"Anyone approaching the Resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead means will inevitably misunderstand those accounts and will then dismiss them as meaningless" (p. 243).

In fact, if Jesus' Resurrection were "merely" coming back to life in any way that we might comprehend, then it would be of little significance.

"Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus' Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us" (p. 243).

So what then does Resurrection mean? For Benedict it represents a new dimension of reality breaking through into human experience. It is not a violation of the old; it is the manifestation of something new.

"Jesus had not returned to a normal human life in this world like Lazarus and the others whom Jesus raised from the dead. He has entered upon a different life, a new life -- he has entered the vast breadth of God himself..." (p. 244).

Because it is something entirely new, it cannot represent a violation of natural law as understood by science.

"Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data. The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented -- a new dimension of reality that is revealed. What already exists is not called into question. Rather we are told that there is a further dimension, beyond what was previously known. Does that contradict science? Can there really only ever be what there has always been? Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?" (p. 246-7)

Thus, in this view, Resurrection (as with all true miracles) is not contrary to science, but an indicator that science does not (yet?) describe the full expanse of reality. Indeed, some may argue that science itself contains similar "indicators." The 11 (or so) dimensional universe required by some versions of string theory, the multiverse theory of the universe where ours is but one of an infinite array of universes with variable physical laws, quantum entanglements, "spooky" action at a distance, the mysterious emergence of consciousness from inorganic matter -- all push the limits of human reason and imagination, suggesting to some that reality may be far more complex than the human mind can grasp.

For a moment, let us entertain the possibility that Resurrection is as Benedict interprets it: not a violation of natural law but an indicator of something beyond our scientific understanding of the universe. This has interesting implications for understanding how believers and skeptics approach the issue. If Resurrection does not violate science, then science does not necessarily constitute an impediment to accepting the reality of Resurrection. If the difference between the skeptic and believer is not science, then is it just a matter of imagination? The believer imagines greater possibilities for the universe than the non-believer. While this is possible, it seems questionable. To my knowledge, no research has found differences in imaginative abilities between religious and non-religious people. Moreover, contrarian examples easily come to mind: Isaac Asimov was an atheist but hardly lacking in imagination when it came to science fiction. I tend to think that both believers and non-believers can imagine (with varying degrees of effort, I'm sure) the new possibilities implied by Resurrection.

Thus, if it is neither imagination nor science that prompts skepticism about Resurrection, then what is left? I suggest that it comes down to a question of authority: At what point does one allow imaginative possibilities to have authority over how one lives? To the believer, Resurrection has an authority that science fiction does not. Resurrection is not thought-provoking entertainment. It requires far more than just imagining greater possibilities for the universe. It requires a change of life, here and now. Unlike the microscopic hidden dimensions of string theory, the new dimension implied by Resurrection has "broken though" into everyday reality and demands a response -- even if that response is to actively ignore it.

Now, what convinces the believer that Resurrection merits such authority when other imaginative possibilities such as extraterrestrial life or time-travel do not? The answer here appears to be historical commitment. There's no record of people committing themselves to the point of martyrdom to other imaginative possibilities as they have to Resurrection. The earliest example of such commitment being found, of course, in the dramatic post-crucifixion turn-around of the Apostles. Such an astounding change of heart, followed by an unwavering commitment capable of altering human history demands a categorically unique explanation: Resurrection.

The believer's argument, however, remains unconvincing to the skeptic. However impressive they might be, a change of heart and steadfast commitment do not necessarily add up to a new dimension of reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fair enough. So a key question regarding the interpretation of Resurrection is this: Is the post-crucifixion history of Christianity extraordinary? Does it compel the dispassionate observer to concede that a categorically unique event could plausibly be its best explanation?

It ought to be upon questions such as those above that skeptics and believers respectfully engage one another, rather than the simplistic and often acrimonious sloganeering that has increasingly become the norm.

Science and Ethics

I grew up with the deep conviction that science and theology belong together. Nurtured in the Reformed tradition, I had learned that science and religious faith are compatible ways of looking at the world. It was a tradition that esteemed science—as well as the arts, politics, trades, and good housekeeping. It also esteemed the Bible, our rule of faith and practice, and the theological research and scholarship that enriches our understanding of Scripture. I grew up knowing that both creation and the Word came from the same Author—the Author of the universe, who is thoroughly and perpetually consistent.

I also learned that there is great concordance between the natural world and the Bible—the two great books enjoyed by my culture. Scientific study of how the natural world works is in accord with theological study of the purpose and meaning of life illuminated by the Bible. And so, for these students I wrote “science” at one corner of my triangle and “ethics” at another. Under “science” I added the explanatory question “How does the world work?" and under “ethics,” “What is right?”

My early childhood interest in reptiles had continued on through my teens, through college, and into graduate studies. In graduate school at the University of Michigan, I picked up on my love for the painted turtle, the first species that occupied my backyard zoo, and set about researching how it might control its body temperature. But working with creatures that move between land and water was complicated—especially when I tried to quantify evaporation from the turtles’ shell following their climbing onto a basking spot, and when I tried to record their body temperature underwater with thermocouples whose wires got tangled as my turtles moved through a variety of aquatic vegetation. That prompted me to me to shift my subject to a reptile that lived in a nearly water-less and nearly plant-less environment—a desert lizard.

My shift of subject from a reptile I had studied in a pond in my backyard zoo to one that lived in the desert of southern California led to many wonderful discoveries. It helped my research, but it did much more: it would also produce the third label I would add to the triangle I drew for those students.

In search of my new subject, the desert iguana, I traveled to the desert with Ruth, my wife and field assistant. I learned that its genus (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) comes from the Latin words for “thirsty” (dipso) and “lizard” (saurus). I learned about the marvelous ways this creature survives and flourishes in the desert with almost no water in extremely high temperatures. Eventually I reported my findings in my dissertation and in various scientific papers. But it was there in the desert that I also learned something unexpected about another species—our own Homo sapiens. I learned that we humans have immense capacity for taking action in areas about which we know next to nothing! Uninformed by science and ethics, we can and do act in ways that have great negative consequences on the world. And often we do so intentionally, eschewing scientific and ethical knowledge in cultured ignorance.

The site I selected for study of the environmental physiology and physiological ecology of desert iguanas was on the alluvial fan at the mouth of Deep Canyon—a dry river delta—several miles to the east of Palm Springs in what would later become the city of Palm Desert, California. About once in a century, this canyon would discharge floodwaters from torrential rains in the San Jacinto Mountains above on to this delta that fanned the waters out to the desert below. For a century or so, this alluvial fan had been as we observed it: a quiet, dry, gently sloping plain that provided a grand view of the desert below. The area’s infrequent deluges were mutely proclaimed by an Indian village whose remains rested high off to one edge, out of most floods’ reach—a revelation of the knowledge and wisdom of an earlier people. The absence of water did not diminish the ominous reality displayed in this sloping plain. Had a torrential rain dumped onto the mountains above, we could have been swept off our study site by its floodwaters.

One day, toward the conclusion of my field research, as Ruth and I studied how the Desert Iguana survived on this hot dry delta, we were startled by the arrival of jobbers who parked their tank truck near us and sprinkled water on the desert for a few days. Soon after, they poured a concrete slab for a house on the wet soil. It was one of hundreds—and later even thousands—of buildings that would be placed on this usually dry river delta. House would be added to house, and lot to lot, until the city of Palm Desert covered most of the sloping triangular plain. At some point during the next few decades, my study site would become the approach lane to a drive-in bank, and the once-abundant population of desert iguanas would be reduced to a specimen or two in the local zoo. The annual rainfall in this new city? Less than 3 inches.

A second surprise happened to the west of my study site, toward Palm Springs. First men with machines arrived and leveled some shifting sand dunes. Next they sprinkled the areas they had flattened from water trucks, and this was followed by a similar sequence of slab-laying and house-building. Earlier, developers had subdivided the flattened dunes by lines scribed on a plat map; these lines were then transcribed to the landscape as a housing “development” acclaimed and commended by Life magazine.

And now, while driving my car through drifting sand on paved streets, I came upon a brand new ranch-style house—cracked in the middle, with one end hanging several feet down into a deep wind-scoured hole. A nearby neighbor complained to me that Riverside County did not send plow trucks frequently enough to keep the streets clear of continually drifting sand. People settling in houses newly placed in desert sand seemed to know nothing about the place they had chosen to live. Their subdivision stood in the blowing winds and the shifting dunes of the open desert. In air-conditioned oblivion—in cars and houses that protected them from the desert’s searing heat—they did not know their place.

It was a startling illustration of how human knowledge about how the world works (science) and about what ought to be (ethics) had had little effect on the decision of the people who settled in these desert dunes (praxis). The dune levelers had transformed dirt-cheap land into high-priced lots. Presumably the human settlers to whom the developers sold knew nothing of shifting dunes or alluvial fans; neither did anyone tell them of their precarious situation. The “developed” landscape, as I beheld it, was a silent testimony to the cultured ignorance of these well-intentioned home buyers and to the arrogance and greed of those who enticed them to buy. Living there, they knew next to nothing of the “there” where they lived, the desert and dunes. Their praxis was divorced from desert knowledge (science) and desert wisdom (ethics).

