The script was written by biology student Joy Walters, with help from BioLogos president Darrel Falk.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, author and pastor Brian McLaren discusses the idea of surrogate arguments, in which a debate over one thing is really a means for arguing something completely different. According to McClaren, the argument over the age of the earth is one such example, in which an apparent scientific debate is actually a discussion over the nature of religious authority and how previous generations have understood how we should interpret the Bible. Such debates can lead to two crises: one of confidence and one of ethics. While some have the confidence to differ with the views of the generation that raised them in the faith, McLaren points out that some are not able to overcome the ethical challenge of differing with grace and love. When this happens, he notes, the end result is damage to the Church and a retrenching of the views of the older generation. Managing the crises well requires courage of convictions while also respecting tradition and maintaining a gracious spirit. Anything less, is not only unwise, it is also unfaithful.

In this video Conversation, senior biblical fellow Peter Enns asks Rev. N.T. Wright to respond to a common question of readers regarding the disconnect between science and religion. Specifically, he asks Wright why he thinks there is such controversy in evangelicalism about evolution. Is this a “culture war” issue?

Wright responds by noting that this is a very America-specific issue. In England, very few people have these same hang-ups about evolution, except where education and movements have come over from America and have gotten into British subculture —much to the dismay of many who think otherwise.

As a possible explanation for this issue, Wright points to the American conservative/liberal split which happened a century ago with the modernist/fundamentalist controversy. The divide was expanded with the Scopes trials and, he points out, has echoes of some of the old civil war mindset—that is, that people in the south are ill-informed and fundamentalist while people in the north are too liberal and doctrinally soft. Though these are only stereotypes, Wright notes, there are still enough examples of them that the caricatures stick.

People then project those divisions onto issues of science and faith and cast those that believe in science as secularists and those that believe in God as being anti-science. These characterizations are flawed, however, since modern science emerged from people of deep faith that wanted to explain the natural world.

Peter Enns wonders if one way past a combat mentality would be for Americans to have a better cultural awareness as to how we have come to this place and Wright agrees that this would be a good thing. “We all see the world distorted,” he says, “and that’s why we need one another, to be honest.”

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In his post on Monday, Karl Giberson writes that, “My primary concern about ID is that it promotes the idea that nature has gaps in it that God must intervene to fill.” Similarly, in this short video, physicist Ard Louis echoes these same doubts about Intelligent Design, noting that his primary resistance to the movement is based on theological grounds as opposed to scientific. That is, he suggests that accepting Intelligent Design is a bit like acknowledging that God “[couldn’t] get the world right the first time around”.

To illustrate this point, Louis recounts a famous exchange between Newton and his rival Leibniz that occurred when Newton was working out his theory of gravity. Newton found that in the solar system, planets are unstable. He tried to explain this aspect in his theory by suggesting that God occasionally reforms the planets to stabilize them. Leibniz dismissed this claim as nonsense and that in fact argued that this line of thinking was demeaning to God because it discounted God’s power. Moreover, Leibniz said, God doesn’t do miracles for wants of nature—he does miracles for wants of grace. This means that God doesn’t make miracles just to “fix” things in the past. Further, as Louis points out, these “correctives” are not mentioned in the scriptures, thus it makes many of ID’s claims seem theologically unlikely.

I am asked all the time to explain, in a nutshell, why irreducible complexity is not a valid argument in favor of intelligent design. Indeed I have addressed this issue in Part I and Part II of this series. However, I have never heard anyone put it in a more cogent form than Oxford biophysicist Ard Louis in this video. If you are like me though, you’re going to have to listen extremely closely and probably play it two or three times in order to fully grasp the depth of the point he is making. Here is what I think he’s saying. Tell me if I’m right.

Dr. Louis begins by pointing out the complexity of the bacterial flagellum—it consists of many different protein components that must assemble in a specific configuration, a process which takes about twenty minutes. As the components assemble, they might try out many different arrangements until at long last the correct one is identified, producing a fully mature bacterial flagellum.

The problem is that there are a “zillion” different possible combinations and configurations of the components and only one works. Trying them all out and arriving at the single correct one in just twenty minutes would be impossible. Yet, the flagellum assembles. It works. And it works in twenty minutes.

