Human Destiny: Evolution and Spirituality (Endings)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 16, 2008, 17:00 (5972 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George has drawn our attention to an essay by Denis Alexander, a theistic evolutionist, pleading for Christians to accept evolution as the agency of God's creation. - Bearing in mind George's atheism, I'm impressed by his broad-mindedness and by the restraint of his response! Some salient points: - Alexander: the task of the theory is "to explain the origins of biological diversity on this planet". Exactly. It never seeks to explain life itself. Dawkins and Co. distort the scope of the theory. - Alexander: "You can baptise evolution into virtually any world-view you like, and it will fit comfortably within most." I agree, and it amazes me that theists can show such degrees of hostility towards a theory that works just as well for theism as it does for atheism. (Darwin saw no reason why the theory should "shock the religious feelings of anyone".) - Alexander: "If there is a personal God with intentions and purposes for his creation, then we expect order, directionality and the emergence of personhood. This is precisely what evolution delivers." But in the very next paragraph, he asks: "Why does God use such a long process, involving so much animal pain and death, to fulfil his purposes?" Sadly, he doesn't answer ... unless he provides an answer in his book. Additional problems for me are: a) why a "personal" God? b) Why assume that intentions and purposes are Christian (maybe God created us simply for his own entertainment)? c) Why order, directionality etc., when it could just have been a matter of starting the whole thing off and then seeing what happened? d) It is a moot point whether evolution does deliver order and directionality. - George is interested in the three Genesis models. Alexander favours C, the most literal version. In B he says "children today seem readily to believe in God almost as soon as they can speak", which I find extraordinary; I'd have thought children of that tender age would simply believe what their parents told them. Model A (a sort of parable) gets my vote. - Just as interesting as the essay are the many comments that follow. Andrew Holloway (Tuesday 1 July) points out that evolution is far from proven (i.e. as an explanation for the origin of species). He cites government-funded experiments on fruit flies to induce mutations, the results of which were 1) normal fruit flies, 2) handicapped fruit flies, and 3) dead fruit flies. Personally, I have no doubt that evolution occurs, in the sense that natural selection preserves advantages, but how life and heredity originated, and how unconscious organisms gained the ability to form themselves into new organs and new species is another matter altogether. - Many of the correspondents are vehement in defence of "God's word". A typical example is Bruce Budd (Tuesday 8 July): "Please, friends, the Word of God is either right or it's wrong." But a few lines later: "Man's interpretations of the Bible are man's words, not God's, and should be treated as such." Since the Bible was written by man and translated by man, and like all language is subject to interpretation by man and can only take on a meaning through man's interpretation, how on earth does he know what is God's Word? - But there is a lovely contribution from Harvey Edser (Monday 14 July) which really took my eye: "We may not like the implications of evolution being God's agency in creation ... that it involves death, suffering, struggle and waste. But our dislike is not disproof. I don't like the divinely-ordered slaughter of women and children in the Old Testament, and I'm not keen on the concept of hell, but ultimately God doesn't have to act how I would like him to. Of course, he's also free to create the universe in 6 days and then make it look like it took billions of years." - Worth logging on just for that.