For the students in New Hampshire I added “praxis” to the third corner of the triad, along with the question, “What then must we do?” The corners of the completed triangle provided the framework for me to address their question.

Part 2 describes the science-ethics-praxis triad that Dewitt drew for his students.

Part of the BioLogos mission, then, is to show how all things hold together in Christ—to show how a Christian worldview integrates the knowledge we have of God through the Scriptures with the knowledge we have of God through the other areas in which he reveals himself as Creator and Redeemer. Our website contains a wealth of Christian scholarship in a wide range of fields—from biology, to cosmology, to mathematics, to Biblical studies, to history, to theology—all demonstrating that the best contemporary science is compatible with Biblical Christian faith. But today we introduce a new tool—the BioLogos Navigator—to make these posts more accessible, and to show how they inter-relate (see sidebar on the right).

Modeled on the astrolabes that early astronomers and sailors used to orient themselves under the heavens, our Navigator makes the cross of Christ the starting point by which we understand the cosmos. Each of the four arms of the cross represents one of the domains of knowledge and experience through which God reveals himself to the world: Scripture, the Church, Nature and Culture. These domains are not in opposition to each other, but are complementary and inter-related areas through which we can recognize God at work in the world. Linking these four domains is a network of specific topics relevant to the science and faith conversation. Their arrangement suggests how each relates to the four domains but also to teach other. Clicking on an individual topic tag highlights not only that topic, but other topics that are linked to it—sometimes in unexpected ways.

Clicking a topic tag a second time takes you to the Topic Landing page: a curated selection of the best resources on that subject from the BioLogos archives. (The image above shows the Christianity & Science—Then and Now Landing page, complete with Navigator and highlighted tags.) At the bottom of each page is a link to our Resource Finder, where you can investigate additional materials on that topic, as well. By exploring the relationships between the topics on the Navigator itself, and by delving deep into each topic via the resources presented on the landing pages, readers can focus on specific aspects of the harmony between science and Christian faith while also getting the wide view of God’s providential work in all things in the heavens and on the earth.

In the coming days and weeks, the BioLogos Navigator will be more fully integrated into the rest of the site, accessible directly from the Forum homepage and from the Resources dropdown list at the top of every page. We’ll also be including features that help place each blog post on the “knowledge map” defined by the domains and topic tags. Finally, the Topic Pages will also be periodically updated with the latest and best new materials in each topic. In the meantime, you can access the Navigator by clicking anywhere on the small image in the sidebar, above, and find a link to this post at the upper right corner of our homepage. So take some time to explore our site with this new tool, which we think will to help orient our readers in the science and faith conversation, while always pointing to Jesus, the Christ, through whom all things were made.

The first video, “10 Questions with Katherine Hayhoe”, introduces the scientist in a brief and lighthearted interview. Hayhoe is presented with 10 questions concerning her personal life and beliefs. When asked, she explains that one thing people should know about Christianity is that having a relationship with the God of the universe is one of the most incredible experiences that a person can have. As the video unfolds, the viewer quickly begins to realize that, despite her unique profession of two seemingly incompatible beliefs, Hayhoe is a remarkably sane and “normal” individual. Her role model, she explains, is her father-- the person who first introduced her to science and showed her that it could be “really cool”. On a more serious note, the scientist admits that being both a scientist and a Christian can be difficult. The most frustrating thing about her position, she says, is the amount of disinformation which is targeted at her very own Christian community.

In the second video, “Climate Change Evangelist”, Katharine Hayhoe delves into deeper discussion of the perceived conflict between climate change and Christian faith. She explains that admitting her identity as a Christian scientist can be uncomfortable. Since evangelicals are the targets of much disinformation concerning science in general -- and specifically the science surrounding climate change -- many people in the church have a misguided view of the subject and do not look kindly at her career choice. One woman encountered by Hayhoe at a church in Texas, for example, believed that global warming was a lie taught in schools to mislead her children. In an effort to realign misguided views like these, Katharine Hayhoe and her husband wrote a book addressing the deep-rooted emotions often associated with climate change. People fear that addressing the climate issue will bring forth changes in the economy and uproot their way of life. However, Hayhoe encourages her viewers to act out of love, as the Bible calls us to do, rather than out of fear. Acting out of love inspires us to consider the poor and disadvantaged people around the globe when we respond to the reality of a changing climate.

In the final segment of this three part video montage, Hayhoe addresses the question of what climate change means. Specifically, she is concerned about how global warming affects people on a personal level. While global warming generally brings to mind melting ice caps and polar bears, its implications are far more widespread, affecting the lives of everyone around the world- from cotton farmers in Texas to public health workers in Chicago. If nothing is done to change current emission levels, the number of days per year which exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, will begin to increase dramatically, and if emissions are increased, many areas will even develop extreme conditions like those seen currently in Death Valley. Hayhoe’s goal is to demonstrate clearly that the only way to preserve the world for future generations is to significantly reduce dependence on inefficient means of getting energy and instead transition to cleaner renewable energy sources.

Editor's Note: These videos first appeared on the Nova program "The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers".

Evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century were generally not biblical literalists, nor did they believe in a young earth. In other words, the religious opposition to Darwin did not arise from perceived problems between Darwin's theory and a literal reading of Genesis. Rather, following the publication of Origin of Species, it centered on what seemed to be the randomness of natural selection, the appearance of new organisms by chance, and therefore the exclusion of divine purpose or design in Nature.⁷ It was the teleological question that Gray addressed in his review and about which he and Darwin corresponded over many years.

Darwin responds to Gray's review of Origin of Species

Darwin's response to Gray's review, a copy of which he received prior to its publication, was very positive. Darwin even hoped that it could become a preface in a second American edition of On the Origin of Species on which Gray worked. In a letter later in the year to James Dwight Dana, Darwin said: "No one person understands my views & has defended them so well as A. Gray;--though he does not by any means go all the way with me."⁸ The "all the way" included teleology, and Darwin wrote this to Gray concerning his attempt to retain design:

It has always seemed to me that for an Omnipotent & Omniscient Creator to foresee is the same as to preordain; but then when I come to think over this I get into an uncomfortable puzzle something analogous with "necessity & Free-will" or the "Origin of evil," or other subject quite beyond the scope of the human intellect.⁹

Three months later he picked up the discussion with these comments:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.--I am bewildered.--I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me .... But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.¹⁰

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." - Charles Darwin

Darwin invokes William Paley

Shortly after this letter to Gray, Darwin wrote Charles Lyell on the same subject and said:

I have said that natural selection is to the structure of organised beings, what the human architect is to a building. The very existence of the human architect shows the existence of more general laws; but no one in giving credit for a building to the human architect, thinks it necessary to refer to the laws by which man has appeared. No astronomer in showing how movements of Planets are due to gravity, thinks it necessary to say that the law of gravity was designed that the planets should pursue the courses which they pursue.--I cannot believe that there is a bit more interference by the Creator in the construction of each species, than in the course of the planets.--It is only owing to Paley & Co, as I believe, that this more special interference is thought necessary with living bodies.¹¹

In mentioning "Paley & Co," Darwin was referring to William Paley and other natural theologians, who had argued that nature--through the organization and adaptations of living organisms--demonstrated the existence of an intelligent creator. Darwin had studied Paley while in university, and Gray had also been influenced by the work of Paley, whose eighteenth-century opus Natural Theology was an important component of nineteenth-century American philosophy and was still used as a text at Harvard when Gray began teaching there in 1842.

William Paley

Paley's Argument from Design ultimately boiled down to this:

Premise 1: God's will is for us to be happy in this life and the next.

Premise 2: We can discover God's will either by consulting Scripture or by consulting "the light of nature." Both ways will lead to the same conclusion.

Premise 3: The will of God with regard to any action can be found by inquiring into its "tendency to promote or diminish the general happiness."

Conclusion 1: God creates to promote the general happiness of all creatures.

Conclusion 2: Organisms are perfectly adapted to their environment by the Creator.

The corollary of this last conclusion was that perfect design, from the structure and functioning of an organ to the structure of the universe, is evidence for God.

Confronting the reality of suffering and death in nature

For Paley, Nature provided the evidence for the existence of God, but Darwin had difficulty with this argument. His difficulty centered on what might best be referred to as issues surrounding theodicy, i.e., are natural selection and its results consistent with design by a benevolent God or do they imply that, if designed, God is capable of malevolent intent. In a July 3, 1860, letter to Gray, Darwin explicitly raises the issue. He writes:

One word more on "designed laws" & "undesigned results." I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.--An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can't & don't.--If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.--If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.¹²

What Darwin wanted was Design without suffering, teleology without agony, purpose without pain.

