Canadian Mennonite
Volume 10, No. 11
May 29, 2006
Pointing us to a loving God: The paradox of natural selection
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In The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, author C.S.Lewis employs a lot of magic—but it is remarkably constrained magic. For example, Aslan could have rescued the traitor Edmund from the White Witch by some mighty act of power, but Lewis did not let him get away with that. The White Witch confronts Aslan without fear for her safety because she can make a good case for ownership of the boy according to the deep laws of Narnia. Aslan respects those laws and pays the price. There is no cheap magic here.
What is true for the stories of Narnia is true for the laws of nature as well, and for the character of God. God does not employ magic and miracles on a daily basis. God seems willing to abide by natural laws that govern creation, not intervening to fix things and resolve problems. And God seems to also want for us to discover how this marvellous created world works. Why else would God give us such incredible gifts of curiosity and skills in science?
All of which leads me to a topic that is very much current today: “intelligent design.” Since I am a Christian scientist (a molecular biologist), I am often asked what I think of intelligent design. Most people seem to assume that I support and welcome it, since one of the goals of intelligent design is to restore God’s role in creation—a role that science seems bent on eliminating altogether. People are usually surprised to discover I am not in favour of intelligent design as a guiding principle for science, nor are a number of other Christians involved in science. Let me tell you why.
Biologists not too thrilled
The main proponent of intelligent design is Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box (1996). The basic idea in Behe’s book, and in other intelligent design books by such authors as Phillip E. Johnson and William Dembski, is that there are things in nature that could not have been made by using the laws of nature alone. Just as an intelligent human is required to make an electric motor, an intelligent designer is required to account for objects in nature that are highly organized. This is particularly true of the living cell, which contains tiny motors, pumps, turbines and code readers. Biologists think that such structures were made by natural selection (Darwinism), but, according to intelligent design proponents, they are wrong. Whenever we find something that is highly organized, they say we should recognize it as specially created by an intelligent designer who works in such a way that there is no natural explanation for the result.
You can see why biologists, whether Christian or not, wouldn’t be too thrilled with this idea. Biology would cease to be an explanatory science and would just become a list and a descriptor of the many things the intelligent designer had done. There would be no point in asking how the designer had done the work.
I think, however, that Behe is wrong. There are clues in the cell about how it was made. When we look at the DNA of plants and animals, what we see looks like a building site. Working genes make up only a few percent of the total DNA. The rest of the DNA consists of dead genes, useless genetic material and huge piles of virus-like segments.
The genes are not arranged in an orderly way on the chromosomes; they may be facing backwards or forwards, they may be clustered or far apart, and the clusters can be bizarre mixtures of different kinds of genes. The genes themselves are made up of bits and pieces of other genes, with the bits separated by large tracts of genetic nonsense.
This makes me think that the DNA is the result of a long tortuous process of trial and error, mix and match, renovation and repair. It actually fits quite well with what would be expected from the Darwinian process of natural selection. What Behe says about the orderliness of the cell is fine, but he has told only half of the story.
A natural explanation
If things aren’t so orderly in creation, what about “irreducible complexity”? This is another idea promoted by Behe. Through irreducible complexity, he seeks to show that everything in a cell is there for a purpose, and that each part depends on the other to function—there are complex machines in the cell that don’t work until all of the parts are in place.
The favourite example is the motor found in some bacteria that drives the propeller (the flagellum). Evolution would put the parts together one after another in a long sequence, but this would be impossible because natural selection would always eliminate half-done machines before evolution could complete them. Half a motor is no good.
It would seem that irreducible complexity is fatal to the theory that natural selection is the source of design in nature. But I wouldn’t write the obituary for Darwinism just yet. There are bacteria that don’t have propellers, but still have many parts of the propeller motor! What are these motor parts doing in a cell that doesn’t need a motor? They are incorporated into a pump. So here we have the rudiments of a Darwinian story: half a motor is okay if it works as a pump.
But even if there are structures with irreducible complexity—and I believe there are many in the cell—natural selection would not be precluded. Something that has irreducible complexity today need not have had it in the past. A stone arch will fall if only one stone is removed; each stone is indispensable. But in the past there may have been a wooden scaffold underneath the stones. The removal of the scaffold makes the arch irreducibly complex when it was not irreducibly complex with the scaffold in place. Proteins in the bacterial motor that are indispensable today may not have been essential in the past.
So there may be natural explanations for living things after all. And why not? Why can’t we say that God made the cell while at the same time understanding that the cell is the outworking of the laws of biology working in a process called natural selection or some other yet undiscovered principle of nature?
