So, I’ve decided to try a slightly different approach for the next while—one that has these sorts of folks in mind. From time to time, you can still expect those more in-depth, technical articles, or perhaps a discussion of some new research that makes the popular press, or even an analysis of some new argument from the IDM or RTB. These will be breaks from the new routine, however. For the most part, we’re going to stick to the basics, much like you would if you took an introductory evolution course at a university. Don’t worry, though: this course doesn’t have any prerequisites! All that’s needed is a willingness to learn.

What you can expect

The goal of this course is straightforward: to provide evangelical Christians with a step-by-step introduction to the science of evolutionary biology.  This will provide benefits beyond just the joy of learning more about God’s wonderful creation. An understanding of the basic science of evolution is of great benefit for reflecting on its theological implications, since this reflection can then be done from a scientifically-informed perspective. From time to time we might comment briefly on some issues of theological interest (and suggest resources for those looking to explore those issues further), but for the most part, we’re going to focus on the science. For folks interested in the interaction between science and Christianity, I heartily recommend Ted Davis’ recent series as a fabulous introduction to the topic.

You can also expect a slow, patient pace. Since this course is intended for folks with little or no background in biology, we’re going to take our time to make sure no one gets left behind. This might be frustrating to folks who already know a fair bit about evolution. Hopefully even more knowledgeable readers will learn some new and interesting details along the way—but the goal will primarily be to help folks who are less well versed in evolution increase their understanding.

You can also expect a survey of many different areas that have some bearing on evolution. We’ll examine geology, paleontology, biogeography, genetics, and a host of other topics in order to provide a “big picture” overview. This broad-brush approach means that any given individual post will not necessarily be “convincing” to folks who have doubts about evolution. Think about assembling a large jigsaw puzzle: placing any individual piece, on its own, doesn’t convincingly demonstrate what the overall picture will show. This course will be like that. Each topic we cover will put a few pieces in place here and there, slowly building towards the final overall picture.

Since evolution is an active science, this process will also highlight where there are “missing pieces” that are still being sought by scientists. All of this is well and good, since the purpose of this course is not so much to convince anyone of the validity of evolutionary theory, but rather to inform readers about the nature and scope of evolution as a scientific theory in the present day. My goal is to provide readers with a basic understanding of what evolution is and how it works. Given that as the primary goal, if one finds the scope of the evidence ultimately convincing (or not) is somewhat beside the point. The intent here is to provide readers with information they can use to make their own, informed decision.

How you can help

First and foremost, you can help by spreading the word about this series to folks you think would be interested in learning more about evolution in a non-threatening environment. Secondly, you can help me by asking questions in the comments. One of the challenges of being a specialist is having the ability to put oneself in the shoes of someone just starting out. What might seem obvious to me may not seem obvious to you, and I hope you’ll feel that no question is too basic or too simplistic. If you’re wondering about something, it’s almost guaranteed that other folks are, too! So, please don’t be shy. I’ll do my best to answer questions in the comments, though I hope that some of our more skilled commenters will (respectfully!) help out here, as well. Finally, you can help by letting me know what broader areas of evolution you find confusing. I have my own ideas about what areas of evolution are commonly misunderstood, but I’d love to hear from readers about what areas they find difficult to understand. I’ll use this input to shape the topics I will cover as we go forward.

Getting started

In the next post in this course, we’ll dive into the course content by introducing two key areas: how scientific theories work in general, and how evolution in particular works as the current organizing theory of modern biology. 

These were just a few of the questions that motivated us at BioLogos to commission a survey of pastors on origins.  In 2012, the Barna Group conducted 743 telephone interviews with pastors from across the US, from churches big and small, and from all Christian denominations.  This comprehensive, in-depth survey provides a fascinating analysis of views held by clergy today.   In the coming month, we’ll be digging deeper into the survey results, but for now, here are some key highlights:

#1: Pastors hold a diversity of views on origins.

Overall, while a slight majority of the pastors surveyed fall under the label of Young Earth Creationism (54%), sizeable portions of clergy accept Progressive Creation (15%) and Theistic Evolution (18%).

The numbers varied widely based on a number of factors, however. Pastors of mainline churches were most likely to accept Theistic Evolution, while non-Mainline, Charismatic, and Southern Baptist pastors were overwhelmingly Young Earth Creationists. Pastors of larger churches were also more likely to accept Theistic Evolution.

Regionally, the highest percentage of YEC pastors was found in South, while the highest percentage of pastors accepting TE was in the Midwest. Pastors from the western states were the least likely to accept TE.

#2: Most pastors think science and faith questions are important.

Regardless of their views, the majority of pastors surveyed feel that the Church needs to look at how it handles issues of science. 72% of pastors with YEC views and 73% of pastors with TE views agree with the statement that “the Christian community needs to take a serious look at its understanding of science and human origins in order to maintain its witness in the world.” (The numbers are slightly lower for pastors who hold to Progressive Creation and who are uncertain).

Similarly, 66% of YEC pastors and 61% of both TE and Progressive Creation pastors agree that “younger adults today are more concerned than ever about whether faith and science are compatible.”

#3: Clergy think disagreements on science and faith harm our witness (but for different reasons).

Clergy across all three viewpoints feel that disagreements are harming the Church’s outreach, but they differ in how they view that harm.

YEC pastors overwhelming agreed (85%) that “Christian disagreement on matters of creation and evolution is compromising our witness to the world.” However, a majority of TE pastors disagreed with the statement (63%).

Conversely, a majority of TE pastors (63%) agreed that “The church’s posture toward science prevents many non-Christians from accepting Christianity,” while a majority of YEC and Progressive Creation leaning pastors disagreed (59%).

#4: Pastors aren’t avoiding science.

The majority of pastors think that addressing issues of science for their congregations is an important part of their work. Of those surveyed, 72% felt that addressing science issues in the local community was somewhat (51%) or very (21%) urgent. When asked about science on a national and global level, even more pastors felt that addressing science issues is important (43% somewhat and 46% very). Furthermore, 79% of pastors included scientific themes in at least one sermon in the past year, and 40% had included them in at least ten sermons.

The majority of clergy across all four viewpoints also agreed with the statement “Just as scripture should influence human interpretation of science, science should also inform our understanding of scripture.” The numbers were highest for TE pastors and those who are uncertain (81% and 72%, respectively), though over half of YEC and PC pastors also agreed (52% and 65%, respectively).

Finally, although YEC’s are more reluctant than other pastors to say “science should inform understanding of scripture, they strongly agree (84%) that “The Christian community needs a greater commitment to showing how young earth creationism is consistent with science.”

#5: However, they are concerned about evolution for biblical reasons.

Over half of pastors said they had “major concerns” about the idea that God used evolution. The main reasons for that concern were that the idea “undermines the authority of Scripture” (64%), “views portions of the Bible as non-literal, like Genesis” (62%), “raises doubts about a historical Adam and Eve” (61%), and “raises questions about how and when death and sin entered the world” (59%). However, 26% of pastors saw no concern with the idea that God used evolution.

#6: The majority of clergy accept parts of scripture as symbolic.

60% of the pastors surveyed felt that “some portions of the Bible are symbolic, but all that it teaches is authoritative.” Clergy whose views fall under theistic evolution and progressive creation were more likely to accept this statement (79% and 73% respectively), but a sizeable number of YEC pastors (40% among the core followers and 49% among those leaning towards YEC) also agreed with the statement.

#7: Clergy are concerned that changing their views on origins might compromise their ministry.

Over half of pastors (58%) who fell under the YEC category agreed that “If you publicly admitted your own doubts about human origins, you feel you would have a lot to lose in your ministry.” 41% of pastors in the Progressive Creation group also agreed with the statement. Pastors who were uncertain or who fell under the Theistic Evolution group were less concerned, with only 26% and 17% respectively agreeing with the statement.

Such remnants are also found in our genomes.  Humans, unlike most mammals, cannot synthesize (make) our own vitamin C, but we carry the genes for synthesizing vitamin C.  One of these genes encodes the GLO (L-gulonolactone oxidase) enzyme, and this gene in humans contains inactivating mutations and is therefore a “pseudogene.”  This pseudogene and the genes that encode the enzymes of the vitamin C biosynthetic pathway are the remnants of our own evolutionary lineage from an ancestor that was able to synthesize its own vitamin C.⁴ Furthermore, the GLO pseudogene is just one of a graveyard of inactivated genes, transposons, retroviruses and other non-functional sequences that litter our genome.  While some of these sequences have been co-opted for particular functions, many of them have no known function.⁵ We share many of these non-functional sequences with chimpanzees.  The very presence of these genomic and anatomical flotsam and jetsam only makes sense if evolution has occurred.⁶

A third piece of evidence for evolution comes from biogeography.⁷ The flora and fauna of islands such as those of the Galápagos and Hawaii are radically unbalanced in that they lack many types of plants and animals but contain a profusion of clusters of similar species.  Hawaii, for example, has no native mammals, reptiles, or amphibians, but a profusion of fruit flies and silversword plants.⁸ One third of the 2,000 species of fruit flies are found on the Hawaiian Islands, which only covers 2 percent of the land on earth.  These islands were never connected to the continents and arose as a result of volcanic activity and were, at least initially, completely uncolonized.  The colonization of these islands occurred by means of occasional introduction of creatures from the mainland that then rapidly speciated on these islands to fill every available ecological niche.  Thus, the organisms most closely related to island species come from the closest mainland areas, and often include those creatures most likely to find their way to islands, such as birds and flying insects. 

The Galápagos Islands provide an excellent example of how biogeography provides evidence for evolution. The Galápagos have fourteen species of finch whose closest relative is probably the South American grassquit (Tiaris), yet only four of these finch species feed on seeds as finches normally do, while two others feed on cacti, seven eat insects, and another eats almost exclusively leaves.⁹ Darwin, while visiting the Galápagos, still thought that species only varied within a particular kind (though he would not have used that terminology) but could adapt to various local environments and become particular subspecies. Therefore, he originally listed the warbler finch (Certhidea olivacea) as a wren and listed the small cactus finch (Geospiza scandens) as a member of the Icteridae or the family of meadowlarks and orioles.  Only after Darwin had deposited his Galápagos specimens with the British ornithologist John Gould did Darwin discover (in a meeting with Gould that occurred during March, 1877), that his finch collection included thirteen or fourteen species of unusual finches that were all so closely related, Gould classified them in a single group all their own.  This meeting showed Darwin that the immutable barrier between kinds of species did not exist.  The Galápagos Islands were not a distinct “center of creation,” but a workshop for evolution in which an ancestral species made it to the yet uncolonized island and underwent a massive degree of speciation to adapt to the environment of the island.¹⁰ This is precisely what one would expect if the species of islands had arisen by evolution. 

A scientific theory also allows scientists to make predictions, and good theories provide accurate predictions.  Can the theory of evolution allow accurate predictions?  The answer, once again, is yes.  Darwin himself predicted that the earth must be very old for evolution to occur.  He did not know the age of the earth, but further research has shown that the earth is 4.55 billion years old, which is plenty of time for evolution to occur.  Darwin also predicted that since plants on islands were most closely related to certain mainland plant species, the seeds of these plants should be able to withstand immersion in sea water for long periods of time, and again, Darwin was shown to be right.¹¹ Many decades after Darwin, we now know that variation in organisms is due to mutations in DNA and that these mutations are inherited, just as Darwin predicted.¹² Also, Darwin’s principle of natural selection predicts that particular sequences of DNA should behave in a manner that benefits only themselves and not their carriers, which modern research has thoroughly confirmed with the discovery of transposons and other types of “selfish DNA.”¹³

Is evolutionary theory a good scientific theory?  It has been repeatedly tested for over 150 years since its inception, and it has passed those tests successfully.  The theory has been modified in response to new data, but the outlines of the theory have remained largely intact.  It has existed at risk from new data.  During the molecular biology revolution that began with the discovery of the structure of DNA by Franklin, Watson and Crick in 1953, the explosion of new data could have shown contemporary evolutionary theory to be wrong.  However, some of the most powerful evidence for the theory of evolution has come from a field of science that did not even exist during Darwin’s time.  The ability of a theory to withstand such intense scrutiny is a clear sign it is robust and enduring.  As shown, the theory of evolution has predictive power, and it also integrates and makes sense of data from several fields of science, including ecology, paleontology, genetics, historical geology, paleoclimatology, and comparative anatomy and biochemistry.  The highly integrative nature of evolutionary theory makes it a fine theory by any measure. 

In conclusion, when measured against the standards of a good scientific theory, modern evolutionary biology clearly qualifies as good science.  Ongoing debates within evolutionary biology exist about mechanism, rates, and causes, but not over whether evolution occurred.  Such a question has been largely settled by the last 150 years’ worth of research.  The future certainly looks bright for this field of science and I cannot imagine a more exciting topic to study. 

Notes

1. Davit-Béal, Tiphaine,Abigail S. Tucker, and Jean-Yves Sire. “Loss of Teeth and Enamel in Tetrapods: Fossil Record, Genetic Data and Morphological Adaptations.” Journal of Anatomy 214, no. 4 (2009): 477–501. 

2. Tian, Natasha M. M.-L., and David J. Price. “Why Cavefish are Blind.” BioEssays 27 (2005): 235–38; Yamamoto Y, Stock DW, and Jeffery WR (2004) Hedgehog Signalling Controls Eye Degeneration in Blind Cavefish. Nature 431:844–7; Jeffery, W. R. “Adaptive Evolution of Eye Degeneration in the Mexican Blind Cavefish.” Journal of Heredity 96, no. 3 (2005): 185–196. 

3. Bejder, L., and B. K. Hall. “Limbs in Whales and Limblessness in Other Vertebrates: Mechanisms of Evolutionary and Developmental Transformation and Loss.” Evolution and Development 4, no. 6 (2002): 445–58. 

