Is Evolution God’s Undertaker?
That is the question that John Lennox addresses in his most recent book God’s Undertaker, Has Science Buried God? (Lion, Oxford: 2007). I’ve read about two-thirds of the book which is filled with so much excellent content I thought I better write some of it down before it goes in one end and out the other.
The beginning of the book discusses the question of whether naturalism (atheism – nature is all there is and explaining nature is all we can know) is demanded by science or was naturalism brought to science. Is naturalism itself a statement of faith? Or is naturalism something that will not hinder science compared to religion? Lennox does a good job of showing how modern science actually came into being because of practicing Christians (Whitehead’s thesis) such as Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Babbage, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, and Clerk Maxwell (p. 20). His point that theists do not hinder the scientific process at all. However, the real conflict that exists is not between science and religion, it is between naturalism and theism; two diametrically opposed worldviews or philosophies (p. 27). He goes on to discuss the limits of science and really the faith that is inherent in the reductionistic thinking that science is all about1 as well as some arguments from design and the fine-tuning of the universe.
Evolution Confusion
What I found most useful so far was his chapter on “The nature and scope of evolution” (p. 98ff.). What actually is meant by evolution? Lennox gives five different variations:
- Change, Development, Variation – this just implies change without any implication as to mechanism or intelligent input. This is a very innocuous and uncontroversial use of the word. After all, things change.
- Microevolution – this is what Darwin observed himself on Galapagos which we see and measure everyday as bacteria become resistant to antibiotic drugs. One example used in many textbooks is that of the color of moths (light moths were more easily seen by predators, so darker moths were more fit survivors). This has been proven to be “wrong, innacurate, or at least incomplete”; however, it still is used in most modern textbooks. Microevolution though is a fact and can be demonstrated on many counts.
- Macroevolution – refers to large scale innovation (e.g., new organs, structures, body-plans, new genetic material) characterized by a marked increase in complexity. This is one of the areas where most of the controversy surrounding evolution exists. The gradualists (e.g., Dawkins and Dennet) would say that macroevolution is merely the extrapolation of microevolution.
- Artificial selection, for example, in plant and animal breeding – We of course see this in all our different doggies. There is considerable intelligent input here. Darwin would argue that what takes man a relatively short time would take nature a very long time. However, this provides no real evidence in and of itself for evolution by unguided processes.
- Molecular evolution – In reality, evolution presupposes the existence of self-replicating genetic material. Natural selection requires things to be living, prebiological natural selection is a contradiction. Molecular evolution is the term used to describe the living from the non-living. The fact that it uses the word evolution does obscure the fact that it is not Darwin’s evolution.
So the confusion comes in with what one actually means by evolution. If one says “I don’t believe in evolution”, then they would be taken as a fool, because 1, 2, and 4 clearly do occur and can be measured and verified. However, what typically happens is that people state that macroevolution occurs by natural selection, but the only real examples given are those of microevolution. What is interesting in all this is that for all of the examples of natural selection, nothing new was ever formed. What was selected was already there. There is nothing creative or innovative from what is known of natural selection. This flies in the face of the assertions made by Dawkins and other neo-Darwinists.
So really the question becomes, how far can microevolution go? Lennox has many quotes from many scientists who admit that there is no evidence for large evolutionary innovations — none have been observed, we don’t know if any are in process now, there are no good fossil records of any, we can’t really effectively exrapolate from what is known (microevolution). One emenent scientist, Pierre Grasse from France, notes that “fruit flies remain fruit flies in spite of the thousands of generations that have been bred and all the mutations that have been induced in them”. More recent work on E. coli bacteria has yielded no real innovative changes after 25,000 generations.
Clearly there are two clear reasons that negate the proposition by neo-Darwinists such as Dawkins, Lewontin, and Dennet that attribute macroevolution as fact similar to the fact that the earth orbits the sun:
- The earth is observed to orbit the sun – where birds or any other species actually came from has NEVER been observed
- The earth is observed REPEATEDLY to orbit the sun – as Lennox puts it, “to put an unobservable and unrepeatable phenomenon in the same category as an observable and repeatable one would seem to be such an elementary blunder… one cannot help wondering if … materialistic prejudice is overriding common (scientific) sense” (p. 108)
The evidence of the fossil record is so against gradual evolution it isn’t even contested by paleontologists. All that is observed in the fossil records is stasis (no real change in a species during their existence on earth) and a sudden appearance — not by steady or gradual transformation from it’s ancestors, they appear “fully formed”. That is why Gould and Elderedge came up with the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” – the existence of sudden large macroevolutionary jumps (whatever that is).
The final discussion of this chapter was on “common descent”. This is actually a more powerful technique for determining common ancestry which is the structure of the DNA sequences in a collection of organisms. The similarities in the DNA sequences can be used as well an evidence for design. Stephen Meyer (quoted by Lennox) makes a good point, “postulating an unobserved designer is no more unscientific than postulating unobserved macroevolutionary steps.”
That is all for now. But knowing these different aspects of evolution and what is really known is essential in dialoguing with folks on this issue.
Additional Information
- The idea that we can understand things down at their smallest parts and then explain more complicated things (bottom up thinking) – for example one limitation is akin to the analogy that I may know all of the materials that are contained in my house, but with that knowledge alone, could I really predict how they would be put together to form my house? In fact, you really would have to start with the raw materials used to make the building materials, or the molecules used to make those raw materials, or the atoms… From just that knowledge could you predict how the building materials (the higher up process) would be fabricated? — It’s not that reducing things to their smallest parts is wrong. It is essential to science. But it does have it limitations in being able to explain higher level processes just from what is known of the smallest parts. [↩]
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This book sounds really sweet, it’s amazing how twisted around the truth gets by “scientists” who refuse to look at things objectively, when in fact there is nothing disproving a creator God.
Also, have you noticed that “sudden large macroevolutionary jumps” reads almost like a direct quote from the begining of the X-Men movie? Why isn’t everybody telekinetic by now?
Comment by Becky — February 22, 2009 @ 11:58 am
Yeah, that beginning to X-men is a hoot. If I recall Jean Luc Picard says that evolution-mutations occurred over 100,000’s of years — I think he’s a few zero’s off of what evolutionists actually say and makes it sound like things can change much more quickly than they actually do.
Thanks for reading the post. What I find most amazing is not that scientists have to accept God or anything, but that when faced with the facts that this theory is inadequate they cry foul and pull every trick in the book (e.g., straw man arguments) to degrade any critical assessment of it. I don’t think this is very good for science and just shows how ego-centered it can be like anything else in the world.
Comment by morscher — February 23, 2009 @ 9:43 am
Thats pretty sweet, i thought it was goofy that my science teacher was pretty much 100% sure darwin was right, and that there is SO much evidence.
But I just wondered why there were no middle animals alive, the ones that were in the middle of evolving or whatever.. gtg bell rings..
Comment by b — February 24, 2009 @ 8:28 am
Note that I edited the statement that the moth example used for microevolution was proved “false”. It actually has been proved to be “wrong, innacurate, or at least incomplete” by Michael Majerus, “Melanism – Evolution in Action” (Oxford: 1998). Thanks to Steve for pointing this out.
Comment by morscher — March 7, 2009 @ 9:11 am