Doing science as a Christian
When I do science as a Christian, I do exactly the same experiments that would be done by non-theistic scientists. But while they may believe that the laws of nature are godless, impersonal and automatic governors of nature, I am free to believe that they are nothing less than the expression of the faithfulness of God. God is utterly consistent in everything he does. But intelligent design proponents want to put biology back into the realm of mystery and miracle. I think that this is premature. There is a good chance that we can see the faithfulness of God even in the evolution of the cell by natural selection.
I think there may be a serious problem with intelligent design that could affect our view of the nature of God. Intelligent design proponents believe the universe was created by the action of chance, natural selection and by the occasional intervention of the intelligent designer. When chance and natural selection are incapable of making an organized structure, the designer does something magical to resolve the problem.
According to William Dembski, chance and natural selection account for very little in the cell; most of it is made in a non-natural way. Yet when it comes to the world we live in from day to day, God seems to be content to allow the slow and wasteful processes of the world to run their course without intervening very often. It has taken about 15 billion years to create the universe as it is now. This is more consistent with a creator who patiently weaves a creation that is constantly constrained by the demands of internal consistency, than one who pays no attention to constraints.
Intelligent design proponents should be careful not to abandon naturalistic explanations too quickly because there is good reason to think that God wants the world to be intelligible to us.
Some have argued that it is this intelligibility of the world that tells us that God creates the world not just with power but also with love. It is paradoxical that understanding of a cruel and wasteful process such as natural selection could point us to the love of God.
Facing the ‘big’ issues in Goshen
John F. Haught, edited by Carl S. Helrich, Purpose, Evolution and the Meaning of Life, Pandora Press, 2005, 130 pages.
Purpose, Evolution and the Meaning of Life consists of three lectures given by theologian John Haught at the last annual Goshen Conference on Religion and Science, as well as a wonderful sermon entitled “God the gardener” by P. Douglas Kindsche, a mathematician.
Haught accepts evolution as a valid account of the origin of life on Earth, but argues strongly that such an acceptance should not lead to the kind of materialistic pessimism found in best-selling books by Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, among others. These thinkers look in vain for meaning because they see nature only at its most basic level. Meaning and purpose emerge at higher levels of understanding.
A helpful analogy is that of a monkey looking at Moby Dick and seeing only black smudges, while a child recognizes some of the words and an adult understands the story. From the perspective of biblical faith, we see much more than just the basic dead material in living things. There are a number of layers of understanding possible when looking at the world. The popular atheistic writers are not wrong because they get their science wrong; they are wrong because they stay at the first simplistic layer—they can’t go deeper than simplistic evolutionism.
What can we see in the long history of life on Earth that is coherent with our biblical understanding of the world? This is a difficult question because, whereas the Earth has been around for more than four billion years, the Bible is only a few thousand years old. How can they possibly tell the same story?
Haught finds resources for answering this question in the work of the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. From Teilhard we get the courage to see the unfolding of Earth history as a great story whose purposes are fulfilled in Christ. With Whitehead we dare to dream that the universe is not just matter and energy, but that it is a drama with an open future, not unlike the kingdom of God in the gospels or the “new creation” in Paul’s writings.
Haught has not given us the final word on the meaning of life in the context of a very old and a very big universe. This frontier in theology is still very new and very scary, but it must be pursued. Some people may think that Teilhard and Whitehead are already old hat and do not represent the core of historic Christian theology, but I think Haught is justified in taking them seriously as pioneers. They are pointing in the right direction.
The biggest challenge is to understand the difference between the Christian view of the ultimate future and that of the atheists. How does the “new creation” come into being from an evolutionary world? How can we be saved from either the “big freeze” or the “big crunch” at the end of the universe? These questions have huge implications for environmental ethics, but they are not yet being addressed by mainstream theology and they are not addressed in this book, except for some musings in the post-lecture discussion that forms the final part of the book. But it is heartening to hear of Mennonites beginning to face these issues.
Primers on intelligent design
Denyse O’Leary, By Design or by Chance: The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life, Augsburg Books, 2004, 337 pages.
William A. Dembski, editor, Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, ISI Books, 2004, 366 pages.
When Denyse O’Leary subtitles her book, The Growing Controversy on the Origins of the Universe, the average lay reader might well raise an eyebrow just a tad. There may be “a growing controversy,” but I’m hard-pressed to detect it in the normal course of my life.
That aside, By Design or by Chance makes a useful primer for those who wish to find out what’s being said by the “intelligent design” people about the subjects of evolution, creationism and any other “ism” that concerns itself with the really big questions.
O’Leary is a journalist, whereas Dembski is a scientist and philosopher, but both are arguing for the intelligent design model of life on the planet. For those who are unfamiliar with the territory, intelligent design is not creationism.
