You raise some good points, and I think others on the ASA list have done a
good job of answering. However, since I've already written a couple of
pages, I guess I'll still put my 2 bits in! (I make no claim to being an
expert in these things)!
There is a distinction to be made between EVOLUTION and evolution. The
first is associated with 'Naturalism', which claims that the universe is all
that there is and every will be. The second is simple the process of change
over time. Any confusion between the two within the ASA message traffic is
a reflection of the even greater confusion in the larger scientific
community and general population. Frequently, scientists will prove some
aspect of change-over-time, and then claim to some degree that this proves
Naturalism, when in fact, all that they have done is found evidence of one
way the Creator could not have created.
Change-over-time itself has multiple aspects: There's thermodynamic change,
such as a cooling cup of tea, or the crystalization of ice, or the evolution
of Jupiters atmosphere.
Most significant to our discussion is the change in time of information
content, as expressed in a creatures geneome.
Young earth and progressive creationists hold that the information was
created instaneously with the creature. A popular arguement for
instantaneous creation is that the chance of the spontaneous creation of the
simplist organism is like the chance of a tornado spontaneously assembling a
sawmill. The problem with this sort of arguement is that it ignores the
incremental nature of evolutionary change. The first life didn't need to be
efficient, it only needed to survive in a competitorless soup. As soon as
an offspring arose that was slightly more efficient, it was only a matter of
time before that offspring displaced the ancestor.
A philosophical battle ground is in the area of directed vs undirected
(i.e., by chance) change. In other words, is God the source of information
in biological genomes, or can the information arise by chance. For
instance, computer systems evolve over time as the engineers & programmers
make enhancements to the hardware and software, but this is directed change,
as there are a creative intelligences bringing it about.
In classic Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, members of a species which can
best survive and reproduce in an environment will pass their genes to their
offspring who will eventually predominate in that environment. For example,
the original finches which blew over to the Galapogoes island were all the
same type of finch, but there was a natural variability in bill size and
shape, partly due to genetics. The original finches managed to survive, but
if the food supply favored finches with long narrow beaks (say, for digging
out grubs), finches who had slightly longer bills had a slight edge in the
following ways: survival to breeding age, health and fat supplies during
breeding season, healthier eggs after breeding, more eggs (on average), more
food available for the chicks, and a longer breeding lifespan. Their
advantage in any single way may have been small but taken together over many
generations, by simple probability, you wind up with a long narrow beaked
species.
But there is a catch in this finch example. There is a big difference
between shuffuling genes (which would be expected to yield beaks not much
longer than the longest beak of the parent population of finches)--which
rearranges information, and adding new information (which would be required
to yield spectacularly long beaks, compared to the parent population).
The source of new information is traditionaly regarded to be mutations.
Critics of evolutionary theory have long pointed out the problems with
relying on mutations to build complex structures. From my persective (and I
haven't been able to keep up with any recent literature on this), this is
where Darwinism is under attack: where does the new information come from?
Atheistic evolutionists have increasingly had to rely on blind faith in
chance. The fossil record only describes the appearance of what happened,
not the how it happened. I think the conclusion on the Atheistic camp is
that "Well, we know it happened, and our previous theories have turned out
to be inadequate to fit what happened. We need new theories."
Theistic evolutionists can sit back and claim God added the information.
This answers the question of "Which came first, the chicken or the egg"
with "The egg", since God could have modified a lizard genome to produce a
chicken. The naive theistic evolution view would be creating chickens from
lizards in this way. But there's no reason to be naive. Based on the
evidence, the new information would have been much smaller and each modified
creature would have been the same species as it's parents--but with subtle
new attributes. Over hundreds of generations of change and natural
selection (such as with Darwin's finches in the Galapogos islands), one
could wind up with new species.
This is also a little too simple. New research in information theory,
self-organizing systems, and complexity (there are many buzzwords floating
around--forgive me if I've misused or left any out) seems to indicate that
there is a lot more self organizing potential in God's creation than anyone
has yet anticipated. Some experimentation with computer simulations of
simulated "life forms" yield progressions of "species" that change and
interact in different ways as the simulation progresses--which is
reminiscint of what has been observed over time in the fossil record.
Prehaps the title "Deistic evolution" could be rightly applied to the
concept of creation as a self organizing system.
There is also the concept of contingency. Most Christians accept the idea
of historical contingency, in that God influences the outcome of small
events which go on to change the world. As the famous quote goes, "For the
want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the want of the shoe, the horse was
lost. For the want of the horse,...., the rider, ...., the battle,..., the
war,...., For the want of the war, the nation was lost".
The same principle can be applied in creation, by allowing God to operate to
tip the scales in favor of mutations and life forms that eventually lead to
a spiritually aware species (that would be us ;-] ). I can well imagine
God, having enjoyed and delighted in 250 million years of dinosaurs, sending
a large asteroid to clear the stage for the next geologic epoch.
This biological contingency view presents "God as gardener", in that he
nourishes, tends, and directs creation much as a human gardener would
fertilize and till his soil--and selectively breed plants to his liking. Of
course, God is more than gardener, because he is also the creator and
sustainer of the creatures that he tends.
There are two views of the role of chance. Many Christians hold that there
is there is no truly random events--that any outcome is actively determined
by God. To me, this seems to stem more from a deterministic world view than
from a Biblical perspective. It is clear from the Bible that God has given
mankind free will, though it is bounded. Similarly, I don't see a problem
with God establishing realms (such as in quantum dynamics) in which pure
chance usually determines the outcome (unless God specifically intervenes).
To do otherwise portrays God as puppet master at the quantum level, a
portrayal which most of us reject at the level of human consciousness (i.e.,
in matters of free will).
Let me give an example: genetic studies have shown that invertebrates
invariably have only one set of the genes (known as hox) which are the
master genes for structuring the body layout. The simplest vertebrates
(lampreys & such) have two sets, and higher vertebrates (with jaws) have 4
sets. It appears that at some point in time, the hox genes was mistakenly
copied twice in the genome, and somehow the creature survived. The second
copy (after further modification) apparently came to influence the
developement of the backbone. At another time, another copying error
doubled the number of hox genes yet again, and those were further modified
to guide the developement of yet more sophisticated heads (including jaws,
and the complex three part brain which we all enjoy).
(No, I'm not a multi-disciplinary genius. This was just in the Feb.3 issue
of Science News).
One can argue that God triggered these transcription errors--and nurtured
the resultant "hopefull monster" (in the words of modern evolutionists)-- in
order to get more genetic material to work with in developing a new phyla of
animal. Essentially, it is not much different than what we do in software
engineering all the time: copy, adapt, and modify existing systems (be it
hardware or software).
Now that I have rambled on for quite a bit, have I answered any of your
questions?
I believe that when we all get to "the great seminar in the sky", we will
all be astounded at how God actually did it (and especially those who claim
to have figured it out already). There certainly is a lot of room for
humility in the origens question.
Grace & peace,
Dennis Sweitzer