Darwin and Gray discuss Design

This issue becomes the focus of discussion following the third article of a series that Gray published in The Atlantic Monthly in July, August, and October of 1860. When these articles were reprinted as a chapter in Gray's Darwiniana, the chapter was titled "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology." The passage that focused the discussion for Darwin was this: "We should advise Mr. Darwin to assume, in the philosophy of his hypothesis, that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines."¹³

After stating that the article was "admirable," Darwin responded to Gray in these words:

But I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design .... [Y]ou lead me to infer that you believe "that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines."--I cannot believe this; & I think you would have to believe, that the tail of the fan-tail was led to vary in the number & direction of its feathers in order to gratify the caprice of a few men.¹⁴

In September, Darwin responded to a question from Gray and informed him of his correspondence with Lyell on the subject of Design. In a lengthy passage, he wrote:

Your question of what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life & mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable forces, I should be convinced.... I have lately been corresponding with Lyell, who, I think, adopts your idea of the stream of variation having been led or designed. I have asked him (& he says he will hereafter reflect & answer me) whether he believes that the shape of my nose was designed. If he does, I have nothing more to say. If not, seeing what Fanciers have done by selecting individual differences in the nasal bones of Pigeons, I must think that it is illogical to suppose that the variations, which Nat. Selection preserves for the good of any being, have been designed. But I know that I am in the same sort of muddle (as I have said before) as all the world seems to be in with respect to free will, yet with every supposed to have been foreseen or preordained.¹⁵

Finally, in December, Darwin sent up the white flag, conceding that "if anything is designed, certainly Man must be; one's 'inner consciousness' (though a false guide) tells one so; yet I cannot admit that man's rudimentary mammae ... & pug-nose were designed .... I am in thick mud;--the orthodox would say in fetid abominable mud."¹⁶ From this point on, the topic is not as central in their correspondence.

Following the publication of Darwin's book on orchids, however, he asked Gray to look at the last chapter, since Darwin believed that it bore on the design question. Gray's response was found in both his review of the book and in a letter to Darwin. In his review, he praised Darwin for having "brought back teleological considerations into botany." He concluded:

We faithfully believe that both natural science and natural theology will richly gain, and equally gain, whether we view each varied form as original, or whether we come to conclude, with Mr. Darwin, that they are derived:--the grand and most important inference of design in nature being drawn from the same data, subject to similar difficulties, and enforced by nearly the same considerations, in the one case as in the other.¹⁷

Gray may have believed that Darwin "brought back teleological considerations into botany," and Darwin may have swung that way in his book on orchids, but by 1867 Darwin had definitely swung back to the other side. In his concluding remarks for The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, he wrote:

However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief that "variation has been led along certain beneficial lines," like a stream "along definite and useful lines of irrigation." If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.¹⁸

In Part 3, the final post in this series, Dr. Miles will explore how Asa Gray was able to embrace evolution without rejecting the idea of design in nature.

Notes

7. Following the publication of Descent of Man, a second problem arose for evangelicals, centered on how humans could be moral beings, created in the Image of God, if they were continuous with the animal kingdom. I will not be addressing that issue in this paper.
8. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 303.
9. Ibid., 106.
10. Ibid., 224.
11. Ibid., 258.
12. Ibid., 275.
13. Asa Gray, "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 121-2.
14. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 496.
15. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 267-8.
16. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, 369.
17. Cited in Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, note 11, 430.
18. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 428.

Darwin’s finches are some of the most visible and recognizable symbols of evolution in the world today. Biology textbooks feature them prominently, and the National Academy of Sciences has enshrined them in the entrance of their headquarters in Washington, DC. Surely the finches that Darwin collected on the Galápagos islands were a central feature of his evolutionary theory, right?

Lobby of The National Academies Building. Courtesy of CPNAS. Photo by Robert Lautman

Actually, the Galápagos finches are never even mentioned in Darwin’s famous work On the Origin of Species. Nor do they appear in Darwin’s famous notebooks on “Transmutation of Species”, in which he formulated the idea of evolution by natural selection.¹ Even Darwin’s private diary of his voyage on the HMS Beagle only mentions the Galápagos finches briefly in passing.²

It was only in 1845, in the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle, that Darwin included a tantalizing sentence about the Galápagos finches:

Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.³

However insightful this statement may have been, Darwin never published anything else about the Galápagos finches for the rest of his life. Nor did he publically present these birds as direct evidence for this theory of evolution.⁴

If these finches were so important to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, why did he remain silent about them? One of his comments in The Voyage of the Beagle provides us with a clue:

Unfortunately most of the specimens of the finch tribe were mingled together; but I have strong reasons to suspect that some of the species of the subgroup Geospiza are confined to separate islands.⁵

When Darwin was exploring the Galápagos himself in 1835, he had not formulated his theory of evolution yet, and thus he did know what data would be necessary to make definitive conclusions about finch evolution. In particular, he did not keep careful track of which of his specimens came from which islands. Moreover, as was customary among naturalists at that time, Darwin only collected a small number specimens—he brought home only 31 finches and 64 total birds from the Galápagos.⁶

Though Darwin sensed that these birds were truly special, he lacked sufficient evidence to reach any specific conclusions about their evolutionary origins. It would be up to the rest of the scientific community to carry out the necessary empirical research. Subsequent expeditions in 1868, 1891, 1897, and 1905 brought back thousands of Galápagos finch specimens, but instead of unlocking the mysteries of evolutionary theory, the Galápagos finches became a great enigma.⁷

A century after Darwin's voyage, scientists still struggled to explain the staggering variety of finches on this tiny, remote archipelago. By the mid-1930’s, British Museum ornithologist Percy Lowe argued that the finches presented a "biological problem of first class importance", and he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the finches displayed a "bewildering diversity, intergradation, and distribution".⁸ Who would be up to the challenge of making sense of such tremendous biological complexity? It was David Lack.

David Lack

Ornithologist David Lack

David Lack had an exceptionally keen eye for bird-watching, and he possessed a passion to match it. By age 15, he had already observed 100 distinct species of birds, and before entering college, authored his first scientific paper. At Cambridge University in the early 1930’s, Lack was disappointed to find that his zoology professors taught “nothing about evolution, ecology, behavior or genetics, and of course nothing about birds.”⁹ In fact, at that time, there were only two professional ornithologists in all of Britain!

Thus David Lack took it upon himself to create his own learning opportunities. As an undergraduate, he became the president of the Cambridge Ornithological Club, traveled to Greenland for a bird-watching expedition, and cultivated a relationship with the prominent biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley). Huxley was an inspiring mentor and encouraged Lack to expand his research further by studying tropical birds.¹⁰ Following this advice, Lack embarked on a research trip to Tanzania in the summer of 1934, but his greatest adventure was yet to come.

In 1937, Lack became fascinated by the scientific mysteries surrounding the Galápagos finches. But in order to study their behavior, Lack would need to travel to remote islands halfway around the world. How could he possibly get there? Once again, Julian Huxley was tremendously supportive and raised funds from two prominent scientific societies to pay for his expedition. After a long delay, David Lack and five companions finally set off on their journey.

Instead of residing in comfortable quarters aboard a royal naval ship, Lack’s group subsisted on a shoestring budget, traveled on commercial steamers, and stayed with local settlers. Their experience was definitely not a romantic tale of imperial expedition:

The Galápagos are interesting, but scarcely a residential paradise. The biological peculiarities are offset by an enervating climate, monotonous scenery, dense thorn scrub, cactus spines, loose sharp lava, food deficiencies, water shortage, black rats, fleas, jiggers, ants, mosquitoes, scorpions, Ecuadorian Indians of doubtful honesty, and dejected, disillusioned European settlers.¹¹

Whereas Charles Darwin spent only nineteen days on the shores of the Galápagos, Lack and his crew conducted more than five months of meticulous and exhausting study in the harsh climate. At that time, even the finches themselves provided little solace. Lack wrote,

Darwin’s finches are dull to look at, not only in their orderly ranks in museum trays, but also when they hop about the ground or perch in the trees of the Galápagos, making dull unmusical noises. Only the variety of their beaks and the number of their species excite attention.¹²

Large Cactus Finch on Española Island in the Galápagos Islands

The repetitive tedium requisite for important scientific discoveries is rarely discussed in public, and even today many bright-eyed science students become disillusioned by the painstaking work demanded by their Ph.D. programs. But one of the things that distinguishes great scientists is their unwavering commitment and tenacity in completing major projects. David Lack's efforts were not in vain:

"Despite his personal discomforts (or perhaps because of them), Lack did see something on the Galápagos that no one had ever seen before—natural selection at work among its finches through interspecies competition." ¹³

When the birds’ breeding season ended in 1939, Lack was ready to return to his home in England. But the captive finches that he had brought with him fared so badly on the voyage home that he detoured to San Francisco and put them in the care of the California Academy of Sciences. Turning this mishap into an opportunity, Lack stayed there for five additional months to study the Academy’s enormous collection of Galápagos finch specimens.¹⁴

To complete his systematic research, Lack then travelled across the United States to study the Galápagos finch collection housed at the American Museum in New York.¹⁵ Altogether, Lack examined more than 8000 specimens and specifically measured the length, width, and depth of all their beaks.¹⁶

Lack’s final obstacle was in getting his research published. Though he completed his academic manuscript “The Galápagos Finches—A Study in Variation” in 1940, paper shortages during World War II delayed its publication by the California Academy of Sciences until 1945. Were he only interested in making an original contribution to science, Lack could have stopped here and congratulated himself on a job well-done. However, his motivation sprung from a deeper source:

David Lack's drawing of 14 species of Galápagos finches, p. 19 of Darwin’s Finches

"I did not watch birds primarily for scientific reasons but for sheer enjoyment, and from the age of 15 onward returned day after day in a glow of excitement after seeing a new bird or a new habit." ¹⁷

Lack’s joyful fascination with the Galápagos finches inspired him to continue developing his conclusions long after returning from his expedition. While waiting for his academic paper to be published, he began writing a book that would enable students and the general public to share his excitement about these remarkable birds and the evolutionary processes that shaped them.