4. Lachapelle, M. Y., and G. Drouin. “Inactivation Dates of the Human and Guinea Pig Vitamin C Genes.” Genetica 139, no. 2 (2011): 199–207.

5. Avise, John C. Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.   Romano, C. M., F. L. Melo, M. A. Corsini, E. C. Homes, and P. M. Zanotto.  “Demographic Histories of ERV-K in Humans, Chimpanzees and Rhesus Monkeys.” PLoS One 2, no. 10 (2007): e1026. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001026. 

6. Max, “Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics,” http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen.

7. Coyne, Jerry A. “Intelligent Design: The Faith that Dare Not Peak Its Name.” In Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by John Brockman, 3–23. New York: Vintage, 2006. 

8. Kricher, John. Galápagos: A Natural History. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2006. 

9. Grant, Peter R., and Rosemary B. Grant. How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin’s Finches. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. 

10. Sulloway, Frank J. “Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design.” In Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by John Brockman, 107–25. New York: Vintage, 2006. 

11. Darwin, Charles. “On the action of sea-water on the germination of seeds.” Journal of Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London (Botany). 1 (1857): 130–140.

12. Futuyma, Douglas J. Evolution. 3rd ed. Sundbury, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2013. 

13. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

JIMMY LIN: Currently I’m on faculty at Washington University at St. Louis, where I am a research instructor in the pathology department. Also, a year and a half ago, I founded the Rare Genomics Institute (RGI)—a nonprofit that helps find cures for people with rare diseases.

ER: What qualifies as a “rare disease”?

JL: These are diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntingdon’s disease—diseases that affect less than 200,000 Americans each year. There are over 7000 different rare diseases, and less than 5% of them have any therapy. Altogether, they affect about 25-30 million people.

This creates what we call a “long tail problem”—it’s hard for a top-down research system to create research programs for all 7000 rare diseases. So instead, we are creating a bottom-up platform from which the patients themselves can create research projects and help fund them. We connect patients with physicians and researchers, customize a research program with top medical universities, design the experiment, and then use an online fundraising platform to fund the study through [mostly] friends and family of the patient.

Basically, we create a “foundation in a box.” By partnering with the Rare Genomics Institute, patients and their friends and families who want to study rare diseases don’t have to go through the hoops of creating their own nonprofit or lab—we do that for them. So, instead of creating 7000 different nonprofits, we create a generalized platform from which studies can be conducted.

ER: Who qualifies for care through the Rare Genomics Institute?

JL: Anyone with a rare disease can come to us. The main thing we’re doing right now is diagnosis. When families come to us, they either don’t know the disease that’s affecting them or their child, or they don’t know the gene that’s wrong.

For instance, if a child had a condition that doctors couldn’t identify, his or her parents might come to us for help. What we’d do then is sequence the genes of the mother, father, and child, and compare them to reference genome to determine what mutations each of the parents have. Depending on what the disease is and what the gene causing it is, we can filter out mutations that don’t mean anything using the parents’ genomes—then, after filtering, we can potentially pinpoint the genes that fit the genetic pattern of the disease. This is the first step.

After that, we are building infrastructure to determine the effect of these changes and a way to help. For example, after looking at the literature, we can perhaps design experiments using cells extracted from the patient; this part of the process is different for every disease. Then, if we can determine that there is, for instance, a pathway missing a specific enzyme, we can try using drugs, a bone marrow transplant, or gene therapy to try to put healthy cells into the child… But there’s a variety of diseases, of course, so there’s a variety of different approaches—and we’re just starting to explore these aspects.

ER: How did RGI get started?

JL: It really started when I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins—there was this boy that came to our clinic to be seen. My research was in cancer genome sequencing, and the family had come to our department looking for answers about what was wrong with their son. At that point, the family was almost hopeless—they had gone to so many doctors, run so many tests—I decided I wanted to try to help children like this. That’s when my friends and I decided to start the Rare Genomics Institute.

Currently, there are about 50 researchers associated with the organization, and we are all volunteers. It’s growing much, much faster and been more amazing than we’ve ever imagined—we’re already making an impact. In May of last year, we were able to discover a new disease using the world’s first crowd-sourced, crowd-funded genome. Working with researchers at Yale, we delineated a disease of which our patient was the first identified.

Right now, we’re in the middle of raising funding and hiring staff to make this organization one that is self-sustaining, and to increase its impact even more.

Excerpts from Michael Hickerson Interview

MH: …you call yourself a doxologist. What’s the full term you used in your Jubilee bio?

JL: Medical and scientific doxologist.

MH: How did you decide on that term and what does it mean to you?

JL: I listen to a bunch of teaching by J.I. Packer , who teaches theology at Regent College and is one of the leading thinkers on these things. Interestingly, before any one of his classes, he says “Theology is for doxology,” and then the whole class sings the Doxology together out loud in class. I thought, “Wow, that is so great,” because everybody sometimes learns theology just for intellectual things [instead of for worship].

That’s not just true for theology, it’s for everything: biology is for doxology; chemistry is for doxology. That’s when I started to think, I should consider myself, first and foremost, as a person who praises God in what I do. And then no longer make “Christian” the adjective, right? “Doxologist” is the noun. But then what kind of doxologist am I? So I call myself a medical and scientist doxologist. I would call someone, for example, in the marketplace, a business doxologist. Or, someone who does art, an artistic doxologist. To really have the noun as our identity, and then our vocation as just a descriptor of how we do that.

MH: That’s a great point. A noun is always stronger than the adjective. So, you want that to be the focus, rather than the add-on.

JL: In our current culture, we’re defined by our jobs. It’s having a vocation. I wanted to shift away from that. I didn’t want to be a doctor first and foremost, or a scientist, but one who praises God. And evidently, within science you don’t want to call yourself a Christian Scientist. That’s another religion, so . . .

MH: [laughs] That’s right. I run into that, as well, when I’m teaching or talking about science to Christians. You always run into that stumbling block.

JL: With “scientific doxologist,” people don’t confuse them. You do have to explain what it means. And that gets in a little story actually, on what it means about vocation. It’s a small lesson — a teaching point when you do talk to people about vocation and calling. That’s why I use it.

MH: I guess my final question would be what spiritual practices help sustain you? What helps you stay in contact with God and keep a good foundation?

JL: First, I am interested in many, many different things. I sort of mix it up in terms of spiritual practices. Besides the fundamentals, of course, of quiet time, devotional reading, and scriptural reading, I do theological study because I have to do that academically. I find a lot of time with God through the spiritual disciplines, such as times of solitude — which is very interesting for someone who is in academics to no longer think about ideas but just to be quiet before God — how silence, time to think by yourself, or sitting in silence is also something you should foster.

In terms of spiritual formation, what you really need is definitely a good community of people. I have a very supportive community at my church. I’m the deacon of devotions, so that of course keeps me on track. It encourages me as I, in my own spiritual walk, encourage other people. Fundamentally, I think for all Christians, whether you are academic or no matter your vocation or calling, being in the Word and prayer are the most important things. Doing that and being spiritually fed is what is important.

DOUG LAUFFENBURGER: It could look like a lot of things. One way to envision what I mean is to put yourself back a hundred years. For instance, in 1913, an electronic computer was unimaginable. But using physics, quantum physics, leading to semiconductors and devices like that, people figured out over the next 20 to 30 years how you could build a machine to do calculations and so forth. And then, of course, all sorts of thing happened…

We’re roughly at that stage with biology, even though it seems like things are more imaginable because—and we don’t have to go strictly century by century here—because we can already guess the way some things might change, whereas in 1913 there was no inkling, really, as to what would happen in the computer revolution.

So, to enumerate some of the things that are conceivable—let’s just start with computers, because we were just there.

There’s a notion that computers get faster and cheaper by making their logic gates smaller, and how you improve a design with physics keeps bumping up against how you make these little units smaller. Well, using biology, the solution seems self-evident—you just line up the pieces of DNA, and if you put the right pieces of DNA in the right places, the resulting parts are so much smaller than the things we can do with physics. You can imagine, even though it’s just a theory now, computers continuing to become many times smaller and cheaper—and be made via environmentally benign manufacturing processes—through biomolecular construction.

Now that’s exciting from one point of view, but from another, it’s not that revolutionary, because you’re just using DNA as a piece of physics. It’s not really biology—it’s merely a biological molecule being used to make better physics.

For a different example, if you think about the way we make things, the way we manufacture plastics, gasoline, energy—we have to do all that using chemistry, and to make that chemistry happen, we have to input a lot of energy—in fact, one of the most costly industries in terms of energy usage is the energy industry. You have to put in so much energy to refine petroleum and things like that. And to make plastics, ceramics—things of that nature—is also very energy intensive, and it’s also where a lot of pollution comes from, because you’re mixing together all these chemicals that really didn’t want to be mixed together. You get what you want, but you get a lot of byproducts, toxins, etc.

Well, people have started to realize that a lot of this work can be redone through the use of biology. You can turn corn into fuel or plastic, and you can make magnetic or electrical storage devices out of biological units (viruses can pattern the crystals, so instead of using mixtures of toxic chemicals, you just pull the viruses with the right properties together). Right on this tabletop, you could make materials that by current manufacturing processes would otherwise cause a great amount of environmental hazard.

As for another exciting development—well, to preface, one of the problematic things about modern agriculture is the necessity of using fertilizers (there are insecticides to be concerned about, too), but fertilizer manufacturing is terrible for the environment. You have to make fertilizer out of ammonia and that’s a horribly polluting and energy-intensive manufacturing process. What you could potentially do, instead, is program into bacteria the genes that take nitrogen out of air, turning it into organic nitrogen then just scatter the bacteria onto the field—and you wouldn’t need to make ammonium using the current very caustic processes.

These are the sorts of things I mean—and we haven’t even touched on medicine, yet. People tend to think about medicinal advances, first, but before you even get to medicine, you can think about energy, manufacturing, materials, and agriculture. In 50 years, we should be able to do things in ways we don’t do them now, that will be cheaper, less toxic, less polluting, more efficient, and so forth.

ER: A lot of people are nervous about the idea of “programming” life. Can you respond to this fear as a Christian?

DL: As a Christian, I would say that God gave humankind dominion over the earth, to do good things—he gave us minds, a passion for understanding how things work, and then he put in this world all these fascinating processes, which, if we figured them out, we could do good things, could feed more people—could feed more people without causing extensive damage to the environment. And cure disease and injury. And the list goes on. I think all that is good, and that God would be pleased that we would be using His creation to live better—I’m not saying more luxuriously, but more happily, contentedly, with each other.

ER: But back to the topic—advances using biology in the next century. You had just mentioned medicine…

DL: So, yes, there’s also medicine. Now, obviously, in thinking about this, the use of stem cells comes to immediately the fore. There are a lot of diseases out there that you really do need to correct using cellular processes. Right now, we try to make these corrections through chemistry. For instance, we give you a pill, and that pill should interfere with something that’s going wrong in your body—and yet it’s really never adequate to just interfere with something that goes wrong in the body, because you don’t really set it right just by getting in the way of it.

The opportunity with stem cells is that you can say, “I’ll replace the cells in the body that are doing something wrong with cells that are actually doing it right again.” If you program cells to be neurons, heart cells, or bone cells, you can regenerate properly functioning physiology. Rather than, say, replacing a hip with a metal part, you could regenerate the bone, itself, or you could regenerate neurons in Alzheimer’s patients. Never in the past has medicine been able to regenerate a proper physiology; it’s only tried to replace it with an inadequate surrogate, or minimize how much damage a disease is doing. With the use of stem cells, you can actually imagine returning the body to its proper physiology.

A different use of stem cells is to generate human tissue in the laboratory for better studies of human physiology and pathology and improved testing of drug effectiveness and toxicity.  This will be a major advance over animal models, because of the significant disparities between animal physiology and human physiology.

A key point to emphasize is that there are different kinds of stem cells, which involve big differences in potential concerns. For Christians, clearly, stem cells derived from embryos present a tremendous ethical issue. Fortunately, a good proportion of stem cell technologies can be pursued using stem cells from adult tissue. These cells can be stimulated to develop into certain tissue-specific physiological behavior, or can now even be “re-programmed” to become quite similar to the more broadly flexible stem cells derived from embryos but now not requiring the embryonic source. Happily, the days of reliance on embryo-derived stem cells appear to be over for purposes of beneficial technologies.

We also should consider genomic medicine, and what’s attractive about that field is that with the way we do medicine now, which is chemistry-based—say you have a disease, and we might give you a pill to correct it—well, the biggest problem with that is that while I think this pill will help ameliorate your condition, maybe it won’t. Maybe that drug only works in ten percent of the patients and not ninety percent.

For example, consider cancer. You’ve got a particular kind of cancer, and we prescribe a certain treatment… well, hopefully you’re among the lucky ten percent, and you’ll be in much better shape in two or three years. If you’re not, then we’ve wasted your time. In fact, we’ve probably hurt you rather than helped you, because we’re using chemistry to interfere with things, and even though we might be reducing the damage of some things, we’re probably causing toxicity elsewhere in the system, because that same chemistry is also interfering over there.

So the value of genomic medicine is to get enough information about you through sequencing your genome that we can say, “Ah, for you this particular pill is not a good idea; it will actually do more damage than good. But for your brother, it’s likely to work, and the ratio of benefit to harm is much better.” This is the reason genomic medicine is more imminent—it’s what’s closest on the horizon to being realized—because we can use the same drugs we have now, we’ll just be using them more effectively. At the moment, we can sequence genomes, and we do have these treatments that help, and it’s just a matter of matching up these two technologies.

Now, on the other hand, when you think about genome sequencing, you can find out all sorts of things, and you have to decide, “What if I learn something negative?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Join us next week as we continue the conversation about genomic medicine, bioengineering, and being a Christian in science.

