"God did it, but how?" - to quote Robert B. Fischer's title (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1981). There has been much discussion about how
God might have created. Here, I focus on Howard Van Till's concept of
"creation's functional integrity" (H.J. Van Till, "Special Creationism
in Designer Clothing: A Response to The Creation Hypothesis", PSCF 47
(1995), 123; H.J. Van Till, "Basil, Augustine, and the Doctrine of
Creation's Functional Integrity", Science & Christian Belief 8 (1996),
21). I'd like to raise the question of the applicability of this concept
in the biological realm and ask for comments.
From the point of view of biblical theology, it seems clear that God is
not only the Creator of the universe, life, and individuals, but also
that he continually upholds all of his creation, actively keeping it in
existence. He certainly is capable of performing any "supernatural"
processes ("miracles") he chooses, but he is also the Author of any of
the "natural" processes science is able to investigate. It is therefore
not meaningful to talk about God "intervening" in the created order, as
if he hadn't his hand in it anyway. Whatever evolutionary processes
occurred in the history of the universe or of life were acts of God. His
creation is evolving, and it is he who made it do so.
In all of this I agree with Howard. I also accept his view of creation's
functional integrity for the development of the universe, up to the
prebiotic Earth. We differ, however, regarding the emergence of
biological information. At least twice, I discussed this problem with
him personally (if I remember correctly, it was at the 1990 ASA annual
meeting in Grantham, PA, and at the 1994 C.S. Lewis conference in
Cambridge, U.K.), but he doesn't seem to have deemed my arguments
convincing. They were dealt with in my paper "How has Life and its
Diversity Been Produced?" in PSCF 44 (1992), 80, and again touched upon
in the paper by Armin Held and myself, "Genesis Reconsidered" in PSCF 51
(1999), 231. Similar views have been expressed by Roger Forster & Paul
Marston, "Reason, Science & Faith" (London, U.K.: Concorde House, 1999,
479 pp.).
Howard insists that God created a universe that from the outset had
functional integrity in the sense of being capable of producing
everything God intended to originate at the appropriate time, without
any need of his further "intervention". And Howard includes the
biosphere, apparently not considering life (and even human life) as
being categorially different from the physical dimension. He does not
call the emergence of biological systems autonomous, because it was
decreed by God from the beginning. With functional integrity, it was
autonomous, however, in the sense of not requiring anything God had not
yet gifted creation with from the outset. I concede that God certainly
could have done it this way if he had chosen to do so. But as with Young
Earth Creationist claims, the question is not what God could do, but
what he did do.
Howard's view implies that all information required for the structures
and functions in the biosphere, including humanity, was either contained
in the early big bang plasma (and the prebiotic universe ever since), or
that it emerged by self-organization out of nothing (this is what is
usually claimed). From what is known in the biological sciences, it
appears to me preposterous to believe either version. Curiously, in the
PSCF paper, Howard even seemed to prefer the first version, explicitly
including "biological systems" among the "basic entities" which God
"from the beginning, when the creation was brought into being from
nothing," gifted with all of the capacities needed. Yet biological
systems didn't come into existence for another 10 billion years. What
and where were these systems with their capacities more than 4.5 billion
years ago?
On the other hand, how could biological information have been fed in
later? I don't suggest any divine "intervention" in "gaps" in the sense
Howard rejects. For theological reasons, I believe God "hides his
footsteps" in creation, in order to protect the personal freedom he has
chosen to give us for a faith decision for or against him. His footsteps
in creation are plain, but only to those who choose to believe; to
others, they are ambiguous as evidence. However, from the viewpoint of
molecular biology, the faith in miracles of those who believe in
self-organization of the biosphere is just too big for me. How can these
two convictions be harmonized?
There are plenty of "gaps" of knowability which can never be bridged by
science, not just for the present, but in principle. They are
fundamental impossibilities in epistemology. But here God is free to
act, as well as everywhere else where we can investigate scientifically.
In order to clearly distinguish these limits from the gaps of the
"god-of-the-gaps" view, I prefer to call them God's "hidden options". To
be more specific, they may include quantum uncertainties, randomness in
elementary events, unpredictability due to minute differences in
parameter values in nonlinear systems (deterministic chaos),
coincidences. For instance, if we consider a specific combination of
mutations required in the evolution of a certain enyzme, we can never
prove it impossible, even if its spontaneous occurrence may, in context,
be transastronomically improbable, as the tails of the Gaussian
probability distribution extend to infinity. But God may have chosen to
actively decree it to occur.