First published in 1947, Lack’s book became tremendously influential. Before this time, biology textbooks had never even mentioned the Galápagos finches. But after David Lack’s study, the finches became a primary example of evolution by natural selection, specifically adaptive radiation. Not only did textbooks fully rely on Lack’s findings, they also followed his lead in calling them “Darwin’s finches”, the title of Lack’s famous book.¹⁸

Iconic Finches

What was it about these birds that made them such a prominent symbol of evolution? As Darwin himself pointed out, the numerous Galápagos finch populations each have distinctive beaks, and he speculated that they could have evolved from an ancestral species that came to the islands. But a complete picture of finch evolution would have to wait another hundred years, when David Lack arrived.

During his five months on the Galápagos, including both the rainy and dry seasons, Lack observed that these beak differences enable the finches to subsist on different kinds of food:

The beak differences between most of the genera and subgenera of Darwin's finches are clearly correlated with differences in feeding methods. This is well borne out by the heavy, finch-like beak of the seed-eating Geospiza, the long beak of the flower-probing Cactornis, the somewhat parrot-like beak of the leaf, bud, and fruit-eating Platyspiza, the woodpecker-like beak of the woodboring Catcospiza, and the warbler-like beaks of the insect-eating certhidea and Pinaroloxias.¹⁹

Lack's image of beak adaptations from Darwin’s Finches

Specializing in such different sources of food enables these finches to live in close proximity without directly competing with each other or driving populations to extinction. The fact that so many of these closely related finches are able to co-exist is a remarkable fact in itself. As Lack himself put it, “It is not only the origin, but also the persistence, of new species which require explanation.”²⁰

But it is also fascinating to consider how these birds got to be so different in the first place. How did a finch come to have a beak like a “parrot”, “woodpecker”, or “warbler”? The answer lies in the distinct characteristics of the Galápagos. Because the islands are so remote, no actual parrots, woodpeckers, or warblers ever settled on it. In the absence of these species, the Galápagos finches were able to adopt feeding habits and forms that they would never have taken on a large continent full of other birds competing for food. The isolation of these islands offered just the right conditions for us to see living examples of adaptive radiation.²¹

Conclusion

Considering the immense popularity of the Galápagos finches, it is quite surprising to learn that Charles Darwin himself had so little to say about them. In fact, it was actually David Lack, one century later, who conducted the critical research that immortalized the finches in biology textbooks and popular lore. By naming his landmark book Darwin’s Finches,²² Lack paid homage to the man whose voyage on the HMS Beagle helped transform the study of natural history. But at the same time, Lack also obscured the fact that evolutionary biology is an enterprise conducted by a large community of brilliant scholars, not just the product of one man’s efforts.

This tendency to immortalize “great men of science” has also led many people to refer to modern evolutionary theory as Darwinism, despite the fact that it has substantially changed and developed over the past 150 years. It is important to give credit where credit is due, and if that’s the case, we should seriously reconsider how we refer to the Galapagos finches. Evolutionary biologist Dolph Schluter, who studied the finches several decades after David Lack, had this to say:

I find Lack's intuition really stunning given how little information he had. He's my hero actually… They should be called Lack's finches.²³

In the second part of this series, we’ll explore the fact that David Lack, in addition to being a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, was also a devout Christian. His study of evolutionary theory did not cause him to lose his faith; in fact, he actually converted to Christianity after completing his Galápagos finch research.

For Discussion

Further Reading

• Grant, Peter R.; Grant, B. Rosemary. How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches, Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Sulloway, Frank J. (Spring 1982), "Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend" (PDF), Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1): 1–53.
• Weiner, Jonathon. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Vintage Books, 1995.

Notes

1. Sulloway, F. (1983). "Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend." Journal of the history of biology 15(1): 32. Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation mentioned Galapagos tortoises and mockingbirds, not finches.
2. Lack, David. Darwin’s Finches. Cambridge University Press, 1947: 9. Confirmed by Sulloway (1983), p5.
3. Darwin, Charles. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world. London: John Murray. 2d ed. 1845: 379-80. This edition of the book also contained the drawings of four different finches that have become enshrined in biology textbooks and on the walls of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.
4. Sulloway, p35. Sulloway points out that the first published evolutionary account of the Galapagos finches was not until 1876, by Osbert Salvin: "On the Avifauna of the Galapagos Archipelago." Trans. Zool. Soc. London, 9:447-51.
5. Darwin (1845), p395.
6. Sulloway, p40.
7. Sulloway, p40.
8. Larson, E. J. Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York, Basic Books, 2001: 166-67.
9. Lack, David. (1973) “My life as an amateur ornithologist.” Ibis: 424.
10. Lack (1973), 425-27.
11. Lack (1947), p1.
12. Lack (1947), p11.
13. Larson, 167-68.
14. The California Academy of Sciences sponsored an expedition to the Galapagos in 1905-06 and collected nearly 9000 Galapagos finch specimens (Sulloway, p40).
15. In New York, Lack roomed with the curator of the finch collection—German émigré zoologist Ernst Mayr. By developing this relationship, Lack had close ties with two of the biggest figures in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Julian Huxley and Ernst Mayr (Larson, 168).
16. Larson, p168.
17. Lack (1973), p424.
18. Larson, p198.
19. Lack (1947), p60.
20. Lack (1947), p158.
21. See Lack’s concluding chapter on “Adaptive Radiation”, pp146-159 of Darwin’s Finches (1947).
22. British ornithologist Percy Lowe originally proposed the name “Darwin’s finches” in 1935, but the name did not catch on until Lack used it in his book. See P.R. Lowe, (1936) "The Finches of the Galapagos in Relation to Darwin's Conception of Species." Ibis, 13th ser., 6:310-321. (Cited in Larson, p287)
23. Schluter, in an interview with Edward Larson, 16 March 2000.

Judging from the flurry of headlines over the past week, one might be tempted to think that proof positive of God’s existence (or lack thereof) had just appeared out of a 27-km-tunnel buried beneath the Swiss-French border. This frenzy of news headlines and blog titles hailed the recent news that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has discovered a brand new particle of a mass of 125-126 GeV, which is assumed to be the Higgs boson, or the so-called “God particle.” The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all?

The short answer is “no,” which becomes apparent when one considers the widely-reported story of how it got named. In 1993, Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman, along with science writer Dick Teresi, wrote a book detailing the history of particle physics starting with Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Democritus and culminating with the hunt for the Higgs boson. Until this latest discovery, the Higgs boson was the elusive final missing piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model—a collection of the fundamental particles that constitute our universe and the complex and mathematically-sophisticated relationships between them. Considering how incredibly difficult finding the Higgs boson was proving to be, Lederman wanted to name the book after that “goddamn particle,” according to some of his collaborators. His editor, however, would not allow it and so the name was shortened to “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?” And thus ‘the God particle’ was born, carrying with it more than enough social baggage for such a miniscule particle.

Particle physicist Dr. Zosia Krusberg (at right) is visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vassar College and thinks “the term ‘god particle’ is unfortunate. The Higgs boson is no more (or less) divine or spiritually significant than any other elementary particle within the standard model of particle physics.” It may be fundamental to explaining one of the most basic characteristics of the universe—namely the existence of matter and mass in addition to energy—but “it is no more (or less) important than any other physics principle underlying the Standard Model.”

Last week’s discovery was monumental in that it may have finally provided experimental evidence for the Higgs Mechanism and defined the specific energy of the resulting Higgs boson, but even this “breakthrough” for particle physics leaves many scientific questions unresolved. Finding the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but it does not do away with many other questions and shortcomings of the current state of particle physics, such as the constituent particles of dark matter, a quantum theory of gravity, and other “mathematically subtle problems.” Not to mention that there is still significant work to be done to determine the exact nature of this newly-found particle. According to Dr. Krusberg, this particle might behave just as the Standard Model predicts or it could instead be “a Higgs-like particle that will serve as a gateway into explorations of physics beyond the Standard Model." Krusberg continued, “And I guarantee that it is this latter scenario that most of us are hoping for: physicists love nothing more than discovering the shortcomings of their theories, since this is the first step toward more fundamental theories with even more predictive power!”

No, finding the Higgs boson does not answer all the questions of particle physics, much less lend insight into the existence (or not) of God. For that reason, Dr. Krusberg (like most physicists) bemoans the term ‘God particle’ and insists, “There really is nothing either literally or metaphorically god-like about the Higgs boson.” Indeed, one writer for the British journal The Guardian reached such a point of frustration about the name that he ran a competition for alternatives. The winner was “the champagne flute boson,” ostensibly because the bottom of a champagne bottle is an excellent and oft-used demonstration of the energy potential of the Higgs Mechanism. Or then again, perhaps it is simply because physicists thought that finally finding this shy particle would call for some of the bubbly.