In this video Conversation, Denis Alexander addresses two prominent barriers for Christians to accept evolutionary creation. The first is Biblical interpretation. When contemporary Christians interpret the early chapters of Genesis literally, they do so out of a desire to take the text seriously. Yet the early church fathers saw these chapters as figurative—and that figurative interpretation did not lesson the important foundational truths taught in these passages. The contemporary literal reading is actually a modern approach to the text in that our scientific mindset inappropriately shapes the interpretation. Since science did not even exist at the time that Genesis was written, an overly literal interpretation can actually cause us to miss the inspired message that the Biblical authors were communicating.

The second barrier is the rhetoric of the New Atheists, who claim that it is impossible to accept evolution while still believing in God. Christians should challenge this. Traditional Christian views are not in conflict with modern science. Instead, they see nature as God's work, with St. Augustine writing that "nature is what God does." As humanity develops a scientific understanding of nature, we will only learn more about the handiwork of God. 

Grantees will benefit from in-person interaction through a series of summer workshops in 2013, 2014, and 2015. These meetings will not only foster a broader knowledge base, but will build a sustained network of scholars and church leaders, both young and seasoned, who are serious about addressing the concerns of the church about evolution. Also in 2015, in connection with the third summer workshop, BioLogos will host a large conference open to scientists, scholars, and church leaders from around the world.

ECF History

In January 2012, BioLogos was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund the work of scholars and church leaders on evolution and Christian faith. In spring 2012 we worked hard to get the word out. You may have seen announcements on the BioLogos website, in our newsletters, on the Books & Culture, Leadership Journal, or First Things websites, on your professional society’s listserv, or perhaps on your friend’s blog.

The response was overwhelming: we received 225 letters of intent for a total request of $21 million—about seven times the amount we had to offer. We needed to invite the most promising applicants to submit a full proposal, but recognizing the projects with highest potential would require broad expertise. From the beginning, we envisioned that a panel of scientists, pastors, and scholars would oversee the application and review process as well as play key advisory roles throughout the project. A team of eight highly qualified individuals came on board in the early months of the project. They reviewed each proposal and together recommended that BioLogos invite 86 applicants to submit full applications.

The deadline for submissions was October 1, 2012. As in the previous round, the ECF panel evaluated each proposal. In addition, we asked 55 other experts to participate, so that each proposal received 3-4 scores. Criteria for the decision included significance of topic, project design, creativity and innovation, long-term impact potential, feasibility, and budget.

The panel then met together November 29-30, 2012, to make the final funding decisions. In the end, they recommended that BioLogos give 37 awards, ranging from $23,000 to $300,000. BioLogos staff notified applicants of their awards on December 14, 2013.

The Grantees

As part of our objective to create a network of scholars and leaders, we awarded grants to organizations across the U.S. and the world. Thirty of the 37 grantees are domestic; seven are international, hailing from Canada, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, and Spain.

Two-thirds of the accepted projects will be led by teams—some with three or more Project Leaders. We expect that the teamwork and time spent together at our summer workshops will be the start of a long-lasting network of people dedicated to helping the church think carefully about origins.

Applicants chose to apply under one of three program tracks: interdisciplinary scholarship (Track 1), intra-disciplinary scholarship (Track 2), and translational projects (Track 3). Track 1 projects focus on both the collaboration between individuals in different disciplines and the development of projects at the interface of different content areas. Track 2 projects focus on work done within a specific discipline. Track 3 focuses on projects that encourage Christians, especially those within more conservative traditions, to engage in meaningful and productive dialogue to reduce tensions between mainstream science and the Christian faith. The numbers of grantees in Tracks 1, 2, and 3 are 6, 8, and 23, respectively.

Many of the scholarly projects tackle questions about Adam and Eve, the Fall, human identity, and Original Sin—some of the most critical interpretive issues for evangelical theology.  Some examples: 

• Theologian Oliver Crisp of Fuller Seminary will take an analytic theology approach to ask to what extent a theological account of the origin of human sin depends upon the evolution of modern humans from one and only one ancestral pair—especially if that pair does not appear to correspond to what we would think of as modern human beings. 

• Pastor Michael Gulker and philosopher James Smith, leading a large team from The Colossian Forum, ask a related question: if humanity emerged from non-human primates—as genetic, biological, and archaeological evidence seems to suggest—then what are the implications for Christian theology’s traditional account of origins, including both the origin of humanity and the origin of sin? 

• Biologist Dennis Venema of Trinity Western University and New Testament scholar Scot McKnight of Northern Seminary will write a book on the evidence for evolution and population genetics, with informed theological reflection on how these issues interact with orthodox Christianity.

• Biologist David Wilcox of Eastern University will develop an updated model of human identity which reflects the complex recent scientific advances in genetics and paleoanthropology and yet is sensitive to theological concerns.  

These are just a few of the scholarly awards; check out the Grantees page for full descriptions of all Track 1 and Track 2 projects.

All projects have translational potential, but Track 3 projects are designed to meet the needs of a particular constituency within the evangelical church. These projects run the gamut from ethics to education to media production to ministry resources.  Some examples include:

• Theologian Lee Camp of Lipscomb University will produce “The Questions in Monkey Town,” an episode of Tokens, a live variety show that features musical performances, comedic sketches, brief interpretive monologues, and dialog with authors and scholars. The episode will be performed and filmed on the site of the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.

• Chaplain Joshua Hayashi and Educator Diane Sweeney of the Punahou School in Hawaii will lead a team to produce multimedia curricula aimed at helping high school students connect with their biology curricula and, at the same time, deepen their Christian faith.

• Physics teacher and pastor Benoît Hébert of Science et Foi Chrétienne in France will lead an international, multi-denominational team of French speaking Evangelical scientists, pastors and church leaders to produce a large number of resources on evolutionary creation.

• Pastor Seung-Hwan Kim of Grace Truth Community Church, a Southern Baptist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will produce teaching and preaching materials about evolution for church leaders.

• President Gregory Wolfe and Director of Resource Development for IMAGE will gather artists and writers of faith whose work explores the dialogue between evolutionary science and faith practice, convening a conversation between them and scientists, theologians, and church leaders in private and public conferences.

Again, this is just a taste of the diversity of Track 3 projects. Read more about each project on the Grantees page. You can look forward to an incredible variety of resources coming out of the ECF program, many of which will be featured right here on the BioLogos Forum.

For more than a century, evangelicals and fundamentalists have typically rejected both evolution and higher biblical criticism. Sometimes there are good reasons: the claims of some biblical scholars are so outrageous and the claims of some scientists so anti-religious, that a strongly negative response is entirely appropriate. Too often, however, the evangelical encounter with modern science conforms to what historian Mark Noll has called “the scandal of the evangelical mind”—namely, “that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Attitudes toward science have been crucial to this analysis. As Noll says, “since 1960 creationism has done more than any other issue except abortion to inflame the cultural warfare in American public life.” (p. 192)

Readers who want to know more about Noll’s book and its reception should go here and here. His conclusions about evangelicals and science are fully consistent with those I am about to present.

Evangelicals in Tension with Science

Evangelicals exhibit considerable tension and ambivalence when it comes to science, especially human evolution. On the one hand, evangelicals enthusiastically embrace the findings of science, when it comes to most applications in medicine and engineering. They also accept the experimental sciences, such as physics, chemistry, physiology, or thermodynamics. They have no problems with gravitation, the periodic table, the circulation of the blood, or the law of entropy. Here, their attitude is highly empirical: if it can be shown from repeatable experiments and observations, it’s true and presents no challenge whatsoever to religious belief.

On the other hand, evangelicals are quite hesitant to accept some conclusions of the so-called historical sciences, such as geology, cosmology, and evolutionary biology. Fundamentalists reject the very legitimacy of those sciences, and have created their own alternative explanation, “creation science,” which comports with their particular views of biblical authority and hermeneutics. Evangelicals are more ambivalent. As we’ve seen, many evangelicals accept the big bang and modern geology, with a 4.65 billion-year-old earth and the enormously long history of living things before humans arrived on the planet. But evolution–understood here to mean the common descent of humans and other organisms–presents very serious problems for many, perhaps most, evangelicals. This motivates them to look for alternative views.

The alternatives evangelicals embrace are precisely those we have studied in this series. Some eagerly support the YEC view. Others prefer one of the many varieties of the OEC view. Many like the strident tone of the ID movement, with its vigorous assault on biological and cultural “Darwinism” and its near-universal rejection of human evolution. For most evangelicals, however, TE is probably not a viable option at present, for biblical and theological reasons.

Reconciling Evolution with Scripture

Most evangelicals do not see any reasonable way to combine human evolution with the following beliefs:

• the uniqueness of humans, who alone bear the “image of God”
• the fall of Adam and Eve, the original parents of all humans, from a sinless state, by their own free choices to disobey God
• the responsibility of each person for their own actions and beliefs, within a universe that is not fully deterministic
• the redemption of individual persons by the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

Evangelicals cannot and must not be separated from these crucial beliefs about human dignity, freedom, responsibility, sin, and redemption. The 64-dollar question is: can these beliefs be maintained without simultaneously affirming the necessity of an historical, separately created first human pair? The answer is probably in the hands of evangelical academics, especially theologians and biblical scholars. Can they be persuaded that the scientific evidence for evolution is sufficiently strong to warrant a re-examination of the traditional view? Can a credible gospel and credible science be harmonized?

There exists an enormous gap between popular conceptions of science–conclusions, methods, and attitudes–and those of scientists themselves. This gap is not unique to science among practitioners of specialized knowledge, and it is not unique to evangelicals among the lay public. But it is real and very significant, and it affects theologians and biblical scholars no less than anyone else. Those who try to bridge this gap are mostly scientists (in their role as educators at colleges and universities and insofar as they write books for lay readers) and science journalists. Many influential members of those professional communities are skeptical or even strongly hostile toward Christian beliefs, and this can exacerbate an already difficult state of affairs. If ways can be found to popularize good science, while showing appropriate sensitivity to the concerns of evangelicals, it would be a very good thing.

Signs of Hope

Certainly there are reasons to hope. The conversation about science and religion is considerably broader now than it was at the time of the Scopes trial in 1925. Back then, many Protestants faced a very grim choice. On the one hand, they could follow politician William Jennings Bryan and the fundamentalists, rejecting modern science in the name of biblical authority and orthodox beliefs. On the other hand, they could follow theologian Shailer Mathews and the modernists, rejecting biblical authority and orthodox beliefs in the name of modern science. There was no one out there like John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, Joan Centrella, Owen Gingerich, Simon Conway Morris, William Phillips, or Ian Hutchinson—to name just a few of the many top scientists today who accept evolution while affirming the divinity of Jesus, the bodily resurrection, and the actual divine creation of the universe. But they are all scientists, not theologians (except for Polkinghorne, who is both). In Galileo’s day, it was the scientists who eventually convinced the theologians and biblical scholars to accept Copernicus’ theory of the earth’s motion around the sun. But, it took a long time, and the process was difficult and often painful. Thus far, the biblical scholars and theologians who have tried to move the conversation forward have not been very well received, as Richard Ostling has so capably reported. I suspect we are in for more of the same.

It’s Your Turn to Talk

That’s what I think. What do you think? I’ll mainly be listening quietly, since I’ve now said all I wanted to say. Thank you all for hanging in there for ten months—far longer than I had originally anticipated. After a short respite I’ll return with a new series, but I’ll keep the topic under wraps for the time being.

About a year ago I posted the first article in this series, asking whether recent advances in genomics made any difference to the Judeo-Christian notion of humanity being made in the 'image of God'. That article focused on DNA sequencing data from our closest relatives. This article will focus on the issue of genetic determinism.

Theologians have spent many centuries mining the rich vein of the 'image of God' metaphor. Central to the idea is humanity with spiritual capabilities and responsibilities, equipped for moral decision-making and a relationally rich life in community. Historically, the idea has contributed to the conviction that each human individual has an absolute value, independent of their ethnicity, educational level, health status or income.

Do recent advances in genomics threaten or support such a view of humankind, or are they just neutral? Irrespective of one's belief in God, or not, this is of more than passing interest. Imagine the poor person wrestling for years with the great questions of life and finally deciding to become an atheist, only to then be informed that a cognitive bias derived from his particular set of genetic variants made that decision pretty much inevitable anyway. Such news might be equally unsettling for the person who had just struggled to faith following years of agnosticism. Our deepest human feelings are closely connected with the idea that we choose our own path through life.

The flourishing of genomics in the early part of the 21st century has certainly conveyed the message to many that one's destiny is written into one's genome. Whereas scientists are generally scrupulously careful not to give the impression that there is any such entity as a "gene for" some human trait, by the time the latest discovery appears in the media, such caution is often thrown to the winds. The past year has seen the trumpeting of a "gene for happiness," a "kindness gene" and a "believer gene." It is not even a question of education, but "genes are to decide" if you are a "caring person." Genetic testing websites assure us that "your genes are a road-map to better health," and we all know that road-maps are fixed. Small wonder that there is a creeping genetic fatalism around that subverts the idea of personal responsibility.

Fatalism in itself impacts on human behavior. Studies have shown that subjects exposed to the writings of authority figures doubting free-will are then more likely to cheat. Conversely, workers convinced of the reality of free-will are rated higher in the work-place than those whose beliefs tend more towards determinism.

The reality is that recent genetics research has continued to move steadily away from any notion of genetic fatalism, highlighting the sheer complexity of the genome, and providing some fascinating examples of the ways in which our choices impact upon our own genomes. There is no gene "for" any complex human trait because in fact genes encode proteins or other types of information-containing molecules, and thousands of genes collaborate together during human development in interaction with the environment to generate the unique human individual that each person represents. Those requiring an introduction for the non-specialist are referred to "The Language of Genetics."

Epigenetics adds further layers of variation and complexity. This refers to the chemical modifications of the DNA that cause genes to be switched on or off. It is such epigenetic modifications that generate the 220 specialized tissues of our bodies. Such acquired changes can even be inherited across several generations, certainly in plants and animals, and maybe in humans as well. In choosing to smoke, drink in excess, or take drugs, we also choose to modify our genomes.