O’Leary delineates the range of opinions on the origin of life: from young Earth creationism, that treats the Genesis account of the origins of life as historical fact, to Christian evolutionism and atheistic Darwinism, as well as intelligent design.
Intelligent design theorists believe that, although natural selection and genetic mutation working together are evident in the universe, they cannot explain the irreducible complexity life forms exhibit. The human eye, for instance, is made up of many parts that have no function without the other parts. There is clear evidence that the universe has been consciously designed, intelligent design proponents insist.
On the whole, the book is good reading for those who want to know what the fuss is about but find it hard to slog through the academic essays in books like Dembski’s.
Dembski appears to be one of the foremost spokespersons for the intelligent design viewpoint. Uncommon Dissent is a collection of essays by writers in the intelligent design school of thought. It can become tedious, especially when similar arguments regarding everything from irreducible complexity and gaps in the fossil record to the propeller on certain bacteria are constantly repeated.
Several essays are outstanding, however, because they focus on the meaning of the controversy in a way that should resonate with all people who have grown up with faith in a creator but who have felt they had to modify the details of that faith in the face of the scientific evidence.
I would recommend particularly “Why I am not a Darwinist” by James Barham. For people like me, a Christian who was secularly educated after high school, Barham’s thoughtful retelling of his own voyage is helpful: “I had always been immersed in the humanities, but somehow I had managed to keep the part of my mind that was drawn to the exploration and expression of human feeling separate from the part that was preoccupied with rational understanding” (page 185).
If, as a faith community, were we to undertake a new dialogue on the subject of our biological origins, Dembski’s and O’Leary’s books would be worthwhile resources for that discussion.
Testimony of a math lover
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During a recent “walking meditation” home from the University of Manitoba, where I teach mathematics, I reflected on how math and faith have intertwined and enriched my life, to the extent that separating one from the other would seriously damage both.
I first fell in love with mathematics at 15, when I discovered geometry in Grade 10. That same year I was baptized on confession of my faith in a small rural Mennonite church where higher education was discouraged at the time unless you were going to be a teacher or a missionary, and where math interests were thought to be amusing.
Despite this, my love affair with math grew and flourished. I was both exhilarated by the mental challenge of proving theorems, even as a teenager, and puzzled by how this science of imaginary objects—such as infinitely long lines of zero width—could have something relevant to say about our physical world.
I revelled in the power of calculus—invented by Isaac Newton and other mathematicians. I spent one summer slightly drunk with the power of it all, and I understood what inspired Alexander Pope to write, “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night; God said let Newton be! And all was light.”
However, even then I understood that any mathematical description of reality is metaphorical, that physicists—and other scientists using mathematics to describe the universe—cannot claim ultimacy or to have explained the “why” of some event. And that despite the aura of absolute truth, mathematics is an imaginary world of make believe objects that only exist in the mind. This is a world in which “truth” is of a very different nature, a difficult-to-define concept possibly not that different from religious truth.
So even now when my mathematics students ask that age-old question, “What is truth?” I still don’t know where to begin, other than talking about continuity, harmony, beauty, wholeness and unity being grounded in community.
This notion of truth has become intertwined with that other love, the love of the one I committed to follow, also as a somewhat naïve 15-year-old. The one who, according to the Gospel of John, referred to himself as “the way, the truth and the life.” How does one follow such a one with authenticity, one whose way is a way of life and peace? Certainly not by using truth as a weapon.
When Leona [my wife] and I found ourselves administrating Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) development or peace and justice programs in southern Africa and Canada for several decades, we encouraged ourselves and other MCC volunteers to expect God to be present long before we entered the scene. We suggested it is not our role to insert abstract truth into foreign situations, but to search for truth in the context of community, continuity and wholeness, in the hope that those who search will discover the truth that casts out fear.
So as I continued my recent walk home I pondered what it was that drove me to carry math journals and theology books with me over several decades. Or why I would sit poolside at MCC retreats working on research problems, oblivious to noisy games of water polo. Certainly it was therapeutic. But more than that, it awakened reverence and awe and pointed me through the suffering that surrounded us, to that sense of goodness we find in the first chapter of Genesis.
And while it was from our African sisters and brothers that we learned how to hope in the midst of seeming hopelessness, ever-present for me were my mathematical and theological interests. They did their part to keep hope alive by pointing to the underlying goodness of God and creation in the midst of the incredible suffering we saw, caused by both natural events like droughts and floods, and by the human savagery of war and generations of apartheid.
Human beings have been given the ability to detect, appreciate and play with patterns. This gift has made survival possible, and has provided the means by which we celebrate our universe. It has given rise to the sciences and the arts, and it is this gift of the Spirit that I now share with our future teachers and lovers of mathematics.