This week the Texas School Board will vote on the adoption of public school biology texts—in an atmosphere of rancor and controversy created by creationists who vetted those texts and suggested severe revisions to water down the “e-word” and discussions of global warming. But more on that later.
In such an atmosphere, the major daily paper of Austin, Texas—one of the more liberal redoubts of the state—has given ample space to a preacher to rail against evolution. The paper is the Austin American-Statesman (statesman.com), and the author is David Sweet, pastor of the Hays Hills Baptist church in Buda (!), Texas, who claims that “Science doesn’t explain everything about life’s origins.”
Once again, I fail to see why it’s considered good journalism to present both sides of an issue that’s settled: evolution happened. Well, actually, I do understand: it’s because the paper is catering to its many religious subscribers who don’t accept evolution. Yet that paper wouldn’t publish an op-ed by a faith healer claiming that Western medicine doesn’t work, or by a flat-earther decrying the spurious sphericity of our planet; but they do the equivalent when it comes to evolution. What a gutless move!
Sweet’s letter, however, contains a number of misconceptions, all fueled by the notion that it’s a big mistake to think that science is based on materialism. And, I suppose, a reader who doesn’t know much about science is likely to be taken in by what he says. For example (Sweet’s words are indented):
1. Physicists are desperate to overthrow the Standard Model of physics because it gives evidence for God.
Why so much energy given to overthrowing the Standard Model in the face of consistent, confirming evidence? Because a singular origin of the universe is too close for comfort to certain religious explanations of origins. Also, the perceived odds against a singular beginning resulting in a universe like the one we have appear to be mind-numbingly astronomical. One way to try to slightly mitigate [JAC: he means “militate”] against these crazy odds is to add more universes. It turns out that it’s not just fundamentalist Christians who have ideological issues with science.
That’s crazy. Physicists are expanding—or going beyond—the standard model because by itself it doesn’t tell us everything we want to know. How do we unify gravity with the other major forces of physics? And adding more universes is not a desperation move, but a prediction derived from inflationary cosmology and string theory. Physicists are, by and large, atheists, and have no motivation to try to overturn God, for his supposed actions are simply irrelevant to their interests. Ask any physicist: do your colleagues do their work because they’re sweating over the possibility of God? That’s absurd.
2. Materialism is increasingly coming under question.
Yet despite its failure to bring down the Standard Model, materialism has largely co-opted science. Science seems untouchable today, and so materialism seems untouchable. Philosopher Karl Popper coined the term “promissory materialism.” Materialism operates on the assumption that if a materialistic explanation is not available, it will be forthcoming, because — simply put — materialism is true. Thus, voila — there are no more mysteries! That was easy.
Not even wrong. Materialism is not an a priori assumption: it’s a tool that happens to have provided answers. In contrast, invocation of a deity has explained nothing. That’s why materialism seems “untouchable”, for no alternative methodology has given us any answers about the universe. A materialist approach is not an act of faith, but a working assumption. If there were evidence that immaterial minds had effects on the cosmos, scientists would eagerly pursue it. In fact, they have: studying things like telepathy, ESP, telekinesis, and intercessory prayer. None of these studies have given an iota of evidence for “immaterialism.”
Sweet continues:
Yet, increasingly philosophers of science, like David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, are questioning whether dualism can be ruled out, either in origins of the cosmos or human consciousness. The intellectual leader of modern atheism, Anthony Flew, converted to theism based on new philosophical arguments, the struggle to explain the emergence of a single cell from non-life and the apparent design seen in the genome.
It’s telling that all the questioning of materialism cited by Sweet comes not from scientists but from renegade philosophers like Nagel and their “new philosophical arguments.” (Nagel, by the way, has no new arguments.) We are given no credible scientists who feel they must invoke dualism to explain cosmology or evolution. As for Anthony Flew, I believe there are other explanations for his conversion to theism.
3. There are big holes in the theory of evolution that suggest we should reject materialism.
One problem with teaching evolution in public schools (and it should be taught) is that, inevitably, it is over-simplified — as though evolution were an uncomplicated model with no loose ends. Students don’t hear of the fierce debates about various models within evolution or the constant mini-revolutions. (One way to give students an inkling of the complexities of the evolutionary enterprise is to have them read some articles over a few months from leading scientific magazines.)
A watered-down version of evolution contributes to the false implication that evolution is so well worked out that there is no longer room for mystery. Certainly materialists hope that this is the implication students go away with.
Well, I’m an evolutionary biologist, and yes, we have debates about the unanswered questions in our field. Is epigenetics (defined as environmentally-induced changes in the DNA) of any importance in evolution? How important is sexual selection or group selection in explaining the evolution of behavior and morphology? How often are such changes due to mutations in regulatory elements rather than in genes that produce proteins? These are real empirical questions and, if the history of science is any guide, will eventually yield materialistic explanations. Really, should we consider “God” when arguing about epigenetics? I haven’t seen anyone on either side mention that possibility.