So it turns out that even identical twins are not really genetically identical, developing different profiles of epigenetic modification as they go through life. This no doubt contributes to the otherwise surprising result that the age of death of identical twins, who share identical genomes, is comparable with that observed in non-identical twins, whose genomes are as different from each other as any two sibs. In one study of 184 pairs of twins in Spain, the difference in the age of death between the identical twin pairs was seven years on average, but such averages hide the fact that the age differences ranged from a couple of weeks to eighteen years. In the case of the non-identical twins, the difference in age at time of death was nine years, and the range was three to nineteen years. So there was really not that much in it.

What would happen if there was a genetic marker that identified nearly everyone in prison, marking them out as genetically distinct from half the world's population? What would that do to our ideas about genetic fatalism and convictions about moral responsibility? As it happens that marker already exists. Out of 131 countries worldwide, an average of 96 percent of the prisoners are male and, in this case, no complicated genetic studies are needed to know that the genetic marker that identifies this population is the Y chromosome. So universal is the correlation between the Y chromosome and criminality that we can safely say that no other genetic correlation will ever be found between a variant genome and criminality that surpasses this one. And yet we still hold nearly all males responsible for their criminal actions and put them in jail as soon as they're convicted. Furthermore, we note that most people who possess a Y chromosome go through life without committing a crime. So having a Y chromosome, with its unique set of genes, does not "determine" human criminality, although clearly we cannot go to the opposite extreme and say that it is completely irrelevant for patterns of human behavior.

The point in citing such examples is not to suggest that our genomes have nothing to do with our lives. They certainly do, not least in their significant contributions to our personality differences. The point rather is that the latest results in genetics provide no grounds for fatalism, instead highlighting the richness and diversity of the human population, and our own moral responsibilities, including the challenge to be good stewards of our genomes.

An argument for the existence of God this is not. But for those of us whose world-view is shaped by the conviction that we humanity are made in God's image, it is good to know that the latest genetics is consistent with such a perspective.

According to Merriam Webster, the term “intelligent design” has been used since at least 1847, in reference to “the theory that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by a designing intelligence.” That’s a decent definition, also consistent with those offered by today’s proponents of intelligent design (ID). For example, the leading ID think tank, The Discovery Institute (Seattle), has this:

Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

And in the opening sentence of a book he edited with philosopher Michael Ruse, ID theorist William Dembski said, “Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that in order to explain life it is necessary to suppose the action of an unevolved intelligence.” (Debating Design, p. 3)

On the other hand, while a recent contest on a prominent intelligent design (ID) website uncovered several other early uses of the term, it is important to note that it does not always mean exactly the same thing in each reference. The term itself has an interesting history, and while ID authors obviously did not invent the term “intelligent design,” they have given it specific content in recent years. Indeed, they have even removed content in some cases: a point I will return to later is that, though it seems the only viable candidate for such an “unevolved intelligence” is God, ID proponents sometimes seem to do cartwheels to avoid saying as much. When a term has such a complicated past, there simply is no substitute for looking at specific references in their own contexts as we move to seeing how ID plays out today as one of the 5 ways of relating science and the Bible.

Interestingly, many Protestant “modernist” scientists and theologians from William Jennings Bryan’s day (see my previous column) unhesitatingly endorsed the idea that a designing intelligence lay behind nature. At least one such person, Nobel prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, even used the very term “intelligent design” in an address he gave at a Unitarian church in 1940: “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.” (Quoting his pamphlet from 1940, The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge, p. 13. For more about this aspect of Compton’s views, click here.) However, Compton regarded design as a philosophical and theological inference from science, not an explanation within science to be invoked when other explanations fail. He also accepted the common ancestry of humans and other organisms. This is a significant difference from the ID movement today, which offers ID as a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution and (at least in many cases) seeks to undermine public confidence in common ancestry (even though ID per se is not actually opposed to it).

If any ID proponents are sympathetic to the type of religious modernism that Compton and his friends embraced, I cannot tell you who they are. In a curious, ironic twist, ID is often used by conservative Christian apologists partly to defend a cluster of traditional theological and hermeneutical positions that none of the modernists would have defended. A further irony: the intellectual descendants of the modernists—those scientists and theologians who occupy the left wing of the modern “dialogue” of science and religion—exhibit a studied avoidance of the term “design,” disconnecting them on that score from the modernists of the 1920s.

Many other contemporary writers, including some evangelical TEs, are also reluctant to use the word “design,” precisely because in their view it has been co-opted by ID proponents and they do not want readers to misunderstand their position(s). They may agree with ID proponents that certain features of the universe reflect divine design, but because they do not see design as a scientific explanation they employ other language. (Likewise, the YECs have co-opted the word “creationism” to mean just one specific understanding of God’s creative activity, leading most advocates of other views either to provide their own definitions of the word or else to avoid using it altogether. Politics dogs this conversation at every turn.)

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Intelligent Design

With that bit of historical context for the term “Intelligent Design,” let’s now look at the first of the Core Tenets of this perspective in its current state, and as it is most often used by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement.

(1) The Bible is NOT to be mentioned (at least for now); ditto for “God” and “theology” as far as possible.

This is a deliberate strategy, adopted for political reasons to keep arguments at the level of philosophy and science. Here, “political” refers to the American political system, with its constitutional disestablishment of religion, not to partisan politics. Since the 1980s, federal courts have consistently ruled that “creationism” (which was specifically of the YEC variety in the relevant cases) is sectarian religion, not science, and therefore it cannot be taught in public school science classes. Anxious to avoid a similar fate, proponents of ID always want to ensure that they are not perceived as advocates of “creationism.” The less they mention God and the Bible, the reasoning goes, the less likely they are to fall afoul of those decisions.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pertaining to the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press.
Source: http://www.rochester.edu/college/psc/images/Courses/Spring2008/FirstAmendment.png

Phillip Johnson, the former law professor who effectively began the ID movement some twenty years ago, has put it bluntly: “To put things on a more rational basis, the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion.” He quickly adds, “This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact.” (“The Wedge: Breaking the Modernist Monopoly on Science,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/August 1999, p. 22.)

If God and the Bible are really to be left out for the time being, then why am I discussing ID in a series on “Science and the Bible”? It’s a fair question. I simply don’t see any way meaningfully to avoid talking about ID apart from the culture wars in which it is embedded (I’ll say more about this in a subsequent column), and the Bible is never far from the surface when the battle being fought involves origins. Conservative Christians sense that ID really is about God—Dembski’s “unevolved intelligence”. As Dembski himself has said, “no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life”, and there aren’t a lot of candidates for that job. Many Christians also identify strongly with the ways in which ID seeks to confront the secular establishment, in an explicitly-stated effort to combat what Johnson calls “the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions.” (“The Wedge,” p. 23.) They see it as a way of getting traditional theistic perspectives and Christian values back into the academy, once “design” has become an acceptable academic talking point—and it isn’t very far from there to conversations about “science and the Bible.” If this were not so, then why would so much ID literature be published by Christian presses? Indeed, when I tell church audiences with a straight face that ID purports not to be about the Bible at all, I’m usually met with considerable skepticism.

When I’m back in about two weeks, we’ll look at further Core Tenets of ID—the ones that have even less to do with the Bible, explicitly, and more to do with the way we approach the study of the natural world.

With his compelling personal story of becoming England’s “most reluctant convert,” his towering intellect, and his inimitable eloquence, American evangelicals’ lionization of Lewis is certainly understandable.² But when we attempt to lionize people we often ironically end up taming them, paring their claws so that our heroes and our preconceptions can safely cohabitate in our imaginations. But Lewis is no safer a lion than Aslan, and he will not go quietly into our tidy evangelical boxes. To be frank, American Evangelicalism’s infatuation with Lewis is in many respects somewhat odd. For here is a pathologically populist movement with a penchant for Big Tent Revivalism, an obsession with liturgical innovation, a deep-seated suspicion of ecclesiastical tradition, and a raw nerve about the doctrine of justification, falling head-over-heels for a tweed-jacketed, Anglo-Catholic Oxford don—a curmudgeonly liturgical traditionalist who was fuzzy on the atonement, a believer in purgatory, and, as we shall see, whose views on Scripture, Genesis, and evolution position him well outside of American Evangelicalism’s standard theological paradigms. All of that is to say that Lewis was not “just like us”—any of us—and if we would do him justice, we must be prepared to be surprised by Jack.

In what follows, I would like to look at three areas relevant to faith and science discussions where Lewis’s stated views might be surprising for his American Evangelical admirers—namely, his views on Scripture generally and Genesis in particular, his views on Adam and the doctrine of the Fall, and his views on evolutionary science and the myth of ‘Evolutionism.’

Reflections on the Scriptures: Lewis on the Bible, Myth, & Fact

Lewis derived his theological understanding of the Bible from his reading of Scripture, his intimate knowledge of the Church Fathers and the Medieval Doctors, and also from his awareness of modern biblical scholarship. While Lewis was regularly critical of Modernist biblical scholarship’s naturalistic dismissal of the miraculous, its pedantry, literary tin-ear, and over-eagerness to conflate Jesus’ story with the stories of pagan mythologies (he had precious little patience for Rudolf Bultmann, for instance ), he was not at all given to the knee-jerk reactionary Fundamentalism which has held so much sway in American Evangelical culture. In fact, Lewis incorporated many of the more well-supported conclusions of modern biblical criticism into his theology of Scripture, not least critical opinions about the historicity of much of the Old Testament. In good Anglican fashion, Lewis creatively drew upon the deep resources of the Church’s grand Tradition in order to think through the contemporary problems posed by modern critical scholarship. Here I wish to focus on three features of Lewis’s theological conception of Scripture—his understanding of the Bible as being incarnational and sacramental in character, and Christotelic in focus—before turning to his theological reading of Genesis 1-3.⁴

Inspiration and Incarnation

According to Lewis, the Bible is both a vessel of the divine Word and also a profoundly human collection of documents. In his longest, most substantive piece on Scripture, chapter XI of Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis frames a thoroughly incarnational understanding of the Bible:

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naïvety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.⁵

Lewis’s reference to “[the] human qualities” of the Bible’s “raw materials” is suggestive. As Peter Enns puts it in his book Inspiration & Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, the Incarnation of the Son and the inspiration of Scripture are “analogous.”⁶ Lewis clearly agrees. He goes on in the chapter to articulate a theology of Scripture precisely in incarnational terms:

For we are taught that the Incarnation itself proceeded “not by the conversion of the godhead into flesh, but by taking of (the) manhood into God”; in it human life becomes the vehicle of Divine life. If the Scriptures proceed not by conversion of God’s word into literature but by taking up of a literature to be the vehicle of God’s word, this is not anomalous.⁷

According to Lewis, the means whereby God gives us Scripture is not by faxing us transcripts of inner-Trinitarian dialogue direct from Heaven, but rather, on analogy with the Incarnation, by taking up very human literature and utilizing it to communicate His Divine life to us.

“We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table.”⁸ But God has instead deigned to give us a very human book, just as He deigned to send us a fully human Savior. Lewis makes this point most poignantly in his Introduction to J.B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches where he writes:

The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant-woman’s breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King.⁹

For Lewis, God’s work in the inspiration of Scripture not only communicates but also emulates God’s humble, self-effacing work in the Incarnation. If the heart of Christianity, “an incurably irreverent religion,” should be the Incarnation, “an irreverent doctrine,” then it ought to come as no surprise that that doctrine should be most fundamentally communicated via an irreverent book.

A corollary of Lewis’ incarnational and sacramental view of Scripture is that when it comes to studying the Scriptures we must be prepared to be surprised. Lewis warns against “the Fundamentalist’s” procedure of attempting to frame our ideas of Scripture a priori, deducing parameters for what the Scriptures can and cannot be from our preconceptions about God. Lewis thinks such an approach to be a nonstarter:

[There] is one argument which we should beware of using…: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done–especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.¹⁰

Instead, says Lewis, we should take a humble, a posteriori approach, looking and seeing just what kind of book it is that God has actually given us before making grand doctrinal declarations. “To a human mind,” Lewis recognizes, an incarnational Bible “seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle.”¹¹ But it appears that this is what God has given us, and we must trust that God knows what He is doing. As Lewis says, “Since this is what God has done, this, we must conclude, was best.”¹²

Myth Became Fact

For Lewis, the Word is also like the sacrament. Just as ordinary water, bread, and wine are taken up into and become conduits for and communicators of the Divine life that we so desperately need, so, also, all-too-ordinary human writings are taken up into and become conduits for and communicators of the Divine life and word. In Lewis’s view, we must receive the Divine word by approaching Scripture in a sacramental manner. We “receive that word,” as Lewis says, again, “not by using [Scripture] as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.”¹³ For Lewis, at least when it comes to the Old Testament, receiving the Word means more than simply paying critical attention to the surface meaning of the text, the sensus literalis. Instead, we must press beyond the surface to the sensus plenior, to the “second sense” of the Old Testament, namely, Christ Himself. “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God,” Lewis once wrote in a private letter. “The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”¹⁴ While such Christological sensus plenior interpretation may have fallen out of favor with many Protestants (to say nothing of thoroughgoing Modernist historical-critics), Lewis believes that “[we] are committed to it in principle by Our Lord Himself.”¹⁵ Citing Jesus’ words to His disciples on the road to Emmaus, Lewis argues that Christ “accepted—indeed He claimed to be—the second meaning of Scripture.” Citing a litany of Dominical sayings and New Testament texts, Lewis is clear that Christ is mysteriously the true spiritual center, climax, coherence, sum, and substance of the Old Testament Scriptures.¹⁶

Lewis stands in good company in thinking along these lines. The “good teachers” from which Lewis learned this hermeneutic are undoubtedly Aquinas, Bernard of Clairveaux, Augustine, Origen, and Irenaeus, not to mention the Apostles and Christ Himself. In short, Lewis is standing within the mainstream tradition of pre-Reformation theological interpretation. But Lewis is not simply striking a traditionalist posture. Like a scribe trained for the Kingdom, he is prepared to bring forth treasures new and old. By positioning himself within the grand tradition of pre-modern theological interpretation, Lewis frees himself to follow his highly-attuned modern literary-critical instincts regarding the historicity of much of the Old Testament while simultaneously upholding both a robust belief in the historicity of the Incarnation and a vital theological hermeneutic. He writes:

The earliest stratum of the Old Testament contains many truths in a form which I take to be legendary, or even mythical—hanging in the clouds, but gradually the truth condenses, becomes more and more historical. From things like Noah’s Ark or the sun standing still upon Ajalon, you come down to the court memoirs of King David. Finally you reach the New Testament and history reigns supreme, and the Truth is incarnate. And “incarnate” here is more than a metaphor. It is not an accidental resemblance that what, from the point of view of being, is stated in the form “God became Man,” should involve, from the point of view of human knowledge, the statement “Myth became Fact.”¹⁷

He sets up the above paragraph by saying, “[The Christian story] is like watching something come gradually into focus; first it hangs in the clouds of myth and ritual, vast and vague, then it condenses, grows hard and in a sense small, as a historical event in first century Palestine.”¹⁸ Apart from the Incarnation, then, much of the Old Testament would be but “myth,” “ritual,” and “legend.” These elements of the Old Testament only become tangible historical “Fact,” for Lewis, in the person and work of Christ.