Such "hidden options" do not represent acts of "special creation" in the
sense of exceptions to any natural law. Rather, they are specific
selections among distributions of many different naturally possible
values for stochastic variables. The only thing that is "supernatural"
is that a specific selection represents feeding information into the
system. The physical system does not lack any functional integrity, but
it needs information, just as a fully functional computer requires
software and data to do any useful work. Of course, the only reasonable
interpretation of such a hidden source of biologically meaningful
information is the Creator. Intelligent design in biology cannot be
divorced from God. How often such selections hidden from science would
occur is another question, which seems to be very difficult to judge. I
believe the biblical Hebrew term "bara'" (as it is variously used after
Genesis 1:1) would correspond to this.
The reason why mere random processes without selection cannot do the job
of producing biological functions and an entire biosphere is the huge
size of the possibility space; for biopolymers, this is sequence space.
But natural selection is too inefficient, especially as long as
selection coefficients are small or nonexistent and therefore random
walks the only option. The sequence space for most protein domains
(namely all having at least 62 amino acids) comprises over 10^80
different sequences and is therefore transastronomical, such that it
cannot be productively searched by any means. If only invariant parts of
the sequences (specified by the requirements of the same specific
function in many different organisms) are considered, the sum of all
invariant amino acid occupations, plus the sum of the fractions of 1
corresponding to invariant groups of similar amino acids which can
replace each other, amounts to about 30% of all amino acids (although
the percentage is variable). Thus, the possibility space of the
invariants of proteins containing 2 small domains (around 100 amino
acids each) is again transastronomical. But the average protein length
is perhaps twice as large.
Therefore, it is in principle impossible to find out, by any systematic
means, whether a belief in spontaneous evolution of today's protein
world is plausible. The best we can hope for is to design and synthesize
an initial substrate for darwinian evolution, namely a functional,
self-replicating mini-organism comprising mini-proteins of minimal
activity only, each of which requires a sum of amino acid invariants of
less than 3 (cf. my PSCF paper mentioned), or an equivalent RNA
organism. Those active in origin-of-life research know that, in the
foreseeable future, it would be wildly unrealistic to hope to reach such
a goal. Such a mini-organism, with a genome much smaller than that of
the simplest bacteria, would have had to be available earlier than 3.8
billion years ago, which is shortly after the initial heavy bombardment
of the Earth with planetesimals ceased.
The "hidden options" suggested are not "god-of-the-gaps" speculation:
(1) there is no logical reason, either scientific or theological, for
excluding such hidden options in principle;
(2) they are claimed for scientific reasons, not theological ones;
(3) we know from science that these off-limit areas for scientific
investigation exist;
(4) they are not research-stops, but honest admissions of ignorance in
place of obfuscating just-so stories;
(5) they are not gaps representing exceptions from a supposed usual
inactivity of God;
(6) they are not gaps in "creation's economy" as all materials and their
properties were fully in place and well equipped to proceed anywhere in
development, just sometimes in need of the specific direction they would
require for lack of time for successful random-walk trials;
(7) they are not gaps in God's initial plan, but from the beginning a
part of what he presumably intended to do at the appropriate time, in
addition to his activity in the processes open to scientific
investigation;
(8) they avoid the easy appeal to gaps in our present knowledge which
science is very vaguely and optimistically expected to be able to bridge
some day.
Are there any theological reasons for excluding God's "hidden options"?
Howard suggests that it would detract from God's honor to admit that he
created something unfinished or imperfect. This sounds dangerously close
to Young Earth Creationisms insistence that God created everything
perfect, in sudden fiat creations out of nothing, as anything else would
deny the absoluteness of his wisdom and power. Of course, Howard's
functional integrity of creation does permit long developmental
processes. But what is the theological justification for claiming such
integrity not only for the Creator himself, but for created processes
and systems? It is understandable that Basil and Augustine felt that
way, as science in their day presumably still had a strongly platonic
inclination and knew nothing of the large-scale developmental processes
of the universe and of life and its complexity. Or is there reason to
believe they relied primarily on biblical data for their idea of God
being creatively active only once?
To a limited degree, we may compare God's acting in human history, of
which we know something from the Bible, with his acting in the history
of the universe and of life, of which the Bible tells us much less. God
guided the history of his people by continuously shaping many big or
small events. If it were not for the biblical proclamations of these
events and developments being God's direct action, one might attribute
many of them to "natural" causes like human tendencies, coincidences,
etc. In this sense we may say that God used "hidden options", i.e. he
did specific things in human history, of which we know by revelation
only that it was he who did it, but not from secular history or other
sciences. Did God preprogram all of history from the outset, down to a
suitable level of details, excepting only the modifications to be
expected from some free will decisions by his creatures? There is no
biblical indication for this. Of course, God knows everything that is
going to happen in the future, but preknowledge is not coextensive with
predestination.
If there was a kind of self-emptying (Phil. 2:7) and becoming flesh
(John 1:14) of God in his methods of salvation and, I believe, also of
revelation, this reality may well apply to his method of creation, as
well, in the sense that he did not create the platonically "perfect
biological miracle maze-solving machine" which works all by itself.
Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch>
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