4. Unanswered questions like the origin of life and the evolution of the human brain require non-materialist explanations (i.e., God).
I know that scientists have models for how life emerged from non-life — but it hasn’t been replicated in 150 years of attempts. Evolutionary-minded philosopher John Searle admits, “It is a scandal that we don’t know how life began, but it did — between 3 and 5 billion years ago.” Darwin had no clue of the mind-blowing complexity of a single cell, complete with information systems, so the mystery has only deepened with scientific knowledge. Is it too much to say that the appearance of life from non-life is a mystery?
How about the emergence of the human brain? Why such a brain when evolution posits gradualism based on slight evolutionary advantages? All we needed were brains to allow us to swing higher and run faster. Instead we got brains that allow us to do number theory, philosophy and contemplate that we contemplate.
Think of the many unanswered questions of science that we had 200 years ago. Many of those, including questions about the nature of matter, the origin of the universe, and how species change or new ones arose, have since been answered: all by materialistic investigation. Unanswered questions are just that—unanswered questions. Implying that they haven’t yet yielded to science is simply the discredited God-of-the-gaps gambit. In light of the continual progress of science, and the way it displaces religious explanations, any theologian with a brain in his head has given up invoking God-of-the-gaps. (Of course, there are plenty of brainless theologians.)
I’m not sure I’d call these things “mysteries” anyway, for that word has numinous connotations implying that the answer lies outside of science—in the realm of the divine. In fact, the puzzle (or “unanswered question”) of the origin of life hasn’t deepened, but been clarified, and progress has been made. We now know that RNA can act as a catalyst, providing a new avenue for studying the origin of life. There are new theories that life may have begun on a substrate of clay. These, too, give us new things to test.
I’m not sure what Sweet means by “models for the emergence of life” being “not replicated in 150 years of attempts,” but we don’t replicate models, we replicate results. And when we do produce replicating and metabolizing “life” in the lab under early-Earth conditions—something I think will happen in the next century—will Sweet admit he’s wrong? Or will he simply say, “Well, we don’t know that it did happen that way.”
As for his ludicrous notion that our brains are too complex to have evolved, since the selective pressures involved only swinging from the trees and running faster (these are conflicting, by the way), he needs to educate himself. The notion that the cerebral complexity of humans suggests the intervention of God—an idea that set Alfred Russel Wallace apart from his colleague Charles Darwin—ignores not only the novel selective pressures impinging on small bands of bipedal and social hominins (selection for language, tool use, a theory of mind, and so on), but also the fact that once we’ve achieved a certain level of neural complexity, things like playing chess, making music, and doing physics would arise as spandrels. Further, we can set in order (as Darwin did for the eye), different degrees of mental complexity in different existing species, and thereby construct scenarios for what advantages might accrue to some species evolving more complicated brains. It’s simply silly to say that once we came down from the trees and could run fast, that marked the end of new mutations’ ability to enhance our survival and reproduction.
5. Scientists lie by implying that all the big questions have been answered. They haven’t, and the answers involve rejecting materialism.
Is it fair to lead students to believe that there is no mystery in what we know so far about origins and evolution? Is it only for adults to grapple with the great questions, but leave young students with the impression that it’s all solved? Supporters of teaching evolution like to cite Francis Collins as an example of a Christian who supports teaching evolution in their defense of teaching evolution. Why would they not also support conveying to students that there are leading scientists like Collins who are not materialists?
The problem is materialism’s admixture with science. When materialism gets confused for science, students suffer. Science-education leaders should be equally concerned about the co-option of science by materialism as they are about its co-option by creationism.
I don’t know any scientist or teacher who tells students that we understand everything about evolution, nor that we understand how life arose from nonliving matter. As for Francis Collins, well, yes, he’s gone off the rails by implying that human morality and the “fine tuning” of the universe will never yield to science. But he’s an exception, and, at any rate, he’s never published a scientific paper in which he invokes a deity or the supernatural. As far as I know, the science he does is firmly wedded to materialism.
The decrying of “materialism” is, of course, a tactic right out of the Intelligent Design (ID) playbook, and goes back to the Wedge Document produced by the Discovery Institute in 1999. Recognizing that it was a losing strategy to force public schools to teach creationism, or to inject any religious views into the science curriculum, the IDers decided to use the “wedge” of materialism as a way to ultimately bring people to God. Here are the governing goals of the “anti-materialism” movement, as embodied in that document:
Let us make no mistake about pastor Sweet. What he is doing in his op-ed is using the supposedly invidious strategy of “materialism” as a way to sneak Jesus into the schools. Unfortunately for him, materialism works—in fact, it’s the only thing that’s worked in promoting the progress of science. When he comes up with a phenomenon that demands a nonmaterialistic approach, like evidence for ESP or telepathy, then science will pay attention. For the time being, he’s just an ignorant preacher who’s misleading the public—and I shouldn’t have wasted so much time on him.
h/t: Lamar