On the other hand, some science writers and scientists can appreciate the ‘educational benefits’ of such a mysterious and controversial name because it attracts the attention of the general public and puts a relatable face on an extremely esoteric physics concept. Krusberg herself admits that “People are naturally drawn to the mysterious and the controversial, providing educators with great teaching opportunities.” But she worries about the larger social implications involved in “mixing the vernacular of physics and spirituality,” not least because such uncritical mixing can lead the non-scientific community to draw conclusions about the authority and reach of science that are not justified.

Understanding that the Higgs boson is not the literal stuff of God and that it does not prove or disprove God’s existence (as the name seems to suggest) extinguishes the fire under any sort of religious outcry. But this does not mean that its discovery is irrelevant to the discussion of science and faith, nor to the Christian community as a whole. As Dr. Krusberg remarks, “The recent discovery of [this] new boson at the LHC perfectly embodies the scientific process at its best (and thereby illustrates to the public why and how science works).” Scientific exploration of nature is not a fool-proof endeavor; healthy skepticism and accountability to a wide community of other researchers are absolutely critical to its success. But such evidence of the power and finesse of well-executed science as we saw last week is a testament to our ability to explore and understand the ‘how’ of the universe. God has equipped humanity with the desire, the intellectual abilities, and the collective will to recognize and explore the cosmic order and beauty of his creation. God has made our home knowable, and has given us the tools and capacities by which to know it.

At left, Cern researchers present their findings to a few hundred of their colleagues in Melbourne, Australia. Image © 2012 CERN

It is valuable, then, for the Christian community to understand and appreciate how science works, in part to recognize that there are many instances in which science and the church work in tandem in order to better understand and better serve the world. But I think there is something else we can draw from the story of the Higgs boson, too. The nickname ‘the God particle’ has touched nerves in religious communities because it implies that science has the ability to prove or disprove divine existence by physical means. Even though the physics community is by no means claiming insight into the divine, it is sometimes assumed by the religious community that scientists view their work as chipping away at God’s existence when they begin to understand something that was previously unknown, or known only “by faith” in esoteric theories and models.

And yet, regardless of motives or metaphysical interpretations, perhaps physicists' search for the Higgs boson is in fact an apt picture of our own search for God. How many times have we stared up at the starry ceiling in times of crisis and prayed fervently for some kind of sign from God to assure us of his presence? And how many times has that much-desired evidence appeared only in retrospect, when we look back to see God’s hand faithfully and elegantly working in ways inscrutable at the time? It took a community of physicists to discern the presence of the Higgs boson. But even so, they could only do so after the fact from the cascade of particle decays it sparked; they could not observe the particle itself directly. In a similar way, though we often do not see the working of God directly, “in the moment,” we still trust in his presence and providence, often depending on friends, family and the community of the church to help us see his hand in hindsight.

So while the discovery of the Higgs boson does not itself explain God, we rejoice at the subtle yet striking new insight we have into God’s creative genius via the Higgs boson and at the way God gives evidence of his faithfulness in the ordered creation itself. Perhaps, however, the greatest insight we can glean from this breakthrough is an analogy for the way God calls us to seek him and find him together, in the community of those who follow his son.

Tomorrow, Baylor University physicist Gerald Cleaver answers the question, "What is the Higgs boson?"

A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and the scientists are superior to all other men. --Henri de Saint-Simon¹

Scientism is a rather strange word, but for reasons that we shall see, a useful one. Though this term has been coined rather recently, it is associated with many other “isms” with long and turbulent histories: materialism, naturalism, reductionism, empiricism, and positivism. Rather than tangle with each of these concepts separately, we’ll begin with a working definition of scientism and proceed from there.

Historian Richard G. Olson defines scientism as “efforts to extend scientific ideas, methods, practices, and attitudes to matters of human social and political concern.” ² But this formulation is so broad as to render it virtually useless. Philosopher Tom Sorell offers a more precise definition: “Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture.” ³ MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson offers a closely related version, but more extreme: “Science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” ⁴ The latter two definitions are far more precise and will better help us evaluate scientism’s merit.

A History of Scientism

The roots of scientism extend as far back as early 17th century Europe, an era that came to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Up to that point, most scholars had been highly deferential to intellectual tradition, largely a combination of Judeo-Christian scripture and ancient Greek philosophy. But a torrent of new learning during the late Renaissance began to challenge the authority of the ancients, and long-established intellectual foundations began to crack. The Englishman Francis Bacon, the Frenchman Rene Descartes, and the Italian Galileo Galilei spearheaded an international movement proclaiming a new foundation for learning, one that involved careful scrutiny of nature instead of analysis of ancient texts.

Descartes and Bacon used particularly strong rhetoric to carve out space for their new methods. They claimed that by learning how the physical world worked, we could become “masters and possessors of nature.” ⁵ In doing so, humans could overcome hunger through innovations in agriculture, eliminate disease through medical research, and dramatically improve overall quality of life through technology and industry. Ultimately, science would save humans from unnecessary suffering and their self-destructive tendencies. And it promised to achieve these goals in this world, not the afterlife. It was a bold, prophetic vision.

As this new method found great success, the specter of scientism began to emerge. Both Bacon and Descartes elevated the use of reason and logic by denigrating other human faculties such as creativity, memory, and imagination. Bacon’s classification of learning demoted poetry and history to second-class status.⁶ Descartes’ rendering of the entire universe as a giant machine left little room for the arts or other forms of human expression. In one sense, the rhetoric of these visionaries opened great new vistas for intellectual inquiry. But on the other hand, it proposed a vastly narrower range of which human activities were considered worthwhile.

The Enlightenment

A century later, many of the Enlightenment intellectuals continued their love-affair with the power of natural science. They claimed that not only could science enhance the quality of human life, it could even promote moral improvement. The Encyclopedist Denis Diderot aimed to collect, organize, and preserve all human knowledge so that “our children, becoming better instructed, may become at the same time more virtuous and happy.” ⁷ Many of the French philosophes even claimed that science could be a substitute for religion. In fact, during the French Revolution, numerous Catholic churches were converted into “Temples of Reason” and held quasi-religious services for the worship of science.⁸

Positivism

The 19th century witnessed the most powerful and enduring formulation of scientism, a system called positivism. Its founder was August Comte, who built his positive philosophy from a deep commitment to David Hume’s empiricism and skepticism. Comte claimed that the only valid data is acquired through the senses. Nothing was transcendent, and nothing metaphysical could have any claim to validity.⁹ The task of scientists was twofold—first, to demonstrate how all phenomena, including human behavior, are subject to invariable natural laws.¹⁰ Second, they would reduce these natural laws to the smallest possible number, and ultimately unify them under the laws of physics.¹¹

Comte also subsumed all of human intellectual history into a single process which he called the Law of Three Stages. In his view, each branch of knowledge passes through three stages: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, and lastly the scientific or positive state. He believed that through the continual advancement of human understanding, religion would fade away, philosophy and the humanities would be transformed into a naturalistic basis, and all human knowledge would eventually become a product of science. Any ideas outside that realm would be pure fantasy or superstition.

Logical Positivism

Positivism did not lose its appeal in the 20th century. To the contrary, a group known collectively as The Vienna Circle reinvigorated the fundamental tenets of positivism with enhanced symbolic logic and semantic theory. They called their approach, fittingly, logical positivism. In this system, there are only two kinds of meaningful statements: analytic statements (including logic and mathematics), and empirical statements, subject to experimental verification. Anything outside of this framework is an empty concept.¹²

Given its sweeping claims, logical positivism came under heavy scrutiny. Karl Popper pointed out that few statements in science can actually be completely verified. However, a single observation has the potential to invalidate a hypothesis, and even an entire theory. Therefore, he proposed that instead of experimental verification, the principle of falsifiability should demarcate what qualified as science, and by extension, what can qualify as knowledge.¹³

Another weakness of the positivist position is its reliance on a complete distinction between theory and observation. Observations, essential to the empirical approach of science, were claimed by positivists to be brute facts which one could use to establish, evaluate, and compare the theories. However, W.O. Quine pointed out in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” that observations themselves are partly shaped by theory (“theory-laden”).¹⁴ What counts as an observation, how to construct an experiment, and what data you think your instruments are collecting—all require an interpretive theoretical framework. This realization does not deal a death-blow to the practice of science (as some post-modernists like to claim), but it does undermine the positivist claim that science rests entirely on facts, and is thus an indisputable foundation for knowledge.

Scientism of Today

Scientism today is alive and well, as evidenced by the statements of our celebrity scientists:

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. –Stephen Weinburg, The First Three Minutes

We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little. –E.O. Wilson, Consilience

While these men are certainly entitled to their personal opinions and the freedom to express them, the fact that they make such bold claims in their popular science literature blurs the line between solid, evidence-based science, and rampant philosophical speculation. Whether one agrees with the sentiments of these scientists or not, the result of these public pronouncements has served to alienate a large segment of American society. And that is a serious problem, since scientific research relies heavily upon public support for its funding, and environmental policy is shaped by lawmakers who listen to their constituents. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it would be wise to try a different approach.