Next time, Williams looks at how this understanding of Scripture framed Lewis' reading of Genesis 1-3.

Note

1. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001), 66
2. See Smietana, Bob, “C.S. Lewis Superstar: How a reserved British intellectual with a checkered pedigree became a rockstar for evangelicals,” http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/december/9.28.html
3. “Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see?,” wrote Lewis in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Walter Hooper, ed., Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 156
4. I owe the word “christotelic” to my teachers at Westminster. See especially the discussion in Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005)
5. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1986), 111-12
6. See note xii above.
7. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 116
8. Ibid, 112
9. Lewis, “Modern Translations,” in God in the Dock, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 230
10. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 112
11. Ibid
12. Ibid, 113
13. Ibid, 112
14. Lewis in a letter, 8 November, 1952, in W.H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C.S. Lewis, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 247 cited in Martindale and Root, The Quotable Lewis, 72
15. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 117
16. Ibid, 117-19
17. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Essays, (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 129
18. Ibid

Introduction

One of the reasons that some of us are hesitant to accept evolutionary creation is that it seems to make God responsible for the suffering and death of innumerable creatures over millions of years—before humans ever existed or sinned against their creator. Since we believe in and worship a God who is loving, benevolent, and all-powerful, it sounds quite implausible that our God would have created a world like that; therefore, any scientific evidence for evolution must be incorrect.

Other people look at the scientific evidence for evolution and find a compelling case that it has taken place during our earth's history. On this basis they may conclude that if evolution is true, then the belief in an all-powerful, perfectly good God must be false!

The trouble with both of these views is that they tend to invoke a completely abstract, philosophical god, not the living God of the Bible—the God who became a human being, experienced unimaginable suffering, and died in a grotesque and humiliating public display. The death of Jesus completely defied the expectations (and common sense) of his followers, as well as the expectations of any “rational” understanding of the way the Creator of the universe should act in the world. On the cross, in the person of Jesus, God took upon himself far more suffering than any creature has ever experienced.

If God himself is willing to die, particularly in such a gruesome way, then perhaps we should at least consider the possibility of God allowing the death of other creatures, too. But would this really be compatible with what we know of God through Scripture? In this essay, we will explore this quandary through a “theology of the cross”, a concept articulated by pastor George Murphy in his book Cosmos in the Light of the Cross.¹

Theology of the cross

Before we jump into the theological problems associated with evolution, let’s take a look at how we understand Christian theology itself. For the reformer Martin Luther, any theology (or science) that tries to reach knowledge of God apart from the cross is bad theology.² Instead, Luther pointed to a theologia crucis, in which the true God is seen first and foremost “through suffering and the cross”. To make his point even clearer, Luther insisted that “the CROSS alone is our theology”.³ It is the lens through which we view everything.

Of course Martin Luther, having lived in the 16th century, was not aware of the vast history of life on our planet (or any other aspect of modern science, for that matter), but George Murphy draws from Luther’s teachings the foundation that all human knowledge begins with the Word made flesh and crucified.⁴ With the cross of Christ as the ultimate framework through which we view reality, we are bound to view the processes of nature quite differently. As Murphy explains it,

A theology of the cross is an explication of belief in a God who becomes a participant in the history of the universe and thereby shares in the suffering, loss, and death that are part of worldly experience.⁵

God does not sit idly by and watch unaffected as his creatures suffer, but neither does he swoop in and make everything completely effortless and easy. Instead he chose another way, the crucifixion of Jesus—certainly not the approach that we would have preferred! The apostle Peter went so far as to try to talk Jesus out of it, but he was met with a stern rebuke (Matthew 16:21-23).

Why is evolution so disconcerting to Christians?

The problem of suffering throughout all of human history is troubling enough for us to reconcile with a loving, personal God. But in addition to that, the discovery of vast numbers of fossils reveals that death has taken place on a far greater scale than we had ever imagined. Both the wide variety of extinct creatures and their sheer numbers is quite staggering, and it raises questions about our Creator:

The picture of a God who is immune from suffering and death but who forces organisms through millions of generations and extinction is disturbing to those who believe in a God of love.⁷

The mass extinction of life on earth was already well established by the early 19th century—decades before Darwin’s research—and extinction can be empirically verified independent of any theory of evolution.⁸ The fact that the earth’s crust is a veritable graveyard of long-lost creatures is deeply troubling, and as late as the 1790’s, distinguished intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson denied the very possibility of extinction.⁹

But in addition to the reality of species extinction, the theory of evolution by natural selection proposes that new species also arise in an environment containing widespread pain and death. Both the creatures that are now living and those that are gone are tainted by an “acrid smell of death”.¹⁰ It makes us wonder, if our Creator is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mk. 12:27), where is God’s presence in the evolutionary picture?

In all honesty, creation through evolution is not what we would expect from God, but Scripture is full of examples in which God acts in unexpected ways. After all, God’s choosing to undergo an agonizing death on a cross is not what we would expect from the all-powerful Creator of the universe, either. In both cases, new life comes about through pain, suffering, and death. As George Murphy puts it,

A priori ideas about God have to be overcome, and God's character has to be learned from God's self-revelation.¹¹

God’s fullest self-expression is in Jesus Christ himself, one who is intimately familiar with and personally endured creaturely pain and death. The theology of the cross reveals that God's self-revelation takes place in situations of suffering, loss, and apparent hopelessness, much like situations that occur through natural selection.¹²

The crucifixion is disconcerting too

Not only is creation through evolution an unexpected and unsettling process, but so is the crucifixion of Jesus! Killing someone by hanging them on a cross is an unbearably painful, prolonged, humiliating form of death. It was such a horrific type of public execution that it wasn't until after the Roman Empire stopped the practice of crucifixion—and people no longer witnessed it personally—did the cross become a visual object of devotion.¹³ Our culture is sufficiently removed from crucifixion that we are desensitized to its original significance, but to connect it to our current context, imagine the reaction you would get by wearing jewelry designed to look like an electric chair.¹⁴

Once we are more attuned to the brutality of crucifixion, it seems all the more striking that the cross is the sign of God’s work, what George Murphy calls “the trademark of God”.¹⁵ The suffering and death of Jesus is featured prominently in the Gospels, but the crucifixion-resurrection pattern is strongly resonant within the Old Testament, too. Israel suffered and toiled as slaves in Egypt for centuries before they were rescued in the Exodus, bringing life to a people who were spiritually dead. Centuries later, the nation of Israel would experience death again when the Babylonians destroyed the Davidic monarchy, burned their Temple, killed their people, and sent many into exile.¹⁶ Neither Israel (God’s chosen people) nor Jesus (God’s own son) were spared from death and suffering; rather, suffering seems to have been the way in which God re-forms and renews humanity to fully bear His own image.

Redemption extends to all of creation

Fortunately, God’s story does not end with death. God gives new life after his creatures have been subjected to terrible circumstances. Redemption was promised to Israel itself—Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones describes how God would renew His chosen people (Ezek 37:1-14). Later, the astonishing resurrection of Jesus made salvation possible not only for Jews, but for all people in Christ (Gal 3:26-29). Ultimately, the New Testament makes it clear that God’s renewal will encompass the entire Creation:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. (Ephesians 1:8-10)

Christians are accustomed to thinking of the death of Christ in regard to humans, but our culture rarely acknowledges God plan for the redemption of His entire creation. This is partly attributable to the fact that discussions of creation and origins are often separated from the topic of salvation.¹⁷ In doing so we tend to marginalize Jesus as we argue about Genesis. Rather than fall into this trap, if we view nature through a theology of the cross, we will see Christ as both the alpha and the omega point in discussions of life’s history and life’s future. With this perspective, we are more apt to sense our solidarity with the rest of creation as we wait in eager anticipation of a glorious future:

The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21)

Conclusion

As part of the Church’s conversation about the problem of natural evil, this essay is meant to be a brief introduction to a “theology of the cross”. One can explore this concept in greater detail in Murphy’s book The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. While there is a lot more to be said, let me conclude with the following observation: though evolution may not be compatible with some interpretations of Christianity, evolutionary creation is certainly compatible with the crucified Christ and the theology of the cross. In the person of Jesus, God suffers with the world and ultimately redeems it. As George Murphy puts in, “The world's pains are God's stigmata.”¹⁸

Explore this Topic Further

• Miller, Keith. “And God saw that it was good”: Death and Pain in the Created Order. BioLogos series
• Murphy, George L. The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003.
• Murphy, George L. “Cross, Evolution, and Theodicy: Telling It Like It Is”. In The Evolution of Evil. Edited by G. Bennett, M.J. Hewlett, T. Peters, and R.J. Russell. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008.
• Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2008.

Notes

1. Murphy, George L. The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003.
2. Murphy, p34
3. “CRUX Sola Est Nostra Theologia,” in D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Boehlau, 1892), 5:172. The captitalization is in the original. Cited in Murphy, p26.
4. Murphy, p108
5. Murphy, p4
6. Murphy, p43
7. Murphy, p3
8. Some Christians ascribe animal death to some combination of Adam’s fall and Noah’s flood, but this does not resolve the problem that the animals are still suffering and dying through no fault of their own. See Keith Miller’s BioLogos series Death and Pain in the Created Order for the limitations inherent in a fall-based theodicy.
9. Rudwick, Martin. The meaning of fossils: Episodes in the history of paleontology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
10. See Jeff Schloss’ BioLogos essay Evolution, Creation, and the Sting of Death
11. Murphy, p63
12. Murphy, p122
13. Murphy, p27
14. This example is drawn from an evangelical outreach event held by a Christian student group in Innsbruck, Austria. On campus one day, they started conversations with their classmates by asking the question, “Would you wear an electric chair on your neck?”
15. Murphy, George L. The Trademark of God: A Christian Course in Creation, Evolution, and Salvation. Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1986.
16. Murphy, Cosmos in the Light of the Cross, p 31-32.
17. Murphy, p35
18. Murphy, p87

Behe and IC

Since we have previously explored Behe’s idea of irreducible complexity in an entire series, we will not revisit it here in great detail. It is important, however, to reemphasize how Behe defines irreducible complexity (IC). As we noted in the first part of that series, Behe frames his ideas on IC as a counter to Darwin’s ideas of gradualism.

For Behe, the argument for IC is a critique of gradual evolutionary processes, of the kind that Darwin saw as necessary for his theory to hold. When Behe introduces and defines IC in his book Darwin’s Black Box, he has a key quote from Darwin on gradualism explicitly in view:

Darwin knew that his theory of gradual evolution by natural selection carried a heavy burden: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

It is safe to say the most of the scientific skepticism about Darwinism in the past century has centered on this requirement… critics of Darwin have suspected that his criterion of failure had been met. But how can we be confident? What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications”?

Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

(Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39)

The definition of an IC system is thus straightforward: it is a matched group of components, where all the components are necessary for the function of the system. The necessity of each component can be demonstrated by attempting to remove it – if the system no longer works if even one component is removed, it is by definition IC.

Behe and exaptation

The standard response to Behe’s argument from IC is to discuss the evolutionary concept of exaptation: that new systems and functions are cobbled together from components that have functional roles in other systems already present in the cell. Behe discusses, and ultimately dismisses this idea in Darwin’s Black Box as follows:

In Chapter 2 I noted that one couldn’t take specialized parts of other complex systems (such as the spring from a grandfather clock) and use them directly as specialized parts of a second irreducible system (like a mousetrap) unless the parts were first extensively modified. Analogous parts playing roles in other systems cannot relieve the irreducible complexity of a new system; the focus simply shifts from “making” the components to “modifying” them. In either case, there is no new function unless an intelligent agent guides the setup.

So for Behe, two points are clear: parts selected for function in one system cannot be exapted for use in other systems since they would require too many modifications; and the emergence of a new function is the indication that an intelligent agent is guiding the process.

Behe has responded to my previous posts to claim that the tandem duplication event that brought about the Cit+ actualization event should not be considered a gain-of-FCT mutation under his criteria:

The gene duplication which brought an oxygen-tolerant promoter near to the citT gene did not make any new functional element. Rather, it simply duplicated existing features. The two FCTs comprising the oxygen tolerant citrate transporter locus -- the promoter and the gene -- were functional before the duplication and functional after. I had written in my review that one type of mutation that could be categorized as a gain-of-FCT was gene duplication with subsequent sequence modification, to allow the gene to specialize in some task. Venema thinks the mutation observed by Lenski is such an event. He has overlooked the fact that there was no subsequent sequence modification; a segment of DNA simply tandemly duplicated, bringing together two pre-existing FCTs.

