that degree of complexity you’d need substantial time. Other evidence suggests that there was life about 3.7 billion years ago—less than one billion years after Earth formed as a molten ball. Smith needs to read up on biology and evolution. What he’s getting at here, of course, is that some Intelligent Force was necessary to force the occurrence of such an improbable phenomenon.

Smith then bangs on about how the finite speed of light prevents us from even knowing about distant but intelligent beings. From that he somehow concludes that we are not only alone in “our cosmic neighborhood,” but “probably rare” and “not ordinary.” Well, surely the conditions for the evolution of life surely aren’t common in the Universe, but we simply have no idea how rare they are. Smith has no evidence that “the bottom line for extraterrestrial intelligence is that it is probably rarer than previously imagined.” Well, lots of people have “previously imagined” the rarity, and made calculations; but all those calculations are speculative, based not only on data we don’t have, but on our solipsistic view that extraterrestrial life must resemble that on Earth.

Smith gives away the game in his final paragraph, where he clearly implies some intelligence behind humans. When I read this, without knowing anything about the author, I immediately thought, “Smith is religious.” It turned out I was right. The bolding below is mine:

Some of my colleagues strongly reject this notion [that “we”–humans–are not ordinary]. They would echo Hawking: “I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.” Yes, we all have beliefs — but beliefs are not proof. Hawking’s belief presumes that we are nothing but ordinary, a “chemical scum.” All the observations so far, however, are consistent with the idea that humanity is not mediocre at all and that we won’t know otherwise for a long time. It seems we might even serve some cosmic role. So this season let us be grateful for the amazing gifts of life and awareness, and acknowledge the compelling evidence to date that humanity and our home planet, Earth, are rare and cosmically precious. And may we act accordingly.

What on Earth does it mean that we “serve some cosmic role” and are “cosmically precious”? Those very phrases imply that there’s a playwright behind our evolution, and for Smith that’s surely Yahweh. Note that he uses the word “unique” in the first excerpt from his op-ed.

So what we have here is an op-ed in a prominent newspaper that uses dubious and erroneous arguments to claim that humans were designed. But those arguments don’t stand up in light of what physicists and biologists—at least those not already committed to a religious explanation—understand about our cosmos. There is no compelling argument that we serve any cosmic role, or that any Designer is behind physical law and human evolution.

What galls me about Smith’s article is that, in light of his known views, he’s trying to hide his argument for God, all the while leading the reader to think that there must be a god running our Universe. His piece is deliberately misleading—indeed,  duplicitous.

Finally, I’d point out to Smith that invoking Yahweh is a nonstarter, for then he’d have to explain the existence of the designer. Where did he come from? How did he act? And those are surely harder to explain than is the existence of intelligent life on Earth.

I’m surprised Smith hasn’t yet been funded by Templeton, but he has talked on these issues at an event sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, under their DoSER (“Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion”) program, itself funded by Templeton. (That program, by the way, is a blight on the AAAS.)

I’ll add a link to this post in the comments after Smith’s article.

h/t: Rodney

Pope Francis gives evolution the thumbs up, but still avows creationism

October 29, 2014 • 6:59 am

A famous anecdote from 19th century New England involves Margaret Fuller, an early feminist and ardent exponent of the spiritual movement of transcendentalism. Besotted by her emotions, she once blurted out, “I accept the universe!”  When he heard of this, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle remarked dryly, “Gad—she’d better.”

While the story may be apocryphal, if you replace Fuller with Pope Francis and “the universe” with “evolution,” then Carlyle’s feelings are identical to mine. For, according to many media outlets (for example, here, here, and here), Pope Francis has just declared that he accepts the fact of evolution.

Gad, he’d better.  Evolution has been an accepted scientific fact since about 1870, roughly a decade after the theory was proposed by Darwin in 1859. And there are mountains of evidence supporting it, as documented in my book Why Evolution is True, and no evidence for the religious alternative of divine creation.  As Pope Francis tries to nudge his Church into modernity, it wouldn’t look good if he espoused creationism.

But if you parse Francis’s words yesterday, spoken as he unveiled a bust of his predecessor Benedict XVI, you’ll find that tinges of creationism remain. In fact, the Vatican’s official stance on evolution is explicitly unscientific: a combination of modern evolutionary theory and Biblical special creationism. The Church hasn’t yet entered the world of modern science.

The recent history of Catholicism and evolution is spotty. Pope Pius XII claimed that evolution might indeed be true, but insisted that humans were a special exception since they had been bestowed by God with souls, a feature present in no other species.  There was further human exceptionalism: Adam and Eve were seen as the historical and literal ancestors of all humanity.