Physicist Ian Hutchinson offers an insightful metaphor for the current controversies over science:

The health of science is in fact jeopardized by scientism, not promoted by it. At the very least, scientism provokes a defensive, immunological, aggressive response from other intellectual communities, in return for its own arrogance and intellectual bullyism. It taints science itself by association.¹⁵

Noting that most Americans enthusiastically welcome scientific advancements, particularly those in health care, transportation, and communications, Hutchinson suggests that perhaps what the public is rejecting is not actually science itself, but a worldview that closely aligns itself with science—scientism.¹⁶ By disentangling these two concepts, we have a much better chance for enlisting public support for scientific research than we would by trying to convince millions of people to embrace a materialistic, godless universe in which science is our only remaining hope.

Distinguishing science from scientism

So if science is distinct from scientism, what is it? Science is an activity that seeks to explore the natural world using well-established, clearly-delineated methods. Given the complexity of the universe, from the very big to very small, from inorganic to organic, there is a vast array of scientific disciplines, each with its own specific techniques. The number of different specializations is constantly increasing, leading to more questions and areas of exploration than ever before. Science expands our understanding, rather than limiting it.

Scientism, on the other hand, is a speculative worldview about the ultimate reality of the universe and its meaning. Despite the fact that there are millions of species on our planet, scientism focuses an inordinate amount of its attention on human behavior and beliefs. Rather than working within carefully constructed boundaries and methodologies established by researchers, it broadly generalizes entire fields of academic expertise and dismisses many of them as inferior. With scientism, you will regularly hear explanations that rely on words like “merely”, “only”, “simply”, or “nothing more than”. Scientism restricts human inquiry.

It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can't catch in his nets does not exist.¹⁷ Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.

Notes

1. "Un savant, mes amis, est un homme qui prévoit; c’est par la raison que la science donne le moyen de prédire qu’elle est utile, et que les savants sont supérieurs à tous les autres hommes." Translated into English by Valence Ionescu in The Political Thought of Saint-Simon. Oxford University Press, 1976. Page 76
2. Olson, Richard G. Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2008.
3. Sorell, Tom. Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science. New York: Routledge, 1991.
4. Hutchinson, Ian. Monopolizing Knowledge: A Scientist Refutes Religion-Denying, Reason-Destroying Scientism. Belmont, MA: Fias Publishing, 2011.
5. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method
6. Sorell, p176
7. Sorell, p35
8. Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1988.
9. Zammito, John H. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes : Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
10. This view is a form of strict determinism, and current popularizers of continue to enthusiastically endorse it. Perhaps they are “determined” to do so?
11. This view is a form of extreme reductionism, also widely endorsed by current popularizers of science.
12. Zammito, p8
13. Popper, Karl. Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1959
14. For an extended discussion, read Zammito’s chapter “The Perils of Semantic Ascent: Quine and Post-positivism in the Philosophy of Science” in A Nice Derangement of Epistemes. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
15. Hutchinson, p143
16. Hutchinson, p109
17. Giberson, Karl, and Mariano Artigas. Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists Versus God and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

The astronomy community is particularly interested in this event because exoplanets throughout the Milky Way galaxy regularly transit their parent stars in just the same way. This local example will allow astronomers to test and refine techniques used to determine the composition of these exoplanets' atmospheres, providing insight into whether these distant planets could possibly harbor life.

As Venus begins to cross in front of the disk of the Sun, Venus's atmosphere will refract the Sun's light, illuminating the backlit portion of the planet's atmosphere. Telescopes on the ground and in orbit will be trained on this thin arc of atmosphere lit up by the Sun. Astronomers will use spectrometers to break the light up into its constituent colors, from which they can determine the chemical composition of our over-heated sister planet's atmosphere. Once perfected, this same technique can be used to examine the atmospheres of planets far beyond our own solar system, offering us one of our best clues as to the habitability of these distant worlds.

Not only is this process of discovery exciting for natural science, but it has profound theological ramifications as well. Surely a God capable of orchestrating both the majestic swirls of a spiral galaxy and the intricate language of DNA could bring forth life where and when He chooses, but only now are we on the verge of being able to answer the age-old question: “Did God confine His creative life-giving actions to our own planet, or does His abundant fertility extent far beyond our limited experience?”

In 1882, William Harkness, the Director of the U.S. Naval Observatory, was one of two astronomers to determine from the transit of Venus the distance from Earth to the Sun. Just as previous viewers could never have imagined calibrating the scale of the solar system from such an event, Harkness could not predict its importance in 2004 and 2012 (the most recent Venus transits). As we look to the future, we can hardly imagine what new frontiers the next Venus transit of 2117 will find us exploring.

The image above shows Venus on the eastern limb of the Sun during the 2004 transit. As described in Tucker's essay, the faint ring around the planet comes from the scattering of light through its atmosphere, which allows some sunlight to show around the edge of the otherwise dark planetary disk. The faint glow on the disk is an effect of the TRACE telescope through which the image was captured. For more on the historical significance of the transits of Venus (including the voyage of Captain James Cook), see this article from NASA, which also includes links to several live webcasts of today's transit.

Josh's Letter

In the Biblical worldview that I had, God is omnipotent, omniscient, loving, perfect, and joyfully made a great sacrifice by dying on the cross in order to redeem mankind, of which all members are sinful and deserving of death. Repenting of sin and believing that Jesus was the Son of God and that he would save was the way to forgiveness and eternal life in the presence of God. God longs to have a relationship with people, to the extent that he died on the cross in order for people to have a chance to have their sins paid for and come to Him. Many verses, some in the words of Jesus, teach that prayers by believers will be answered. The first problem, originating from such promises, is the problem of unanswered prayers. It is obvious that God does not always give what people ask for. Additionally, when He does not, He does not always clearly say no or give a clear reason. The entire communication with God is blurry compared to communication with a fellow human being. Given that God is omnipotent and omniscient, it is not clear why the communication cannot be clearer; if communication with another human being can be clear, why is communication with God, a superior and infinitely more powerful being, not as clear? Jesus said that he would send the Holy Spirit to be with believers. There is no warning that the presence of the Holy Spirit will be much different in intensity or quality than the presence of Jesus the man, but quite the contrary, the Holy Spirit is described to be very close. The sincerity of God is therefore suspect.

The second problem is that there is carnage and devastation all over nature and in human societies, which He allows if not causes. A typical Christian teaching is that death and suffering comes from sin. There is also the teaching that imperfection can be used by God to ultimately bring glory to himself, and that suffering can be used to refine a believer's character. The exact nature of this glory is not well-defined, so the teaching about imperfection being used to bring glory to God ultimately amounts to hand-waving. Also, although it is reasonable to view suffering as an opportunity to practice perseverance, not all suffering achieves such a purpose. Regarding why a loving, omnipotent, God would allow suffering and pain, it is argued by Christians that love entails allowing freedom of choice, and freedom of choice entails the possibility of causing suffering. However, it should be noted that not all suffering is man-made. For example, natural disasters are beyond human control. Regarding why God causes natural disasters, the Bible hardly attempts to give any answer. This is also highly suspect for a rational observer.

Thirdly, God blames people for a condition they cannot help that he himself is not subject to. He calls them sinful and condemns them to hell. People are vulnerable, do not know everything there is to know, especially the intentions of others, and yet have the will to survive. Beings with these limitations and desire naturally engage in destructive competition and aggression, which God views as sin. God is not subject to these limitations and it is not fair for him to blame these people for the limitations.

Aron's Response

Dear Josh,

I think I'd like to start out by discussing your first paragraph. I'm keeping in mind the other issues you wrote too, but I think this one is the most important. The other issues may come up naturally as we discuss this one.

Why does God not communicate more clearly? This is not just an important question from a theological point of view, it is also of practical spiritual importance. People talk easily about spiritual experiences in church, but I remember all of the times when I was distressed and begged God to speak, but he stayed silent. I think that almost all Christians have had similar experiences, but they mostly don't talk about it, so they can't help other people. The question is why God remains hidden sometimes, even usually, when it would be very easy for him to communicate.

But I think it is important to ask first, WHAT is God trying to communicate? If God's primary goal were to communicate a simple factual message, and the only thing important to him was that everyone knew it, then everyone would know it. But is God's message primarily facts? The gospel message, as I understand it, is that what God wants to communicate is himself, not facts. What we believe can be important, but God isn't primarily concerned with that so much as he wants us to get to know him.

Have you ever known anyone who talks all the time, but almost always about things other than himself? There is a certain sort of shyness many of us feel when we share about ourselves. The reason is not that we don't want to communicate who we are, it's because we don't want to communicate the wrong idea of who we are. We would rather not communicate a wrong impression of ourselves. Now, it's the same for God. God isn't just interested in us knowing that there IS a God; he wants us to know what his personality and nature are like. But this means that he can't just communicate in any old way, because that wouldn't communicate who he was. He has to communicate in a way that reveals himself most clearly.

Let me give an example. How might God make it totally obvious to everyone that he existed? Maybe every Sunday a large face would appear over the earth and say "I love you and want you to accept Jesus Christ. Also, obey my commandments". Then everyone would be a Christian—or would they? What they would actually be is idol worshippers, because God is not a giant face. But if God communicated in this way, everyone would think of him as a giant face, so actually it would not be communicating more clearly. It would be communicating less clearly. (Also, no one would have crucified Jesus.)