As an aside, quibbling over whether this mutation constitutes a “genuine gain-of-FCT” mutation is not my purpose here, since the definition is Behe’s to define, and I am not aware of anyone else in the scientific literature who uses Behe’s definitions. That said, I consider it passing strange to claim that a series of events that produced a gene that has a new sequence and functional properties distinct from either of its component parts does not constitute the production of a new “functional coded element.” If nothing else, it is a functional coded element that has not previously existed, cobbled together from parts of other functional coded elements, displaying new, adaptive properties. If according to Behe’s definition that’s not “new” or a “gain” then I guess it’s not, but that seems to me to torture the words “new” and “gain” beyond recognition. But I digress.

The important point for our purposes, however, lies elsewhere. Note carefully how Behe describes the Cit+ actualization event. By dividing the new aerobic citrate transporter gene into two previously existing FCTs, Behe is describing an exaptation event. The one FCT (the aerobic promoter) starts off as a necessary component of a gene transcribed when oxygen is present. As such it is under selection for that function, which has nothing to do with expressing a citrate transporter. The second FCT (the citrate transporter amino acid coding sequence) is under selection to be a citrate transporter, which has nothing to do with the function of the gene the promoter comes from. The Cit+ actualization event, then, exapts these two FCTs by placing them together to create a new function (which Behe does not mention).

And here’s the kicker: the new system (expression of the citrate transporter when oxygen is present) requires both FCTs in order to work. It has become a system of “well matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function” (i.e. transporting citrate in the presence of oxygen) “wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

In other words, it is a new IC system – a small and relatively simple system, yes, but nonetheless IC. Now, I’m fairly sure that Behe would not define this system as IC, since the documentation of an IC system evolving would seriously undermine his thesis. I am interested, however, in how he will handle this development, on two fronts. First, he would need to explain specifically why two exapted FCTs that are required together for a basic function does not constitute an IC system (if indeed he wishes to preserve his definition). Secondly, given that he allows for exaptation in this case, he needs to explain how exaptation is not a threat to IC in general. In Darwin’s Black Box he disallows exaptation altogether, but that option is no longer on the table.

In the next post in this series, we’ll continue to explore the evidence for exaptation as a means to build new FCTs, and go on to examine the implications of this evidence for Douglas Axe’s proposed limit to evolutionary mechanisms.

For further reading:

Blount, Z.D., Barrick, J.E., Davidson, C.J. and Lenski, R.E. (2012). Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population. Nature 489; 513- 518.

Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2006).

Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2007).

Michael J. Behe (2010). Experimental evolution, loss-of-function mutations, and “The first rule of adaptive evolution”. The Quarterly Review of Biology 85(4); 419-445.

Genesis is one of my favorite books of the Bible. I read through it probably once every few months and repeatedly grind my Hebrew language skills on its opening chapters. Unlike Leviticus (at least in the opinion of most people I know), the Genesis narrative is exciting and adventurous. Some of our favorite stories come out of the book: Noah and the Ark, The Tower of Babel, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, and so on.

But no story is perhaps as infamous and well known as the creation account (or accounts) as presented in Genesis 1-2. Almost every Christian or Jew, even those less than devout, know the opening words to the tale: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We know that God created the earth in six days. We know Eve was taken from Adam's rib for a companion. We know that God called the general creation “good”, the special creation of man “very good” and, at the very end of it all, took a day of rest (which I'm sure most of us would call “very good.”)

Of course, we know all of this. Yet we challenge it (and are challenged by it), continually, when we consider the variety of interpretations of how this story intersects the world as described by science. With Genesis, are we dealing with a literal scientific account, where “day” means 24-hours; are we dealing with metaphorical “days” in which epochs or periods of time or even processes are being described; or are we readers of a creation mythology from the Ancient Near East that doesn’t have anything directly to do with material origins? Interpretations go on and on, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying the creation debate knows. By and large, however, we can probably categorize Genesis interpreters into three camps: the Young Earth Creationists, the Old Earth Creationists, and the Theistic Evolutionists.

Now, I have the unique benefit of falling into all of these individual camps at one point or another in my life, sometimes even mixing them up. I have made a strong transition from being a die-hard Young Earth Creationist to being convinced that the evolutionary story is, in fact, the more substantiated and evidenced position. I say this with no pride, since my own transition involved many agonizing questions, a whole lot of reading, and a significant internal spiritual battle: what I believed about when and how the earth was created would not only change the way I read Scripture, it would also change certain aspects of how I viewed the Creator.

While I've certainly learned a lot of information on my journey, it was not an accumulation of facts that has kept me following Christ through all the ups and downs, but Jesus himself, and the knowledge that truth is not something which the Christian should find spiritually threatening. Nevertheless, those same ups and downs—and my internalization of each of these views on creation in turn—has provided me with one simple realization about the debate over scripture and evolution: most of us are not so committed to finding the truth about Genesis and creation as we are to sustaining and maintaining our own interpretive boundaries and the boundaries of the communities which influence us. In other words, the debate is often not so much over Genesis—or even over whether we can all follow the same God when we believe different things about how he created—it's over our own ability to be right. I know this because admitting that I was wrong was the most difficult part of my own transition.

Interpretive communities

While I am pretty convinced of the truth of an evolutionary portrait of reality and an ANE reading of Genesis similar to that espoused by scholars like Peter Enns or Bruce Waltke, I can still make this claim about interpretive communities because my intention is not to dissuade others from debating the issues involved, but to ask that we simply recognize our own limits and check them as often as possible. This is part of following Jesus, is it not? Unfortunately, vigorous debate often deteriorates quickly into screaming matches where proponents of one position or another simply are talking heads, speaking past each other and forgetting our fellowship in Christ. We play into the same interpretive competition that the Pharisee and Sadducee scribes were well known for, each claiming to have a proper interpretation of the Scriptures, but all the while forgetting that interpretive arguments matter exceptionally little if a genuine search for God is not at the forefront. This is certainly not to insist that the discussions cease, but rather, to insist that these discussions can only be propelled forward if individuals—of whatever stripe—step outside of their own interpretive boundaries and communities and humbly present themselves before God, seeking His truth alone. It is to insist that “system maintenance” must die along with the self, because only then can we allow Scripture to interpret itself. Unfortunately (and this is an issue that goes way beyond the Genesis text), too many of us are more committed to a specific model than we are committed to seeking God’s truth, whatever inconvenience to us that truth proves to be.

In 2006, for instance, I heard a popular and well-trained Young Earth paleontologist make the following statement: “If all the evidence turns against young earth creationism, I will still believe it because that's what the Bible says.” I followed up with him in a conversation a year later over lunch and quickly realized that I did not misunderstand his statement. For him, the parameters of his convictions were set in concrete and the truth of the overarching story of Christianity rested on these parameters not being crossed. In his view, the Bible absolutely and fundamentally teaches a universe which came into existence 6,000-10,000 years ago; to deny that is to deny Scripture, and if evidence turned up to the contrary one must not alter those parameters but, instead, search (perhaps in vain) for counter-evidence or be willing to live in blind faith. For this paleontologist, confident Christianity hinged on the stability of those borders of interpretation. Transition wasn't allowed.

But I have heard and read statements coming out of the two other camps of thought that share this kind of certainty over interpretation, too. There is a sense of doing injustice to scripture, thereby doing an injustice to Christianity, and, thereby again, doing an injustice to God if one strays from the preferred reading. One Old Earth Creationist remarked in a popular book that an interpretation of Genesis that allows for evolution is a “contradiction in terms” and it's an unfortunate thing to “blame God for it.” Genesis, in the mind of this thinker, specifically precludes any interpretation which leads to the sort of story evolution tells. To think otherwise is to “blame” God for something which he intentionally tells us is otherwise against his nature.

I have equally heard some theistic evolutionists deride—in a very spiritually shallow and personally offensive way—those who do not accept an evolutionary viewpoint. As one who went through an interpretive evolution on biological evolution, I can say confidently that I believe my own transition would have been much easier both intellectually and spiritually if not for feeling as if certain theistic evolutionists accused me of intentionally lying or being mentally ignorant. It seems that all three camps are at least sometimes plagued by the issue of pride—especially in the cases of a few strong advocates. But pride is nothing less than the cement by which interpretive barriers are built, helping them become unmovable walls that protect the interpretive communities within.¹

On the other hand, one of the great benefits of the fall of positivism (or verificationism) and the rise of postmodernism was the realization that total objectivity among individuals is a false conception. And, since individuals make up communities, neither are camps of thought above error and immune from being wrong. Yet way too many Christians continue to approach Genesis as if we can interpret it on its own terms, completely and totally, without reference to our own location in history and culture. We're still functionally positivists. But it is an illusion that we’re above the interpretive fray, and we must realize time and again that we are subjective individuals, affected by a number of factors and people. We are deeply influenced by those that speak into us, those that we trust, and those that we find credible. As W. Randolph Tate writes,

Interpretations...must be consistent with the established interpretive framework of the interpretive community. The worldview of the interpretive community sets the parameters within which interpretations are accepted or rejected.²

The Bible takes a slightly different angle and puts it this way: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, we are not objective data-interpreting individuals but fallen men and women, even as followers of Jesus.

So it’s when groups of folks line up on either side of an issue and make their positions part of their identity that the debate over interpreting Genesis reaches a near stalemate. It's communities against communities, PhDs against PhDs, experts against experts, and—perhaps more internally—interpretive parameters against interpretive parameters. The truth is that as long as we are first and foremost committed to maintaining the community in which we are involved, there will be very little chance of us getting at the real issues and the best conclusions, much less giving an adequate witness to our God, both Creator and Redeemer.

New eyes, fresh air

I mentioned earlier that I spent time in all three major camps of thought on this issue. I was a hard-lined Young Earth Creationist, debating on forums and writing creationist papers in college. I argued for the existence of modern-day dinosaurs, major flood geology, and so on. I was convinced I was right, that defending the truth meant digging my heels deeper into the sand. But two questions plagued my thoughts: first, I asked whether Christianity fell to pieces if I was wrong. Second, I asked whether I was committed to Christ or, rather, to myself and my interpretations. With that as my first major paradigm shift, I eventually came to accept an Old Earth view. I sat comfortably within the Old Earth view for several years, but the Lord was still at work in me, and, once again, brought those two questions to my mind. Back to the books I went, back to the Bible I went, and back to prayer I went.

Through months of extremely difficult and heart-rending transition, I found myself considering a particular reading of Genesis that I would have regarded as unacceptable as a YEC. But then I was confronted with this even more important point about Christianity: often God finds what is unacceptable to us very acceptable to Him! That included me, personally, and I felt the warmth of God’s grace flow over me. In the wake of that change of heart, people accused me of rejecting my background, my Christian education, and my interpretive communities. And, yet—whether I was right or wrong—I knew God accepted my path towards this new reading of Creation as a genuine search for Him. My spiritual struggle—contrary to what I thought while it was happening—was not a struggle to reject bad data and exegesis, it was a struggle to reject myself.

While the “facts” were important, that spiritual struggle was even more so for me. What was God showing me in the midst of it all? Was thinking differently about the creation making me appreciate the Creator less, or more? Did reading Genesis differently mean only that I had been wrong, or that it was somehow less true? What did any of this have to do with my sense of calling to love and serve God and my fellow men? In a way, I’m still figuring this out. But I can absolutely testify that the struggle transformed every single one of these questions. Indeed, for the first time, I believe I saw God as much this-worldly as other-worldly. I saw nature as intimately intertwined with itself, still being woven together by God’s hand. I saw Scripture as a beautiful expression of God’s desire that man should participate in creation. I saw that my fellow men and my fellow Christians were all on a journey, much the way I was. And I saw myself as a flawed, stubborn, and prideful man, yet forgiven for the times I’ve pitted myself and my presuppositions about Scripture against God, its author.

As settled as I am now, I have not forgotten that the common ribbon which ties together all of these transitions is my commitment to keep asking questions within my own circle, too—realizing that God still has much to teach all of us. I have learned the continuing importance of stepping outside of my camp and making sure I haven’t become merely a product of or a willing prisoner to thinking a certain way, unwilling to consider that it and I might be incorrect. I came to realize that everyone (including myself, of course) has stories and life experiences that become the framework in which they read Genesis 1-2. And if I stopped pretending that I, myself, could be perfectly objective, then I also had to stop pretending that those in the community that I trusted were necessarily objective, themselves.

Ultimately, I had to be willing to be wrong and to see that my friends might be wrong, too. That’s not something that any of us are “naturally” very good at, but it is possible when we realize that the world does not depend on us being right, but upon Jesus being right. For me, seeking truth rather than presupposition requires that we all be able to approach the communities that have influenced us deeply, and ask not just “what” they say but “why” they say it. We all have to guard our hearts even more than our heads. Frequently reminding myself to walk back to the edge of my own camp—to follow Jesus’ example and withdraw to a solitary place—has shown me that there is room to breathe outside our familiar interpretive parameters. At certain times, I have found it to be the most refreshing air I've ever tasted.

Notes

1. Though, admittedly, the theistic evolutionists tend to have a greater sense of leeway when it comes to how the claims of Genesis 1-2 affect Christianity as a whole. It would be an odd thing to say that to not interpret Genesis 1-2 as an evolutionary metaphor is to reject Christianity. As far as I know, most Christian evolutionists are very much willing to acknowledge that Young and Old Earth Creationists are still within appropriate spiritual bounds, even if not scientific ones. It seems to me that if individual theistic evolutionists choose an issue about which to be rigid, it’s the Fall and the existence of Adam.
2. Tate, W. Randolpy. Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008, p 222.