Both of these features fly in the face of science. We have no evidence for souls, as biologists see our species as simply the product of naturalistic evolution from earlier species. (And when, by the way, are souls supposed to have entered our lineage? Did Homo erectus have them?). Further, evolutionary genetics has conclusively demonstrated that we never had only two ancestors: if you back-calculate from the amount of genetic variation present in our species today, the minimum population size of humans within the last million years is about twelve thousand.  The notion of Adam and Eve as the sole and historical ancestors of modern humans is simply a fiction—one that the Church still maintains, but that other Christians are busy, as is their wont, trying to convert into a metaphor.

Pope John Paul II was a bit stronger in his support of evolution, yet still insisted that the human “spirit” could not have resulted from evolution, but was vouchsafed by God.

Pope Benedict was more equivocal, occasionally flirting with intelligent design and claiming that evolution was “not completely provable” because it couldn’t be completely reproduced in the laboratory.  (The Pontiff apparently didn’t see that there is plenty of historical evidence for evolution, like the fossil record and the existence of nonfunctional genes in our DNA that were useful in our ancestors.) Showing his misunderstanding of evolution (which is not a process involving chance alone, but a combination of random mutations and deterministic natural selection), Benedict also claimed that “The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe. . .Contemplating it, we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.”

The Church’s support of evolution, then, has been equivocal: while allowing that humans had evolved, it also affirmed human exceptionalism in the form of our unique soul. And the historical doctrine of Adam and Eve is profoundly unscientific, for we could not have descended from only two people, something that itself implies special creation. The Vatican, in other words, embraces a view of evolution that is partly scientific but also partly “theistic,” reflecting God’s intervention to produce a species made in His own image.

But Francis is seen as a reformer, beloved even by atheists for his supposedly progressive views on issues like homosexuality—a stance that has yet to be converted to Church doctrine. Did Francis’s words on Monday also signal a change in the Church’s view of evolution? Not a bit. Here’s the gist of what he said (see also here):

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so. . .

“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fullfilment. . .

“The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. . .

“God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life. . .

“Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

This is simply the Church’s traditional view of non-naturalistic, theistic evolution,  expressed in words that sound good, but that still reflect a form of creationism.

Let’s start with the Big Bang, which, said Francis, requires the intervention of God.  I’m pretty sure physicists haven’t put that factor into their equations yet, nor have I heard any physicists arguing that God was an essential factor in the beginning of the universe. We know now that the universe could have originated from “nothing” through purely physical processes—if you see “nothing” as the “quantum vacuum” of empty space. Some physicists also think that there are multiple universes, each with a separate, naturalistic origin. Francis’s claim that the Big Bang required God is simply an unsupported speculation based on outmoded theological arguments that God was the First Cause of Everything.

As for evolution “requiring the creation of being that evolve,” note that the word “creation” is still in there. But what Francis is saying here is a bit ambiguous. It’s not clear whether that “creation” was simply God’s creation of the Universe through the Big Bang, which then went on to produce Earth, life, and humans through purely naturalistic processes. Alternatively, perhaps Francis meant that God created the first living form itself which then, according to His plan, evolved naturalistically, giving rise to humans and other species. Or perhaps Francis even meant that the human lineage itself was specially created (“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws. . . “).

What is clear is that creationism of some sort is still an essential part of Francis’s view of life.  Although the media, intoxicated by a supposedly “modern” Pope, is all excited about what Francis said, his views on evolution don’t differ in substance from that of his recent predecessors.  As usual, Francis appears to be a voice for modernity but still clings to old dogma.

What surprises me most, though, is the claim that “God is not a divine being or a magician.” If God is not a divine being, why is Francis calling him a “divine creator”? Well, perhaps the Pope misspoke on that one. But in truth, the Catholic view of God is indeed one of an ethereal magician. What else but magic could create souls on the spot, both during the course of human evolution and during the development of each human being?

Let us face facts: evolution that is guided by God or planned by God is not a scientific view of evolution. Nor is evolution that makes humans unique by virtue of an indefinable soul, or the possession of only a single pair of individual ancestors in our evolutionary history. The Vatican’s view of evolution is in fact a bastard offspring of Biblical creationism and modern evolutionary theory. And even many of Francis’s own flock don’t buy it: 27% of American Catholics completely reject evolution in favor of special creation.

The Catholic Church is in a tough spot, straddling an equipoise between modern science and antiscientific medieval theology. When it jettisons the idea of the soul and of God’s intervention in the Big Bang and human evolution, and abandons the claim that Adam and Eve are our historical ancestors, then Catholicism will be compatible with evolution. But then it would not be Catholicism.