Or to make a more subtle example of the same thing, a lot of people think of the Holy Spirit as something like "a voice in my head that tells me what to do". If any time we had a question to ask God, a thought always immediately popped into our minds that seemed like an answer from God, then most Christians would probably be a lot happier. It seems like maybe you were expecting something like this. But the Holy Spirit is not a voice in the head. The Spirit can communicate in this way, and every now and again he does communicate to me in something like this way. But if he did so on demand, I would start to think of the Spirit as being a voice that speaks to me like another human being does. But this is not what the Holy Spirit is, or wants to be. You say, "The Holy Spirit is described to be very close". Since the Spirit doesn't interact with you in the way you expected, you think he is not as close as he promised.

But the Spirit doesn't want to be a voice in your head (at least not all the time), the Spirit wants to move through you and inspire your own activities, like the Spirit inspired the activities of Jesus. You won't notice when the Spirit is acting through you because it will feel like you are the one acting!—until you learn to recognize it gradually. This assumes that you are following Christ's commandment to love other people as he loved us. If you aren't trying to follow Christ's commandment, then the Spirit will not be acting inside of you, and of course that will make it impossible to recognize the Spirit's activity.

Now, this isn't just something I'm making up in order to explain why reality doesn't match the Bible. It's actually what the Bible says. You say, "There is no warning that the presence of the Holy Spirit will be much different in intensity or quality than the presence of Jesus the man", but actually Jesus does warn this. He says that like the wind, you cannot tell where the Spirit comes from or where the Spirit is going (John 3:8). He explicitly says that the condition for him sending the Spirit is that we keep his commandment of love, and that as a result the world is incapable of receiving, seeing, or knowing the Spirit (John 14:15-17, 21). When Judas son of James asks why Jesus is not going to show himself clearly to everyone, Jesus again reiterates that the necessary condition to know God is love (John 14:24). Why would Jesus need to reassure the disciples not to be sad at him leaving (John 14:1), and not to fall away (John 16:1), if the Spirit was going to be just as obviously present as he was?

So this is my suggested answer: love is what God is like, and therefore the only way of knowing God is through love. If we came to know God in any other way besides loving each other, then we might think he was being more clear, but he would actually be less clear because he would be revealing something other than what he is.

As for the Bible teaching that prayers by believers will be answered, many times it is stated explicitly that this only applies when the person asking has faith and does not doubt (e.g. Mark 11:20-25, James 1:5-8), and asks with the right motives (James 4:3, 1 John 5:14-15). Now I don't know how much faith exactly is needed here, but one thing that is CERTAINLY not faith is asking in order to test God to see if he really exists and cares. In fact, testing God is a sin (Deut 6:16, Matt 4:1-7, Matt 16:1-4). God wants us to gradually learn to trust him over the course of many years, so that our trust can be based on our character and not on things superficially going well. If God allowed us to manipulate him into revealing himself, this process would be short-circuited and we would always be immature, and never grow up spiritually.

You might ask, if we aren't allowed to test God, how are we supposed to know he exists and cares? The answer is that we are supposed to learn this on the basis of what he has already done in creating a beautiful world, saving Israel from Egypt, sending Jesus, and starting the Church. Once we learn to trust him, then he can act through us.

I am reminded of a story about Confucius: he once told his disciples that he was thinking of giving up speech entirely. The disciples were upset and asked what would be left for them to pass on. He said "What does Heaven ever say? Yet there are the four seasons and the hundred things coming into being. What does Heaven ever say?" Confucius understood, even without the benefit of the Bible, that God was speaking silently through the things that were made, and that this is always a call to change how we live. God is always speaking. But most of us are not good listeners.

Imagine how humble God must be! To create the whole world, to die for the people in it, and then when people complain and curse, not to lose his temper but just to wait patiently until they mature enough to understand and repent. This is the sign, not of an insincere character, but of a strong character. If God were proud and needed ego boosts you can be sure that there would be no atheists.

What do you think about this?

Aron

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures and features physicist Ard Louis.

In today's video, Oxford physicist Ard Louis discusses the famous debate between renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould believed (and wrote in his book Wonderful Life) that if the "tape" of evolution were rerun, the chance that anything like human intelligence would emerge is essentially zero. In other words, humanity is here through random accident. Gould pointed to the work of Morris and fellow scientists in their research of the Burgess Shale as evidence for this view.

However, Morris himself disagrees, pointing to what is called evolutionary convergence. As Morris notes, there are numerous examples of identical features evolving multiple times throughout the history of life independently. Morris believes that if the tape of life were replayed, we would see something like humans emerge. A Christian might say, it looks like we were planned.

Some Christians might find Simon Conway Morris' viewpoint, with its implicit teleology, more attractive. Others, perhaps motivated by a high view of providence, may find Gould's emphasis on contingency equally congenial to their faith. What do you think?

As we noted in our response to the June article in Christianity Today “The Search for the Historical Adam,” the evidence for gradual creation is overwhelming, with more studies supporting the evolutionary process being published each year. We’ve looked at many of these evidences: from fossils, from comparative anatomy, from genetics. Today, we’d like to highlight for our readers a compelling video from the annual TED Conference featuring geneticist Svante Pääbo. You may remember Pääbo from his efforts to extract and sequence DNA from 30,000(+) year old Neanderthal bones (we mentioned his work here).

In this eighteen minute video, Pääbo covers a lot of ground, noting several lines of genetic evidence for the evolution of modern humans from earlier hominids in Africa, as well as for the interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals. We’ve covered some of this data before, but it’s particularly compelling to hear it described by one of the scientists leading the field of study.

However, our goal at The BioLogos Foundation isn’t just to make the Church aware of the fascinating and convincing scientific evidence for gradual creation. As we have said before:

BioLogos exists to help Christians think carefully about the ramifications of these new data in light of long-standing traditional ways of viewing human creation. We have some re-thinking to do, but it can be done and will be done within the context of a Christian faith that is fully orthodox and thoroughly evangelical. Any time we draw closer to truth, to God’s truth, we have nothing to fear. There is still much to learn, but we can look back at what we have learned with awe—absolute awe.

It is truly amazing that we know so much now about our early days. For example, Africans do not have DNA which is specifically derived from Neanderthals, whereas people in the rest of the world do carry a small amount. This confirms the picture of human history derived from studying fossils. Neanderthal bones have not been found in Africa, so it isn’t surprising that their DNA is not there either. The fact that non-Africans have some of the DNA found in Neanderthal bones confirms that which geneticists knew from other studies: we have two distinct groups of human ancestors—those who left Africa in ancient times and those who stayed.

God chose to reveal himself and to begin working with a distinct sub-group of ancient humans, those descended from Abraham and Sarah. To Abraham, God made a marvelous promise. Drawing his attention to the stars above, God said that someday Abraham’s descendents would outnumber the countable stars in the universe. And so it came to be. Indeed through our adoption into the family, we are all children of Abraham. The God of Abraham is our God too and each one of us is one of those stars too numerous for Abraham to count.

Sometimes, it seems that we are uncomfortable with the notion that God made us through a gradual process that included apes in our family tree. It is almost as though we would prefer dirt to apes. Perhaps, in at least some cases, this is due to an inadequate appreciation for the fact that God loves, really loves, all of creation, not just us. As special as we know we are, we can’t read Psalm 104, Genesis 1, Genesis 9 (where the covenant is not just with Noah but with all living creatures), or Job 38-41 without being reminded that all living creatures are God’s creation (see here). The Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo erectus, and the australopithecines were God’s creation too! Still, we modern humans have been singled out. We’ve been called out.

True our family tree, as Pääbo shows here, is intriguing. But let us never forget, that the most important thing about this tree is that God is the vine which exists at its core, and we are called to be the branches which bear fruit. The fact that many of us have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, some of us have Denisovan DNA, and others have neither is interesting, but it is really just a side issue for people of faith. As a result of God’s visit to Abraham, followed eventually by God’s taking on flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, we can all know God as our heavenly Father. We are children of God and as such, we are God’s representatives. We are called to image God. We are called to love God. And we are called to love each other and to deeply respect all that he has made.

The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions

Karl Giberson: You are an unusual evangelical in that you don’t struggle with the relationship between evolution and your faith. Has this never been an issue for you?

Francis Collins: I had a problem in terms of the counterintuitive nature of evolution. Remember, I had no meaningful exposure to biology in my formal education until I was already a graduate student.

I learned biology in a high school class in a little town in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia—if it mentioned evolution, I don’t remember that at all. It was purely descriptive: “Here’s how we classify organisms; here’s how you memorize the parts of the crayfish;” and that’s what it was all about. I don’t think I really had much exposure to the whole concept other than just knowing “Oh yeah, there’s this vague concept that’s out there called evolution.”

I had an issue how counterintuitive it is. Almost everybody encounters this when they first bump into this concept. And it was, of course, difficult for Darwin at first, too, to get his mind around so we shouldn’t feel like we’re all so stupid, if it takes a little while! We are so tied up in our natural daily experiences that being able to imagine what could happen over hundreds of millions of years in very small increments is just not something that comes naturally.