With the complete genome sequence in hand, we knew the sequence and location of our genes, but what we didn’t know was how all those genes are regulated: how do the trillions of cells in our bodies know when to turn on or off all those genes? How do the hundreds of distinct cell types develop and function together, when they are all running on the same DNA “operating system?”

That’s where the ENCODE (short for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project comes in. Launched in September 2003, shortly after the announced completion of the Human Genome Project, the goal of the ENCODE project is “to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome, including elements that act at the protein and RNA levels, and regulatory elements that control cells and circumstances in which a gene is active.” In other words, the project seeks to understand how the genome “works.”

Early this month, researchers from ENCODE released more than thirty papers presenting their findings. During a Science magazine online chat, the project’s data coordinator, Ewan Birney, explained the outcome:

The ENCODE project aimed to start our understanding of how the human genome works. We know that (nearly) all the information that determines a human is in the genome, as we all start off as single cell with this DNA. However, we had a patchy understanding of how it works, in particular away from protein coding genes.

To work out how the genome works, we used the fact there are many tiny machines (proteins and RNA - RNA is very like DNA) in each of our cells which know how to "read" parts of the genome. By monitoring where these little molecular machines are on the genome, or how parts of the DNA are copied into RNA (there are quite a few different types of RNA as well), we start to gain some insight into the genome.

We did many such experiments, across different cell types (eg, one cell type was very similar to a liver cell type; another was very similar to a white blood cell). This way not only can we see what is similar, we can also see differences between these cell types.

There is a lot more to get to know and understand here - this is definitely closer to the start than the end. But it is a substantial amount of data, and analysis, to start on this journey.

According to the abstract of one of the lead papers from Nature, this extraordinary glut of data “enabled us to assign biochemical functions for 80% of the genome, in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions.” Only 2% of the genome codes for proteins, but 80% or more has some biochemical function. As a Science news article put it, these 30 papers “sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases.”

The pro-Intelligent Design organization The Discovery Institute has heralded the discovery as the “demise of junk DNA.” Casey Luskin writes for their blog Evolution News:

Let's simply observe that it provides a stunning vindication of the prediction of intelligent design that the genome will turn out to have mass functionality for so-called "junk" DNA. ENCODE researchers use words like "surprising" or "unprecedented." They talk about of how "human DNA is a lot more active than we expected." But under an intelligent design paradigm, none of this is surprising. In fact, it is exactly what ID predicted.

The extent to which the ENCODE project been able to identify function has been surprising—even exhilarating—though scientists have for some time been getting glimpses of the many ways in which segments of DNA can be “active.” Even in 1970 biologists knew that some non-coding DNA had function, and by 2003 there was a large body of work demonstrating that many non-coding elements acted as promoters, enhancers, insulators, and so on. Indeed, in recent years many have come to appreciate the fact that “junk” was never really an appropriate metaphor in the first place. Still, because sequencing of multiple genomes has shed such extraordinary light on key evolutionary mechanisms, many geneticists have focused on function primarily in terms of which regions do or do not contribute to the evolutionary fitness of their host, rather than whether they were merely "doing something" biochemically. What the impressive ENCODE project has done is open a treasure trove of new information that can only accelerate the pace at which researchers are able to explore the incredible subtlety and complexity of DNA, and refine the very concept of “functionality.”

So with all this in mind, is ENCODE a stunning victory for ID, as Luskin believes? Bryan College biologist Todd Wood thinks not. He writes, “I don't think that function equates to design, nor do I think that design requires or predicts function. They're not the same thing… my understanding of function does not require me to hypothesize God (or an anonymous designer, if you must) as the proximal cause.”

We agree. Indeed we would go on to say that evolution and design are not mutually exclusive. So while finding function is not sufficient to prove design, recognizing that function has arisen by way of evolution does not indicate that God was not at work. We at BioLogos believe God providentially works out his purposes—his designs—through the elegant processes of evolution, not in opposition to them.

Amazing as the new data are, it only strengthens and enhances our evidence for evolution. While much of the genome is “doing something” biochemically, it is still likely that the majority of the sequence is evolutionarily neutral (Senior Fellow Dennis Venema discusses the evidence for this “neutrality” in a post on our site, including a striking comparison between 29 different mammal genomes and the human genome). In fact, another ENCODE researcher participating in the Science magazine chat, John A. Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington School of Medicine, thinks the findings align beautifully with evolutionary theory:

ENCODE's data provide a unique and powerful window through which to view evolutionary change. We can see those changes directly by lining up the genome sequences of many different organisms -- these line-ups have revealed millions of regions where all the genomes agree, indicating sequences that have been specially preserved by evolution while others have decayed away (ie freely changed their letter codes). We now see that a large proportion of these 'conserved' regions are lighted up by ENCODE annotations, indicating that they are marking spots in the genome that contain important instructions for cell function.

We’ve discussed “junk” DNA previously, including a multi-part series by Dennis Venema, and we’ve received many emails over the past few days asking for our comments on the ENCODE findings. On Monday and Tuesday, Dr. Venema will begin to offer his own thoughts on ENCODE.

A special thanks goes to Darrel Falk, Mark Sprinkle, Kathryn Applegate, Dennis Venema, and Tom Burnett for their contributions to this post.

The Denisovans, an extinct hominid group that interbred with modern humans, made the news again lately with the publication of a more detailed study of their genome. One of the many interesting findings was that the Denisovans share the same chromosome 2 fusion that modern humans have. In this post, I review what we know about the origins of human chromosome 2, and then discuss the new Denisovan findings and their implications.

The origins of human chromosome 2: a brief review

Though I have discussed the evidence for a fusion event leading to human chromosome 2 before, perhaps a brief review of the evidence is in order. The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes (for a total of 46 chromosomes). This makes us something of an oddity among living great apes, all the rest of whom have 24 pairs of chromosomes (for a total of 48). Given that there are many independent lines of evidence that support the conclusion that we share a common ancestor with other great apes, this poses something of a conundrum: how is it that our species arrived at this specific chromosome number? If we were to represent this “problem” on a phylogeny, or tree of relatedness, it would look something like this (not to scale):

Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, both have 48 chromosomes, as do all other great apes such as gorillas and orangutans. This pattern has one of two explanations, one of which is much more likely than the other. Either the common ancestor to these species had 48 chromosomes, and there was an event that reduced that number to 46 specifically on the lineage leading to humans (option A), or the common ancestor species had 46 chromosomes, and there were independent, repeated events that increased chromosome number in all other great ape species (option B). We can compare these options by placing the required event(s) on the phylogeny (again, not to scale):

It should be obvious that the option that requires the fewest events is the more likely one – in this case option A with an event that reduces chromosome number in the lineage leading to humans. The other option, that of repeated, independent events to increase chromosome number, remains a formal, but unlikely, possibility. Events that reduce chromosome number are not frequent occurrences, so Option A is more likely than Option B.

We can also find further support for Option A, because it predicts a specific type of event, namely one that reduces chromosome number. Since loss of a large amount of chromosomal material is almost always detrimental, we need an event that reduces chromosome number without losing information. One way for this to happen is for two chromosomes to fuse together and become one. Initially, this event would produce an individual with 47 chromosomes, where two different chromosomes get stuck together. Contrary to what is often assumed, this individual would be fertile and able to interbreed with the others in his or her population (who continue to have 48 chromosomes). In a small population, over time, two relatives who both have one copy of the fusion chromosome may mate and produce some progeny with two copies of the fused chromosome, or the first individuals with 46 chromosomes. Since either a 48-pair set or a 46-pair set is preferable for ease of cell division, this population will either eventually get rid of the fusion variant (the most likely outcome), or by chance will switch over completely to the “new” form, with everyone bearing 46 chromosome pairs. While not overly likely, this type of event is not especially rare in mammals, and we have observed this sort of thing happening within recorded human history in other species. Some mammalian species even maintain distinct populations in the wild with differing chromosome numbers due to fusions, and these populations retain the ability to interbreed.

Further evidence for a fusion event in the lineage leading to modern humans comes from comparing synteny, or gene locations and orders on chromosomes within modern great apes – an issue we have discussed here before. In brief, what we see in human chromosome 2 is exactly what we would predict for a fusion event. When compared to other great apes, we see the genes on human chromosome 2 match up, in order, with two smaller ape chromosomes. We also see that sequences used at the tips of chromosomes are present at the proposed fusion site, and that human chromosome 2 has not one but two sites for the cell cytoskeleton to attach to for cell division – but that one of the sites is mutated and not functional, though it lines up precisely with the location of this site on the appropriate ape chromosome. Together, this evidence consistently supports both common ancestry for humans and great apes, and specifically that the difference we see in our chromosome numbers arose due to a single fusion event. I briefly discussed this evidence in my last post where I describe how I teach some of this material and the compelling impact it has on students exploring the evolution question for the first time.

Enter the Denisovans

With that as background, we are now prepared to appreciate a new finding that comes from genomics work done on the Denisovan hominids, an archaic species that is more closely related to Neanderthals than to us, but that nonetheless interbred with some anatomically modern humans as they migrated out of Africa and populated the globe. (For those not familiar with the Denisovans, or the evidence for our interbreeding with them, both Darrel Falk and I have written on this previously, here and here). Recently, a more detailed understanding of the Denisovan genome was published, and nested in the new information is the discovery that the Denisovans share the 46 chromosome set with the same fusion that we have. This strongly supports the hypothesis that the fusion event predates the separation of our species. If we were to represent this on a phylogeny, we can now place this event with more accuracy than before (as before, the phylogeny is not to scale):

Despite this new information, one obvious question remains. Did the Neanderthals also have the 46-pair set? From looking at the phylogeny above, we can see that the most likely answer is that they did, since the fact that the Denisovans had it strongly implies that the last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals / Denisovans had it as well, and the Neanderthal-Denisovan split comes later. While the Denisovan DNA samples are of high enough quality to make this assessment, we do not yet have Neanderthal DNA of high enough quality to do the same analysis with current methods (though one additional feature of the new work on the Denisovan genome is developing more sensitive DNA sequencing techniques that may resolve this question in the future).

In other words, this fusion seems to be an ancient one, predating our species by several hundred thousand years. Present estimates of the last common ancestor between humans and Neanderthals / Denisovans range at about 800,000 years ago.

Implications for understanding our “becoming human”

The main implication from this work is that it places the fusion event well before the advent of our species. I’ve often chatted informally with Christians about evolution, and at times some have thought that this fusion event was what “started” our species, or made our species unable to interbreed with other groups. Some have even suggested that perhaps the fusion event was what produced the first human (i.e. Adam).

Note that thinking this way suggests a misunderstanding of how chromosome fusions occur and what effect they have on their hosts. A fusion does not precipitate a speciation event, but rather the individual with the fusion remains a part of his or her population, and able to interbreed, even if with reduced fertility. Also, there is no necessary biological effect or change that the fusion produces on the appearance of the organism. These misunderstandings aside, however,what this new evidence shows is that this fusion event took place long before modern humans arose at around 200,000 years ago. Indeed, the 800,000 years ago date for the last human - Denisovan common ancestor means that this is the most recent date possible for the fusion. While it is an interesting piece of our evolutionary history, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we came to acquire the traits that set us apart from, and ultimately outcompete, other similar species.

In Tennessee and across the country, many others weighed in on the subject over the next few weeks, including two essays (here and here) on the BioLogos Forum. But soon after that, other issues crowded that story off the front page. Now, though, teachers and students across my state are returning to science classrooms, and we will all get to see what effect the law has in practice. Again speaking as a Christian, a biologist, and educator and drawing on all three of those perspectives, I’d like to offer my own reflections on the bill’s likely effect on Tennessee teachers and students, beginning with this excerpt from the bill itself:

The teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy . . . The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, directors of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies. (Tennessee HB368 / SB893)

As an evangelical, I think this bill could be more detrimental than helpful to Christian teenagers’ faith. Many students who are particularly interested in the sciences and theory of evolution are already in the uncomfortable position of hearing pro-Intelligent Design doctrine from the pulpit on Sunday and then listening to their science teacher’s evolution instruction on Monday. I was one of those students—sitting in more than one congregation under pastors who were particularly antagonistic to the theory of evolution, and who made not-so-subtle comments that it cannot co-exist with authentic Christian faith. Having a keen interest in the sciences and wanting to explore the data so widely accepted by the scientific community, I felt confused and ostracized in my church. I wondered if I would have to choose between my faith and intellectual integrity. The church family I trusted clashed with the science that I also trusted, causing a near catastrophe for my faith. I am thankful to the few people who offered me grace, allowing for my questioning of some of what I heard in church without labeling me a heretic.

Though the conservative Christian community may view this bill as a “win for the faith,” it is actually a loss if it reinforces the idea that this is simply an issue of science vs. scripture. Evolution is central to modern biology; trust in the authority of the Scriptures is central to Christian faith. But this fight mentality between the two established communities is detrimental to our young teenagers who are seeking to grow in faith, but who cannot seem to reconcile scripture and scientific data. We need them to seek after that reconciliation, not be told it can’t be done. Whatever they are hearing from the pulpit, the science classroom should be the one place that students can learn science. Students may well emerge with bitterness towards the church for dismissing the evidence of evolution not only so quickly, but in what is so often a haughty and condescending manner. Worse yet, students may emerge with bitterness that they were forced to choose between faith and intellectual integrity. Is this really an all or nothing argument? Are the two truly diametrically opposed?

In my world, these two have reconciled, and they now co-exist in peace. It has been a very long road to get there and I could not have done it without both access to good data and the freedom to explore it. Having taught teenagers in an evangelical church for years and having observed in many biology classrooms as well, I know that many students are still struggling for this same reconciliation. That reconciliation is perhaps most easily attained when the seeking student is able investigate evolution in the science classroom without harassment from opposing religious forces. With this freedom, the student may very well realize that the fear that he/she may have regarding evolution is really just a fear of the unknown, and that it is possible to have intellectual integrity and to praise God for initiating and sustaining the evolutionary process.

