Darwin’s Doubt
Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt, was recommended by a friend. The intersection between faith and science is interesting to me, so I ploughed my way through this 400 page New York Times bestseller.
It’s 20 years since I last read a book by an Intelligent Design (ID) proponent. Mike Behe’s Dawin’s Black Box (1996) was hard going for me as someone who struggled with chemistry at school and I cannot find my hardback copy of the book but I can remember the basic premise. Behe wrote that there are some biochemical processes that are ‘irreducibly complex’. If you remove any one of several chemical components from the reaction or process, then it does not achieve the end goal. The suggestion was that this process could not therefore have evolved one chemical component at a time - it must have been intelligently designed as a unit. I didn’t really have the biochemical knowhow to comment at the time (I still don’t), but it did seem strange to me that we can only discern design when we cannot understand the process by which something comes into being.
Darwins’ Doubt dealt with more familiar territory for me. As an undergraduate studying geology, I learned about the Burgess Shale Fauna; an array of creatures from the Cambrian period (roughly 500 million years ago) exquisitely preserved in a layer of rock high in the Canadian Rockies. We had to read Simon Conway Morris’ wonderfully illustrated book ‘the crucible of creation’ on the subject. Meyer suggests that neodarwinian evolutionary mechanisms are not potent enough to produce the Cambrian explosion of life in the comparatively short period of earth history following the first appearance of life on earth 3.6 billion years ago. His contention is that this proliferation is evidence of intelligent design in basic body types.
I didn’t find Meyers’ attacks on mainstream evolutionary theory all that convincing. There have always been plenty of gaps in evolutionary biology - no one has ever convincingly explained how the first cell formed to me and there have always been plenty of missing links in the fossil record. I still think evolutionary theory gives the best account of how the biological world as we observe it came to be. I cannot escape the feeling that ID operates like a bit of a conspiracy theory. ID highlights a gap in mainstream scientific understanding and suggests that the gap indicates design. When one gap closes (some of the gaps Mike Behe highlighted have subsequently been closed) the enterprise simply moves on to the next gap to insist on the necessity of a designer.
It’s interesting to me that unlike the earlier creationist movements, ID proponents don’t see the need to undermine the general scientific consensus on the age of the world or the dating of fossils. Meyer does make some interesting points, particularly in his ‘why it matters’ chapter about ethics. He rightly points out that if humans are the physical product of random forces acting on valueless materials, then kind, just or generous treatment of them is hard to rationalise. Even Richard Dawkins says that “science’s entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least.”
I’m a Christian, so I believe in the God revealed in the bible and chiefly through Jesus. The God of the bible is the God of the stuff we do understand. The psalmist praises God for providing grass for cattle to eat (Psalm 104). Whether you live in the 9th century BC or the 21st AD, a causal link between green grass and cow growth is manifestly observable. The same psalm praises God ‘who touches the mountains and they smoke’. No-one in the psalmist’s iron age orbit knew about plate tectonics– they were praising God for something they did not understand. God is to be praised both for the phenomena we understand and the things which are beyond our grasp. Neither gaps nor explanations provide exclusive evidence of God’s power, providence or presence.
I also believe that the personal God revealed through Jesus is the arbiter of human personal morality. The fact that nature can be red in tooth and claw and that the weakest creatures struggle to survive is of no relevance to how I should behave. I can see that constructing a kind moral framework is a big problem for thinking atheists, but I already have one and I don’t need to pick holes in evolutionary theory to bolster it.
Meyer recommends Simon Conway Morris’ 2003 book ‘life’s solution’. I’ve got a copy and will read it at some point. Conway Morris is still one of the UK’s leading evolutionary palaeobiologists AND is a bible believing, church attending Christian. I’m not in too much of a hurry though. I already know who made the world and how he wants me to behave.
For more of Tom’s ponderings on Faith and Science, have a listen in to episodes 2, 39 or 55 of two pastors in a pub.