This note gives the last of the Puerto Rico thoughts, but I'm brain-dead after 2 days of writing. I'll get back to this as soon as I can, but maybe you can make some sense of it on your own. (BTW, do people still know today what "Stay Tuned" means, or am I just a relic?)
20 comments:
i imagine you probably have already seen this, but augustine has a couple of good quote about natural philosophy and the christian worldview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#Natural_knowledge_and_biblical_interpretation
Lee,
I think your diagram is interesting because it seems to be establishing an "independence" position between science and religion. Science is about the how and Creation is about the who and if either pursues the other then it leads to dead ends. There's something appealing about this because it potentially removes the need for conflict or even compromise as long as each field stays in its place.
Some questions that it raises for me, though. Doesn't the how of creation tell us something about the creation and the creator? Perhaps this isn't a good analogy, but my wife and I recently took a trip to Charleston, SC. We walked around the old part of town and fell in love with the architecture, the history, the beauty of the homes & churches. After we got back, we did some reading on the city and realized if there ever was city that built its grandeur on the backs of slaves, it was Charleston. That changed how I viewed the city and that beauty. So if science tells us something about the how of creation, isn't it also telling us something about the who? And if it is, what does evolution by natural selection say about the Creator?
Best,
Jeff
Wow, Jeff! That last question is a really, really good one. I'm looking forward to reading the answers on it! What does evolution by natural selection say about the Creator? Man! I'm thinking on that one.
Jeff,
If the Creator God used/uses natural selection to allow evolution to occur/occuring then that would lead to a belief in a "clock winder" God who does not intervene in the natural world. If that is true how does the Bible and its history of God intervening into the natural world fit in?
Lee,
I am not convinced that the how of Creation is a dead end. The original "big bang" of Creation we will never complete understand, but I think that we can use science to trace the evolving of species through natural selection, breeding, and extinction. I belive they are a more entagled and to fully separate could cause a loss of the big picture. What do you think?
josh
Josh,
I think that the "clock winder" idea is an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about (though not the only conclusion you could draw, I think). The how (evolution) leads you to inferences about the who (clock-winder Creator).
And your question also shows how answers to questions about the who (the intervening God of the Bible) would lead us to suspect things about the how (we might expect Creation to occur through interventions).
I'm not sure I'd say what evolution says about a Creator (or vice versa) yet, but your questions point to why I'm not satisfied with attempts to keep science and religion separate and distinct from one another. It seems like science and faith, and especially faith, seek a more integrated view of the world. But this sounds dangerously to some ears (mine included) like a new, perhaps unorthodox, theology.
Anyway, I appreciate the posts here. Keep up the hard work, Lee!
--Jeff
Wow! You guys really took off with this, and I appreciate what you've said thus far. I'm pondering, and I'll try to flesh out soon what I was thinking on the original note, but I can already tell that my original thinking is going to be impacted by what you've said here.
Jeff, thanks especially for making us all think about whether we should keep the two distant. (Shades of Steven J. Gould's Non-Overlapping Magesteria, huh?)
It's so easy to keep them distant, especially when talking about what should happen in the public and in public schools. But you're all making me think about how many of us as humans are looking for how they connect, not how to keep them separate. (By "us", I mean more than just those of us chatting here.) Of course, that's my challenge in the book in helping science teachers gently and gracefully support students in that process. Otherwise, the science classroom stays with its current Check-Your-Religion-At-The-Door approach. You've all helped me reconnect with that difficult, but worthy, goal.
Question for whomever wants to tackle it, and you'll have to forgive me if this is way basic. (I'm kind of new to all this.)
Does the process of evolution automatically include natural selection? I mean, is that the prevailing thinking that if there is evolution there will necessarily be natural selection/survival of the fittest?
I think the answer to this question is pretty important for me in order to answer the question about what creation by evolution says about the Creator, so thanks for answering it.
JNoah: Natural selection is the mechanism of evolution. At least, that's the way I'm coming to understand it. I'm having to learn so much about evolution that I've blocked out in the past; so, someone else may correct me. But, big-picture evolution (in the sense of development of new species over long periods of time) occurs by the action of natural selection acting on small changes in populations.
I'm not wording that very well, but hey, it's early in the morning.
Josh,
There are two other mechanisms for evolution in addition to "survival of the fittest." The first is sexual selection which is a subset of natural selection. Rather than changes being driven by the survival and reproduction of the fittest members of a population, they are driven by mate selection. Sometimes this works against survival in the way we normally think about it. For example, male peacocks' tail feathers certainly wouldn't help them avoid prey - in fact, the bigger and more elaborate they are, the more likely the male peacock might be caught. But female peacocks have been shown to select male peacocks with big feathers, so those genes get passed on at a higher rate. Of course, why do females select them? Because generally male peacocks with big fancy tailfeathers produce healthier children which means that over time, female who prefer big tail feathers have been selected for as well. So this is a version of natural selection, but doesn't fit as well under the motto "survival of the fittest."
The second mechanism is genetic drift. This really is evolution not by selection, but by random chance. Evolutionary biologists argue about how important it is compared to selection, but generally drift is considered more important in very small populations and selection is more important in large populations. Imagine you had a small population of a plant species with red and blue flowers living on a cliffside. Of these 100 plants, 80 produced red flowers and 20 produced blue flowers. Then a massive rock slide occurred and wiped out 95 plants. By dumb luck, 4 of the 5 plants that survived happened to produce blue flowers. As this plant continued to reproduce, the proportion of blue flowers would now begin to dominate, not because nature had selected it for advantage, but because in small population, strange random things can happen.
Hope this helps. And I hope it's right, or else my poor high school students have been misled over the years.
