Re: [asa] Review of Behe in Books and Culture

>>> "Michael Roberts" <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> 7/11/2007 2:42 AM
>>> writes:

I would not see Behe as TE like Asa Gray, who has a directed evolution and

does not appeal to gaps , or like James Orr et al who argued for
intervention for life, sentience and humanity. To me DBB is simply
confused.

Ted sees this differently. Having read a wide variety of Christian
interpretations of evolution and the rest of modern science for at least 30
years (and Michael might be able to say something similar), my overwhelming
single impression is that Christians of all varieties and stripes agree on
one single thing concerning science: the rejection of materialistic
reductionism (forgive me, philosophers, if I fail to use a term precisely or
correctly), by which I mean the affirmation that personality transcends
molecular and atomic phenomena, that one simply cannot "reduce" people to
impersonal, undirected forces. As I say, everyone agrees on this point--the
most fundamentalist of Christians, who believe simply that we have souls
given directly by God that are supernatural in some sense although they
interact with the natural parts of our bodies/personalities; the modernists
like Shailer Mathews, who believed that personality cannot come out of
impersonality; and everyone in between, like DM MacKay, Malcolm Jeeves,
Nancey Murphy, Robin Collins, etc. THere is much diversity of opinion about
how precisely to set this out as a formal position, but there is no real
disagreement about the conclusion.

Another way to say this: no one really knows, precisely, how to get from
matter & motion to minds & morals. Partly for this reason, the atheists (at
least many of them) flatly deny that minds exist at all--and I suggest in
full sincerity that, as mindless individuals, they ought to be ignored at
this point, if not pitied; I do not talk to machines, rather I use machines
to help my mind express itself, as I am presently doing as I type this. But
all Christians, regardless of how they do it, accept the reality of the
individual minds that interact with one another and with God, and reject the
reductionist assumption that that which cannot be shown to follow directly
from the properties of matter & motion is a mere epiphenomenon with no
reality in itself. Where we disagree, is where/how precisely to draw the
line between matter & motion and minds & matter. The YECs and many OECs put
a whole bunch of ontological "gaps" in between matter, living things, and
lots of specific kinds of living things. Behe does not do that. His main
"gap" is at the cellular level. For Gray, who didn't know much about cells,
frankly (no one did at that point, they mainly just waved their hands and
said that life lay in the protoplasm, taking it not much further than that),
there was no "gap" of this sort but he nevertheless thought it made more
sense to see the long stretch of the history of life as "having been led
along certain beneficial lines" by providence. He hoped specifically that
eventually "variations" (ie, mutations) would be shown to be lawlike, so
that providence would act through general laws rather than through
randomness. He turned out to be wrong, as far as we can tell: variations
are not lawlike, and most of them aren't helpful to larger, more complex
organisms (though I understand that variations in less complex organisms are
more likely to be beneficial in the long run). Thus, this particular type
of TE is probably not the best option today, though I hesitate to push that
too far since Conway Morris has argued that it actually is, and I am the
last person who is in a position to contradict him about how to interpret
the fossil record. I note in passing, incidentally, Gray's admission that
evolution did make it easier for someone not to believe in God--similar to
Dawkins' famous statement about being an intellectually fulfilled atheist,
except that for Gray it is a lament rather than a joyous proclamation.

As Michael Roberts notes, James Orr had "gaps" at specific points. James
McCosh, the Scottish theologian who became president of Princeton University
(not the seminary) in the 1860s, took a similar view--life, conscious life,
rationality, these things required special divine action; natural selection
was fine for the rest, as long as it was properly limited. Behe is I think
very much in this tradition, at least in spirit. I disagree with Michael.

A number of modern TEs take the view instead, that God directs evolution
via controlling certain events at the quantum level, where God cannot be
"seen" doing it but where God nevertheless may exert providential guidance
through direct divine action. I am sometimes attracted to this view myself;
certainly Bob Russell, John Polkinghorne, and Owen Gingerich are. As I
argued many years ago, however, this is a "gaps" view of a certain kind--it
is not subject to the traditional "god of the gaps" objection (and that's a
huge subject that ought to be studied more systematically), since if QM is
truly indeterminate (and that's not universally accepted) then the "gaps"
are genuinely ontological, not merely epistemological, and they won't ever
be "filled in"--but it is a gaps view nonetheless. There are real, genuine,
*permanent* "gaps" in what we can do with our scientific explanations, and
God does to some extent reside in those gaps. Thus, I would say, quite a
few modern TEs have "gaps" in their view of nature and divine action. Ken
Miller, incidentally, endorses precisely this picture of things, and Mike
Behe says explicitly (in his contribution to "Debating Design," ed Ruse and
Dembski) that he's fine theologically with Miller's view on this point;
indeed, Behe goes on to claim (perhaps less convincingly) that Miller's view
is actually tantamount to ID, b/c there still is design in nature.
Polkinghorne notes that selection is not the whole story in evolution, and
that in itself is consistent with Behe's view.

The problem with Behe's view, IMO, is that he and his followers--esp his
followers, many of whom do not share Behe's high view of the "fact" of
evolution (ie, common descent) -- seem prepared to load a great program of
social reconstruction on the inadequacies that they perceive (and I don't
think they are entirely inventing them) in present scientific understandings
of microbiology. To put it another way, the glass of cellular evolution is
either half empty (what IDs say), or half full (what others say), and it's
not wise to float the boat of cultural reform on half a glass of water. My
critics in the ID movement would say, on the other hand, that modern culture
itself is already floating on half a glass of water, and the level (they
would say) is getting lower. Beholders do their beholding differently, do
they not?

But I do behold a classical TE when I read Behe's work. The fact that he
insists on seeing design in nature is traditional for TEs; the fact that he
insists we need to add "design" to the toolbox of science (to borrow Paul
Nelson's language) is where he may diverse from many other TEs, including
me, but Orr, McCosh, and other earlier TEs have believed pretty much the
same thing.

Ted

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Received on Wed Jul 11 11:46:50 2007