 

Catholicism and theistic evolution

July 28, 2014 • 9:59 am

Below is part of a short post called “What does the Catholic Church teach about evolution,” appearing on The Catholic Difference, produced by the Parish of St. James in Hopewell, Virginia—very close to where I went to school in Williamsburg. This is pretty much official Catholic doctrine as I understand it. The emphasis in the second paragraph is mine.

Doesn’t the theory of evolution go against the biblical account of creation?
This question can be answered only if we understand clearly what the Bible actually says about creation. A careful reading of the account in the Book of Genesis indicates clearly that the so-called “six day” account of the creation is a poetic description of the origin of the world, which makes two points very clear: first, that everything in the universe was created by God and that, therefore, contrary to what some other religions teach, nothing in creation is to be worshipped as though it were a god or a part of God. The story of the creation in the Book of Genesis in the Bible is not, and was never meant to be, a scientific document giving the scientific details of how the universe came into being and how it has developed since its origins.

The view prevailing among most theologians today is that there is no conflict between the evolution model of the origin and development of life and the truths presented in the Book of Genesis. It still remains true that the origin of every human soul is a new act of creation by God and creator. (That is why the evolution model cannot explain completely the leap from highly developed animal form to the fully conscious, thinking, feeling and deciding human person.)

A few points:

1.  They use the old canard that Genesis wasn’t meant to be a “scientific document giving scientific details.” I wish they’d just be explicit and say “Genesis wasn’t meant to be taken as literal truth: it’s an allegory.” That goes for the whole Bible, which is often excused by theologians as “not a textbook of science.” But if the Bible is an allegory (i.e., an extended metaphor), are there any parts of it that are true? Tell us, Catholics, which ones? And how do you know?

And if it’s “very clear” that Genesis is mere poetry and not fact, why do roughly half of Americans feel otherwise? Where does it say in Genesis: “WARNING: The following book is allegory, and is not intended as a representation of fact. DO NOT CONSTRUE IT OTHERWISE.”? It’s curious that Church fathers such as Aquinas and Augustine, who were presumably very careful readers of Genesis, did construe much of it as fact!

2. The Catholic Church certainly does not see all of Genesis as an allegory. Church doctrine is still that all modern humans descend from Adam and Eve, the sole ancestors of humanity. Science tells us that that is wrong: that the bottleneck of the Homo sapiens lineage was around twelve thousand people, not two (Adam and Eve) or eight (Noah and his extended family).  Now how Adam and Eve continue to relate to Original Sin is something for Catholic fabulists to decide. If the Church maintains, as they still do, that Adam and Eve were the only two ancestors of humanity, then they are in clear conflict with science. If they agree that Adam and Eve were made-up metaphors, then either Jesus died for that metaphor or Catholics must confect a new story about where “original sin” came from. This is a severe problem for Catholicism.

3. Before genetics definitively ruled out Adam and Eve, the one big conflict between Catholicism and evolution was the Church’s insistence that somewhere in the lineage leading to modern Homo sapiens, a soul was inserted by God. Not only that, but each new human being involves God creating a new soul.

Of course what a soul consists of isn’t defined explicitly, but its insertion is a violation of naturalistic evolution. A soul is obviously something that distinguishes us from all other species, and is presumably something connected to the possibility of an afterlife.  But the statement above implies that it’s also something deeply connected with the human ability to be “conscious” and to “think,” “feel,” and “decide.”

Well, some animals can do all that, but they don’t have souls.  And all of those mentations can be explained by evolution, for we see them in our soul-less relatives.  No, I thought a soul was something more than that.  To Alvin Plantinga, the human trait that cannot be explained by evolution is the “sensus dvinitatis,” the ability to apprehend truth that leads us to perceive and worship God.  Plantinga argues, falsely, that humans’ ability to perceive truth is something that also couldn’t have evolved, though I don’t think he’d see the sensus as a soul. I won’t go into detail about how our ability to perceive truth (and our inability to perceive many truths) can be explained by natural selection, with no God needed. I’ve done that here, and I do that in my book.

It’s time for Catholics to tell us precisely what they mean by “soul,” and how they know that our species has it but other creatures don’t.  Maybe they’ve done this, but I’m not about to go digging into the theological literature again. All I know is that they haven’t specified exactly when God put it into the human lineage.

4. Please, religionists, if you do accept evolution, stop calling it a “model”! That is a term that creationists used when opposing the “creation model” with the “evolution model.” Call evolution either a “theory” or a “fact.” It’s far from just a model.