Best,
Jeff
Sorry, it was Jnoah who asked that.
--Jeff
Hi Lee. Wow this is both exciting and really mind boggling (and it doesn't help that i'm reading this through a pounding headache....) anyway, and I have a sense that I am reading comments from what my husband affectionately nicknames as RSG's (really smart guys!) BUT it would seem to me that these views have to be looked at from two different points of time...before sin and after sin. Before sin there was no need for "survival of the fittest" because, well, everything was fit and there weren't any predators/disease/weak genes etc. The result of sin brought these into play within creation. SO, how does sin affect views of evolution vs creationism?
We seem to be in some agreement that the total separation of religion and science is not the best way to look at the world and therefore would not be the best way to teach them either. A question arises though as to what is "sacred". What parts are untouchable or absolutes that cannot be violated? What things can we bring together? Is it possible that evolution as currently and historically described as an "atheistic" religion could raise the process of evolution itself to a sacred level? Maybe I am a little bit off the path of this thread but i think it is an interesting play by some evolutionist to describe the awesome nature of creation/way it occured as sacred and thus keeping the sacred and therefore moral values to a universe that otherwise could become amoral if there really is only natural process that produced this universe.
Thoughts would be welcomed
josh
Lee and Josh, thanks for the help on my question. So, then, to answer Jeff's question, using the information you helped me with, it seems what creation via evolution tells us about the Creator is, at least three things:
1. He does things, really important things (like creation), by random chance, or at least sets things up so they will happen that way.
2. He prefers the best, most able, most adapted, since that is what survives and thus, we can conclude, will be left at "the end of the day."
3. He is concerned with reproduction, making more of, what's already here.
Okay, folks, it sounds like this has all been a clever ploy on my part to set you up, but it really hasn't. Honestly, though, the above mentioned things are what I think we come to conclude about the Creator who works in this way, and I would say that only #2 comes close to matching up with the God presented in the Bible and in traditional arguments about creation, since we assume he created what he preferred, and the Bible teaches that he did in fact, create the best; however, I think it's a stretch to go there with my second point.
Thoughts? You can pick it apart, I don't care. If it's the "best" argument, it should survive anyway, right?
anonymous,
Sin had and has very distinct effects on our world as you have noted. Sin would have no effect on the original created order but it does have significant effect on the evolution of the created order. I believe that sin acceleratd creation's evolution. I like to think of it like this... Drinking a sugary drink gives you lots of energy for a short amount of time before you crash and then return to a normal state. The sin cursed world would have seen dramatic effects like a natural selection on steroids. That speed eventually slowed down as organisms spread throughout the planet and found their niches. Also with the introduction of sin we have the introduction of catastrophes that can reshape entire gene pools to the advantage or disadvantages of organisms.
hope this helps
josh
JNoah: The only other mechanism I can think of is mutation. Helpful mutations are rare, but they can play a part in evolution because they increase variation in a population. Some of those mutations may give an adaptive advantage that then gets selected by the environmental conditions.
(Thanks, Jeff, for your supreme answer. I'm no biologist; so, I'm trying to learn all of these details.)
OK, so let me try to summarize some of the thoughts here:
Separating the how and the who is nice and clean, but maybe too clean. Most of us here are engaged in the topic because we are trying to figure out how the two are related. In fact, this discussion makes me think of the kind of thinking that I'd like religious kids to go through because of their study of evolution. They're beyond the scope of science, though, when they're looking for how to integrate the two.
If the Creator used evolution, then what does that say about his (her?) nature. (Don't go balistic on "her," my Christian friends. At times, I want to send the signal that these discussions are for people from any faith or no faith at all.)
The whole issue of how to factor in sin is a hard one for me right now because as I look at the science, it seems pretty clear to me that life evolved. Hence, my thinking that God used evolution. But, where sin kicked in and changed the dynamics is something I really have no idea of now. (Thanks, JJ, for joining in the chat and throwing that curve ball at us RSG's. If you really are the JJ I think you are, I see you're still pretty good at tossing curve balls at men!)
One last thing here. JNoah, you raised your 3 points about the character of God if he used evolution, and you mentioned randomness. From our shared perspective of Reformed theology, I don't think randomness is necessarily what's going on from God's perspective. Events in the world often look random from our perspective, but I believe God ordains all things, even the randomness we appear to see in evolution.
Lee: good point on randomness being due to perspective. I'll conceede the point that often times God does do things that seem random to us but to him are not, and I'll agree that evolution could be one of those things.
Here's another question I thought of while typing the above: Do you tend to lean towards a God/Creator/Intelligent Designer/Whatever who was actively involved in each step of the process of evolution, or one who created the circumstances and then let the pre-conditions he (or she) had set up determine the outcome. The later would be very close to "the watchmaker" view, although I'm not sure I'm totally talking about the same thing.
In other words, when you think about the Creator's relationship to the evolving creation, is it very, very involved or more removed?
I don't have a motive behind this question, by the way, just curious.
JNoah: You ask really good questions! My personal (not scientific) understanding is that God is very involved in creation from the beginning until now, shaping things according to his plan. Here, I'm staunchly aligned with the Protestant Reformers. I don't accept the Divine Watchmaker idea of liberal Christianity or Deism.
In fact, this is a key distinction that I've put into action in the book. I'm writing to help teachers who have students who are theistic, not deistic. By theistic, I mean students who, like I, believe that supernatural forces are at work right now. But, by theistic I don't mean necessarily Christian like I am. They could be Muslim, Native American, or any other religion that believes that the supernatural is at work around us. These are the students that feel the most conflict between a scientific worldview that focuses only on natural causes and their religious beliefs that tell them that there is more than just natural causes at work around us.
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