In Tennessee’s science classrooms there are surely many teachers who begrudge being told that they must teach evolution, and who are relieved that they can now present it as a controversy and/or allow Intelligent Design as an alternative. They, too, will likely see this law as a “win.” But isn’t public science education is about giving students an accurate picture of the state of science, not about teachers’ philosophical opinions? As has been pointed out before, most Tennessee science teachers have not had the training to teach about religion or philosophy; they have been trained to teach about the basic principles of the biological world.

This bill may be particularly frustrating, then, to teachers who do simply want to teach science. From the many hours I’ve spent in secondary biology classrooms this year, I can say for sure that time is of the essence. Tennessee teachers have barely enough instructional time to cover what students must know to pass the end-of-course biology test required for graduation; they do not have extra time to spend covering material that is not science. I have seen classroom arguments over evolution’s feasibility that ate away precious instruction time and only left a greater rift between the two camps and no doubt, a frustrated teacher. News of the Intelligent Design movement’s success in creating political and legal controversy is misplaced content in the secondary biology classroom.

Furthermore, as it allows teachers to frame biological evolution in terms of “controversy”— something that is a topic for debate—this law will likely not result in students who are more engaged in understanding science, but instead, only in more confusion (and possibly antagonism) in the classroom. Educators welcome debate in many cases because debate encourages critical thinking that leads to “formal thought,” the Holy Grail of Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. But the practice of science is about proposing hypotheses and testing the data, not primarily argumentation. And if the science community is not “debating” evolution, why should high school science students be debating evolution as part of their biology curriculum?

The bill is correct in stating that the purpose of science education is to “inform students about scientific evidence” and “help students develop critical thinking skills necessary to becoming intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens.” I certainly agree, though I question whether it needed to be legislated. Rather, my answer is: “Let’s actually do it!” Before bringing “debate” and “controversy” about scientific theories into the classroom, let’s instead teach our students about sound scientific practice; let’s give them opportunities to learn how to research and to employ the scientific method in everyday life. Let’s focus on teaching them about observing the indicators of climate change, the intricacies of DNA, conservation of ecosystems, and the principles of molecular and cell biology. Let’s give them the tools—specific to science— that help them think critically and work out problems, rather than undermining faith in those very practices and the community of people that uses them every day. Let’s not teach them to live in denial of the ordinary dependability of science, let’s not teach them to distrust scientists who have no interest in “debate,” but want to understand the world God made.

In Tennessee and elsewhere, let’s give both our students and those scientists the grace and support they need to merge authentic faith and intellectual integrity.

“Theistic evolution” has been discussed by that name since at least 1877, and one of the first to do so was the great Canadian geologist John W. Dawson, in his book, The Origin of the World, According to Revelation and Science (1877). In the midst of a lengthy discussion of the animals created on the fifth day of creation, he says:

The long time employed in the introduction of the lower animals, the use of the terms “make,” and “form,” instead of “create,” and the expression “let the waters bring forth,” may well be understood as countenancing some form of mediate creation, or of “creation by law,” or “theistic evolution,” as it has been termed; but they give no countenance to the idea either of the spontaneous evolution of living beings under the influence of merely physical causes and without creative intervention, or of the transmutation [evolution] of one kind of animal into another. (p. 225)

As the final part of this sentence implies, Dawson was (ironically) a staunch opponent of both human evolution and the common ancestry of other animals; in short, by no reasonable definition was he a theistic evolutionist, even though he thought that a great deal of change had taken place naturally, “within certain limits” that he associated with the created “kinds” spoken of in Genesis. Indeed, references to “theistic evolution” are probably no less common among opponents of the view (including William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s) than among proponents, but I won’t attempt to enumerate further examples.

In recent years, however, some proponents of TE have endorsed alternative labels for their position(s). The most prominent example is Francis Collins, the geneticist who started BioLogos. Collins uses the term “BioLogos” itself as the label for his overall position, which fits well within my TE category. The evangelical theologian Denis Lamoureux, one of the most qualified of all writers on this topic (he has earned doctorates in both theology and biology), strongly prefers the term, “Evolutionary Creation” (EC), precisely because he thinks the noun “creation” ought to have more emphasis than the adjective “evolutionary,” something that the term “theistic evolution” does not accomplish. I recommend his book of that title to anyone who wants an authoritative analysis of both biblical and scientific aspects of the origins controversy. The main ideas are clearly presented in his web lectures. Another highly qualified proponent of TE, George Murphy, also has reservations about the term, but he recognizes its wide recognition and agrees with the idea itself, that “Evolution is God’s way of creating”. I will have more to say about Murphy, a very important voice, in a subsequent post.

Despite these quite reasonable objections to the term, I continue to use the “TE” term, partly because it has historical continuity and I’m an historian, and partly because it’s easily recognized. If anyone wants to object, however, they won’t get objections from me, unless their own reasons aren’t reasonable. My only request: define your terms as clearly as I’ve defined mine.

Because the term is broad and a bit hazy, more should be said about it. When we talk about “Intelligent Design” next month, I’ll tell you that it’s a “big tent” (something proponents of that view also say), insofar as it glosses over the biblical and theological issues that have usually separated Christians into various “camps” (such as the various positions we are now studying) when it comes to origins. TE is also a “big tent,” in that adherents differ strongly amongst themselves on theological and biblical issues. Unlike ID, however, theology is openly discussed—and competing theologies of God, nature, and humanity are openly advocated, not left implicit. We’ll say more about this next time. This column presents one type of TE, a type favored by many evangelical scientists and scholars. For example, the people I will discuss all accept (as far as I can tell) the Incarnation and Resurrection—that is, they are Trinitarian Christians who believe that Jesus was fully divine (and fully human) and that the disciples went to the right tomb, only to find it empty, before encountering the risen Christ in diverse places. They also believe in creation ex nihilo, the classical view (illustrated at the start of this column) that God brought the universe into existence out of nothing. There are other types of TE, some of which are not (in my opinion) sufficiently biblical, or even sufficiently Christian, to be part of this series. Please keep that in mind as we proceed: don’t tar all TEs with the same brush—something that happens all too often elsewhere. Let knowledge, not ignorance, be our guide.

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Theistic Evolution

(1) The Bible is NOT a reliable source of scientific knowledge about the origin of the earth and the universe, including living things—because it was never intended to teach us about science.

This reflects not only modern scientific knowledge, but also (more importantly) modern biblical scholarship. Peter Enns and some other evangelical scholars have recently stressed this point, initiating a firestorm in the evangelical academic community that, so far, has confirmed my view that evangelicals in general are just not ready to deal with this, even though it is consistent with the classical notion of accommodation. My own comments about the magnitude of the problem, written before the firestorm started, can be found here.

(2) The Bible IS a reliable source of knowledge about God and spiritual things.

Remember the quip that Galileo attributed to Cesare, Cardinal Baronio, “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.” (We discussed this earlier in the series). Evolution was not an issue in Galileo’s day, but this platitude is frequently quoted by advocates of TE—and often without proper attribution to Baronio. Commonality obviously lies in the attitude, not the topic. Many critics of TE are willing to adopt Galileo’s approach when it comes to the Solar System, but not when it comes to evolution: they are anxious to keep Galileo out of the garden of Eden.

Portrait of Cesare, Cardinal Baronio,
attributed to Caravaggio (1602-3) (Source)

(3) Scientific evidence is irrelevant to the Bible—it is simply not a science book.

See above. This needs to be stated separately, since some believers look to science for “proof” of the Bible, just as some unbelievers look to science for “disproof.” Proponents of TE stress that science and the Bible aren’t like apples and oranges; rather, they are more like apples and rocks: you can hold one in each hand without tension, but they have very little in common. We wouldn’t look for God in the phone book, or in an automobile repair manual. Don’t look for science in the Bible. In principle, scientific theories neither support nor threaten the Bible.

(4) The creation story in Genesis 1 is a confession of faith in the true creator, intended to refute pantheism and polytheism, not to tell us how God actually created the world.

This is meant to echo what we said about the Framework View. It is not necessarily true that all TEs accept the Framework View or something like it, but many do. Most would probably say that the Bible is not contradicted by any specific scientific theory of biological diversity—unless that theory oversteps its philosophical boundaries and functions as a kind of religion, what Conrad Hyers called “dinosaur religion.”

(5) The Bible tells us THAT God created, not how God created

Again, this sounds like the Framework View—or, at least, it should. Belief in God the creator is consistent with science, and even supported by some aspects of science; but, it is not a substitute for scientific explanations.

An Assignment: It’s Your Turn to Read and Write

Astronomer Owen Gingerich has written an eloquent little TE book, God’s Universe. A number of quotations have been compiled here. My review for First Things identifies some of the key theological and philosophical issues related to TE. Please follow these links, study what you find, and offer comments below. If anyone has actually read the book itself, your views would be particularly valuable to include.

Looking Ahead

In our next column in two weeks, we continue our discussion of Theistic Evolution, focusing on some crucial theological aspects of TE. In the meantime, please do the “assignment” and get back to us.

Asa Gray

If Thomas Huxley earned the title of "Darwin's bulldog," then Asa Gray should be remembered as "Darwin's dove." Whereas Huxley enjoyed a good fight in his defense of Darwin's theory, Gray sought to mediate and bring sides together around a common understanding of "good science." As Darwin's strongest and most vocal scientific ally in the United States, Gray recognized the scientific importance of Darwin's efforts for the growing professionalism of biological researchers.

But as an orthodox Christian, a Presbyterian firmly devoted to the faith expressed in the Nicene Creed, Gray saw in Darwin's theory both evidence for his philosophical commitment to natural theology and support for his opposition to the idealism advocated by Louis Agassiz and the Naturphilosophen in both Europe and America. Indeed, Agassiz's advocacy of Platonic forms as a basis of biological understanding (e.g., "A species is a thought of the creator")¹ would be a major source of American opposition to Darwin's theory.

Professor of botany at Harvard during most of the middle half of the nineteenth century, Gray was one of the few members of the scientific community to whom Darwin revealed his theory before the publication of On the Origin of Species, and, from what I can tell, the only American. Gray and Darwin met briefly in January 1839 during one of Gray's visits to England. Later, during the 1850s, Darwin wrote Gray on several occasions requesting information--a practice that Darwin frequently employed. In 1854, Darwin's friend and confidant, Joseph Hooker, showed Darwin Gray's review of Hooker's Flora of New Zealand, in which Gray had argued strongly against Louis Agassiz's idealism and had raised questions from his own work on the stability of species. Gray was not yet ready to deny their permanence, but hybrids and other observations were beginning to trouble him.

The next year Gray wrote a lucid and penetrating positive evaluation of Alphonse De Candolle's two-volume Géographie botanique raisonnée, a pioneering work dealing with plant geography and distribution from a statistical perspective. Hooker had sneeringly dismissed the work. In A. Hunter Dupree's authoritative biography of Gray, he describes Gray's puzzlement at Hooker's response in these terms:

Although in the long view Gray's evaluation of the epoch-making nature of De Candolle's book was more justified than Hooker's sneers, [Gray was confused by his response, for] Hooker seemed to be talking with a more comprehensive theory definitely in mind, some reason for taking his position, which he did not divulge and which his friend [Gray] did not possess.²

Darwin, however, saw in both Gray's review of Hooker's book and in his comments on De Candolle's tome that Gray was troubled by some of the same empirical data that had been bothering him. In April 1855, Darwin wrote Gray to urge that Gray update his Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States first published in 1848, and especially to address the issue of the range of Alpine plants in the United States. Specifically, he said: "Now I would say it is your duty to generalise as far as you safely can from your as yet completed work."³

Behind this request was Darwin's desire to test his impression that Gray could make a good ally. Gray passed the test, and finally, in July 1857, Darwin let Gray in on his theory of the transmutation of species. Gray was never an uncritical supporter, and there are many evidences in the correspondence between these two scientists that Gray was willing to challenge Darwin and disagree with some of his conclusions. Nevertheless, Gray saw the importance of Darwin's work and the ways in which it provided answers to the troublesome issues that he had confronted in his own botanical efforts.

Gray responds to Darwin's theory

After considerable interchange--one might even say debate--among Gray, Darwin, and Hooker, Gray wrote to Hooker in October 1859 (one month before the publication of On the Origin of Species) saying that he had absolutely no problem with cognate species arising by variation. He did, however, raise a concern that would be the source of much future discussion. He wondered about Darwin's "carry[ing] out this view to its ultimate and legitimate results,--how [do] you connect the philosophy of religion with the philosophy of your science." He added: "I should feel uneasy if I could not connect them into a consistent whole--i.e., fundamental principles of science should not be in conflict."⁴

When Origins was published, Gray wrote a clear, positive, yet critical review in The American Journal of Science. Aware of mounting religious opposition, he ended his review by arguing that whereas one could use Darwin's theory in support of an atheistic view of Nature, one could use any scientific theory in that way. He wrote: "The theory of gravitation and ... the nebular hypothesis assume a universal and ultimate physical cause, from which the effects in nature must necessarily have resulted."⁵ He did not see the physicists and astronomers who adopted Newton's theories as atheists or pantheists, though Leibniz earlier had raised such reservations. And a similar situation existed with the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin, Gray continued: "merely takes up a particular, proximate cause, or set of such causes, from which, it is argued, the present diversity of species has or may have contingently resulted. The author does not say necessarily resulted."⁶

This far Gray could go with Darwin. But there was a point at which he parted company, and that was the fortuitous randomness of the process that Darwin's theory seemed to imply.

In part 2, Dr. Miles describes Darwin's struggle with the problem of natural evil and design in nature.

Notes

1. Cited in A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 151. 2. Ibid., 236.
3. Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903), 252.
4. Dupree, Asa Gray, 266.
5. Asa Gray, "The Origin of Species" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 44.
6. Ibid.