Catholic biologist Ken Miller talks about God and evolution

July 19, 2014 • 10:28 am

Panda’s Thumb called my attention to an interview of  biochemist, author, ID opponent, and theistic evolutionist Kenneth Miller from Brown University. Miller once described himself to me as an “observant Catholic.” Here he has a 33-minute conversation with Samuel Varg (see below), who asks him several penetrating questions about God and evolution.

Panda’s Thumb author Matt Young notes:

While searching for the source of this cartoon, I ran across the website of Samuel Varg, a Swedish magician and skeptic. Mr. Varg has posted an interview with Kenneth Miller on YouTube and promises interviews with Candida Moss and John Safran.

Mr. Varg and his colleague Anders Hesselbom were unusually well prepared. Professor Miller, in turn, was an excellent spokesperson for theistic evolution, though I had to take issue with his claim that the universe is “overflowing” with the possibility for life. His position seems to me to be very close to deism, but you can listen to the interview and decide for yourself.

Here Miller espouses theistic evolution, making some arguments that I find dubious, especially for someone who, as he says, is an exponent of science and reason. (Miller also talks about the Dover trial, in which he played a large role in keeping Intelligent Design out of American public schools.) It’s well worth listening to all 33 minutes of this:

Miller speaks well, and it’s interesting to hear how an intelligent and eloquent scientist manages to justify theistic evolution. Miller begins by citing—unfortunately—Aquinas and Augustine on the issue of how “natural phenomena don’t take god out of the picture.” (If you’ve read them, you’ll know that’s not exactly true, for those theologians firmly believed in supernatural phenomena like Paradise, Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, and inherited original sin.)

He then goes on to make a sort of god-of-the-gaps argument, asking, “Why do we live in a universe that is simply overflowing with evolutionary possibilities for life?”  Miller’s answer is that “We live in a world that was fashioned by an intelligent creator who intended to have a process of evolution that would give rise to the beauty and the diversity of life—our own species included.” In other words, he’s making a virtue of necessity, for he admits that many religious people dislike evolution because it tells us we’re nothing special (and we’re not!). The interpretation of a naturalistic process as reflecting God’s plan is Miller’s form of theistic evolution. But there are some exceptions: Miller has stated (as he does in this video) that the universe appears fine-tuned for life, and in his first book he suggested that God worked directly in evolution by His undetectable quantum-mechanical manipulation of particles.

It is telling, though, that Miller’s own Sophisticated Theology™ is completely at odds with other Sophisticated Theologians™ who constantly tell me that everybody who truly understands God sees Him as a Ground of Being, whose presence is essential for sustaining all things. Miller appears to reject this.  He explains that, though he’s a theist, he doesn’t see God as having to do any sustaining: he says a real God would have created a universe like ours that works without his intervention, and “sustains itself.” But the universe sustains itself, as Miller says it does by simply following natural (though God-decreed) law, then God cannot be a Ground of Being without whom the universe couldn’t exist.

Miller also broaches God as the answer to why Earth was able to evolve “reflective, self-aware, intelligent life,” another common argument for God by science-friendly theists. I deal with this question in my book: was the evolution of such life really inevitable? My answer is “We don’t know, but I doubt it.”

At about 9:30 in, Miller implies that the book of Genesis is wrong, and is seen literally only by fundamentalists and atheists (who decry the fundamentalists but attack religion as if all of it were based on pure literalism). Yet Miller’s own Catholic Church insists that Adam and Eve were real people who were the ancestors of all human beings. I’d love to ask him if he thinks that Adam and Eve are fictional characters.

At about 23 minutes in, Miller admits that he has had some doubts about God, based on the problem of evil in the world, and adds that he changed his mind several times about religion but, in the end, always came back to God. I’d like to hear his own take on the existence of “natural” evils like childhood cancers and deaths from natural disasters.

At 29 minutes in, Miller is asked whether he thinks Jesus walked on water and turned water into wine.  He waffles a bit, saying he “does not know,” but adds that the Bible might simply include fictional tales concocted to highlight Jesus’s teachings. As a Christian, Miller says that, to him, “It doesn’t matter.”  Miller adds that he sees Jesus as divine and as “saviour of the world.” That being the case, Varg should immediately have asked him if he thought Jesus was resurrected from the dead. I don’t think Miller would have been on as firm a ground if he had said that that, too, might just have been just a story to underscore Jeus’s “teachings”. For if Miller really thought that, he would be flying in the face of very important Church dogma, and in fact could hardly call himself a Catholic. (If Jesus wasn’t crucified and resurrected, on what grounds do we consider him saviour of the world? And isn’t a denial of the Resurrection a heresy?)

At any rate, the interview shows a religious scientist walking the fine line between theism and deism. This line was depicted by reader Pliny the In Between at his website Pictoral Theology:

Toon Source.054