Dr. Louis goes on: If you were to come across a fully assembled flagellum with all of its protein components attached in the one and only way which works, what might you conclude? Remember there are zillions of ways in which those proteins could assemble, but in the search process, only one works. Given the state of our knowledge until recently, you might well conclude that there was a “guiding hand” or a “vital force” that had facilitated the assembly process enabling it to find the correct combination in only minutes. Yet none of us, I assume, believe that there is a guiding hand acting on the cell, causing the proteins inside it to follow the correct search process to make the flagellum. The basic elements of the process are understood, Louis says. They can be explained both mathematically and biologically. We do not need to invoke a guiding hand inside each of the trillions of bacterial cells that are in our body. Their parts, including their flagella, are assembled by processes that we have come to understand over the past half century. No vital force. No guiding hand.

Louis then goes on to explore another aspect of the assembly of the bacterial flagellum: the evolutionary history by which it arose to become the complex structure it is today. That search process took place not in twenty minutes, but over millions of years—probably hundreds of millions. We don’t have the intermediates for this evolutionary history. All we have is the final product. Today, there are people who look at that structure in all of its complexity and say, “There must have been a guiding hand, a vital force to design and build something so complex. Even with hundreds of millions of years of searching in design-space, no natural process could build something this complex.” So, just as some were incredulous that a flagellum could self-assemble in a cell before our current state of knowledge developed, leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are now incredulous in a new way. For what they consider to be scientific reasons, they believe it is nearly certain that the structure must have come fully formed through an intelligence and not have become increasingly more complex through gradual, natural processes.

Louis, a deeply committed Christian, says in essence, “Given our incomplete knowledge about these processes, how do they know that?” True, showing how the flagellum could have been produced by natural processes is a hard problem—we don’t, after all, have the intermediates. However, is it not too early to say that scientists are never going to discover a natural way in which this could come about? Surely we cannot calculate probabilities of this, when we know so little about the process. Is it not premature to come across a finished product and say there must have been a guiding hand when we know so little about the history of its development over hundreds of millions of years?

Again, I emphasize that Dr. Ard Louis is a deeply committed Christian, a person who sees the Bible as the Word of God. He is not arguing against the existence of a Creator. It is science he is discussing, not theology. There are no scientific reasons to say that a guiding hand was needed in evolutionary history to assemble what we now see as a marvelously complex structure. There are also no sound theological reasons to assert that God could not have used natural processes to carry out God’s creation command. God could have used natural processes! We believe that God is Creator of life, that God “spoke” life into existence, and that God’s Presence sustains the created world in its current state.

Think back to Louis’s initial premise about what happens in twenty minutes. There are no scientific or theological reasons to insist on the presence of a guiding hand which manipulates the process so that the proteins attach in all the right ways to build the flagellum of a bacterial cell. By the same token, there are no scientific or theological reasons for assuming that a manipulating hand is needed step by step to build better and better flagella in evolutionary time. Instead, we are simply left with this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.(John 1:1-3)

That is enough for me.

In this video clip, Oxford University biophysicist, Ard Louis posits that one of the reasons Christians are hostile to evolution is that they latch onto a particular definition, which puts it in conflict with their theological convictions.

Louis begins by explaining the three primary ways in which evolution is generally defined:

First, evolution may be defined as a process that takes things from a level of simplicity to a level of complexity—e.g. from a basic cell level to the level of complexity apparent in the human existence. It is a process that we could simply define as “natural history” (0:27).

Second, Louis notes that evolution can also be described as a mechanism within the evolutionary process, there are mutations and selections that together generate complexity (0:41).

Finally, he points to evolution as a worldview (0:41) perhaps best epitomized by paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson’s suggestion that “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

Louis goes on to say that for many Christians, the nuanced definition of evolution becomes subsumed under the “evolution as worldview” ideology, which is nothing more than a set of theological statements put on top of evolution (that Christians are right to reject).

He continues with a critique of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, which appears to be attacking the second definition of evolution—i.e. “evolution as a mechanism”. Louis describes ID as a movement without apologetic traction as it lacks a valid scientific counterargument (1:37) and as something that pulls us away from the Bible as it lacks a scriptural basis (1:44).