KG: As someone who takes both the Bible and evolution seriously, is there any point when you said, “Well, wait a minute, it’s really tough to put things together at this point?” Did this harmony really just come naturally?

FC: You know, it really did come naturally. I was aware that there was an issue that some people had about this. When I became a believer at 27, the first church I went to was a pretty conservative Methodist church in this little town outside of Chapel Hill. And I’m sure there were a lot of people in that church who were taking Genesis quite literally.

I couldn’t take Genesis literally because I had come to the scientific worldview before I came to the spiritual worldview. I felt that once I arrived at the sense that God was real and that God was the source of all truth, then just by definition, there could not be an irreconcilable conflict between these perspectives. It just was a matter of working out the details. It did not seem to me that there was likely to be anything irreconcilable here, just that there had been misunderstandings along the way in terms of how people had interpreted the first book in the Bible. When I read Genesis, I had to say “I don’t know what this means here”, even before I read any commentators on it. It seemed to me that this was not a part of the Bible that read as the record of an eyewitness, so it shouldn’t therefore be taken as such.

KG: You seem like a mirror image of the fundamentalists who struggle with this. The fundamentalists grow up with a lot of confidence in the Bible and then they encounter evolution so they are bringing their prior confidence in the Bible to this new problem. You were interpreting the Bible before you knew there was a biblical issue to worry about. You had developed enough confidence in evolution so then when you read about origins in the Bible, you would read as we do today when it comes to those biblical passages that seem opposed to heliocentricity— we don’t think of a moving earth as a problem so we don’t even notice the biblical problems.

FC: Right, right. They haven’t noticed those issues because they weren’t pointed out for a long time. I will say, though, that I think evolution is a much tougher problem for a believer to get comfortable with than heliocentricity versus geocentricity. The fundamental nature of evolution is a comment on our biological nature and that’s a lot closer to the “image of God” concept than whether the earth floats around the sun or the other way around. So I don’t think it’s a perfect parallel, though I wish it were. I wish we could say, “We can get comfortable with evolution now just as easily as the church has gotten comfortable with heliocentricity.”

(I must add an immediate qualification to this brief history: Francis Collins did not work on this project after he moved to the NIH. As is often the case with co-authored works, the authors played different roles. Francis’s contribution was to get the whole FAQ project started and work closely with the original writers and editors on the first round of material, most of which ended up on The BioLogos Forum.)

The Language of Science and Faith shares and even embodies the very inspiration that launched BioLogos—the desire to help people find answers to “Genuine Questions” about relating scientific accounts of origins to their faith in God as creator. As our many visitors to this site know, the “pre-history” of BioLogos was Francis Collins’s publication of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in 2007. The book went on to become a bestseller and even now, almost 4 years later the book continues to be near the top of the best-selling books in its area. As I write these words a few days after Christmas, it is #1 on the “science and religion” list at Amazon, a powerful testimony to both the importance of this topic and the winsome writing style and testimony of its author.

The Language of God told the story of how Francis found harmony between his science and his Christian faith. He is a world-class scientist—leading the Human Genome Project to a successful completion and going on to become the head of the National Institutes of Health, where he presently works. But he is also a committed believer. His story moved readers who were wrestling with questions of faith and science, and seeking the place of rest that Collins had found in his own journey.

Letters and emails poured in, asking Francis for wisdom and insight. Readers wanted to dig deeper. Many asked questions not addressed in The Language of God. Soon Francis was buried in a pile of “Frequently Asked Questions.” Addressing these questions individually was simply not possible, but many of them were passionate and came from people with real struggles. Ignoring them was not an option. BioLogos was Francis’s response to this felt need.

Not surprisingly, the BioLogos website launched with a series of FAQ’s in which various experts helped BioLogos staff writers address key issues in their fields—from biblical studies and theology to the history of science, from biology to physics, and everything in between. The experts included such leading thinkers as Denis Alexander, Jeff Schloss, Owen Gingerich, Darrel Falk, Alister McGrath, Ernest Lucas, Ron Numbers, and Ted Davis.

The FAQ format requires short, stand-alone answers to work well, and it became apparent that there would be value in a more systematic treatment of these issues. The mission of The Language of Science and Faith is to survey these same issues but in a more wide-ranging way that is only possible in a book. By rewriting all of the original material, adding fresh material where needed, and working with the editors at InterVarsity, I have tried to create a coherent and consistent style that will help readers stay with the themes as they unfold.

The book groups topics thematically, allowing a reader to get a global sense of the issues connected to each topic. Throughout the book, we built carefully on each topic, hoping to take the reader by the hand, so to speak, from one topic to the next in a way that would let them dig steadily deeper without feeling like they were getting in over their heads.

The book begins with the evidence for evolution and the great age of the earth. As readers of this blog know very well by now, this evidence is compelling and must be taken seriously. In fact, it is the strength of this very evidence that requires books like this and projects like BioLogos. If the evidence was weak and piecemeal, then we could simply withhold assent and maintain a more traditional view. But the evidence does not let us do that, and we make this case in the first two chapters.

Once we accept this evidence, the questions emerge and are the subject of the next two chapters, which look at ways to relate science and religion in general, and science and scripture in particular. Unless a harmony can be found, there can be no “coming to peace with science” as BioLogos president Darrel Falk titled his wonderful book on this topic. We believe, of course, that harmony can be found, and we lay out that case. But this leads to another question: If harmony can be found so readily, why is Darwin’s theory of evolution so controversial?

The controversy surrounding Darwin’s theory is a complex sociological and cultural problem, which we unfold in a chapter. From atheists who want evolution to be a weapon against religion, to biblical literalists who want the Bible to be a weapon against evolution, there is no shortage of people with agendas to create controversy.

The constant presence of controversy creates the impression that this discussion is an endless quarrel. This is far from true, and we include a chapter on the fine-tuning of the universe to make exactly that point. The many features of our universe that are fine-tuned for life do not explain themselves and, while we caution against leaping to the conclusion that “God is the explanation for fine-tuning,” we do suggest that the universe appears to have the sort of deeply rational, purposeful character that a Christian would expect, even before looking at it from the perspective of science.

The final chapter, titled “The Grand Narrative of Creation,” offers a speculative look at the scientific creation story through biblical and theological lenses. We suggest, tentatively, that the affirmations Christians want to make on behalf of Genesis resonate nicely with what science has discovered about origins.

The Language of Science and Faith does not seek to break new scholarly ground. Our target audience is the evangelical church—the tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians who are prepared to engage contemporary science, rather than simply reject it. We were thus quite thrilled when Dr. Joel C. Hunter -- pastor of the Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, an enthusiastic participant in our New York Workshops, and one of America’s religious leaders -- gave us this endorsement for the cover of the book:

"As a pastor, I am constantly searching for resources that will guide people to the fullness of God. I care that my congregation be attracted toward God's artistry, moved by his majesty and intellectually challenged by his sovereignty. This book is at the top of my recommendations both as an evaluation of theories of creation and as a devotional that prompts us to revere the Creator."

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be offering reflections on the development of this book, some excerpts, as well as exploring some of the themes of the book in greater detail.

Be sure to bookmark the new landing page for The Language of Science and Faith to stay up to date with the latest news about the book!

Dr. Francis Collins has resigned as President of The BioLogos Foundation. After forming and guiding the foundation through its initial stages, he is stepping aside from a formal role in order to assume leadership of the National Institutes of Health. Despite the seminal importance of this one unique and highly gifted individual, the organization will continue to fill a most important niche: to encourage a paradigm shift that shows that faith and science can exist in harmony. The need for this shift runs so deep in our culture that this project will not be derailed by the departure of one person, even when that individual is Francis Collins.

It is impossible to measure the massive harm that has been done by those who have tried to show that science and faith are in conflict. Multimillion dollar enterprises like the Creation Museum in Kentucky have sprung into existence. They exist for one purpose: to demonstrate -- on the basis of their faith alone -- that core findings of science are deeply flawed. On the other side, a host of science blogs and authors who sell millions of books argue that scientific data have demonstrated conclusively that there is no supernatural being, and those who put their faith in God are out of touch with reality. Science has spoken, faith needs to be eradicated. It is to this latter group that I especially want to address my comments as BioLogos moves into the post-Collins era.

When I speak to groups of evangelicals, I am sometimes asked if I can think of any potential finding of science that would cause me to lose faith. I enjoy reflecting on that question. Consider, for example:

• Even if it turns out that our sense of right and wrong emerges through natural selection and other natural processes that can be explained through science--and I personally suspect this will be the case -- it does not in any way imply the absence of a personal God. The Creator, after all, may well function through natural selection in some manner that the scientific process is not equipped to detect.

• Even if it turns out that the human mind emerges from molecules interacting in a manner that can all be explained through the physical properties of matter -- which I also suspect is the case -- this in no way implies the absence of a God whose existence is necessary for that mind to come into being. It also has nothing to say about whether there is a God who interacts mind-to-mind with those persons who seek that interaction. Even if the cell and the information it contains is explicable through natural processes, this does not in any way imply the absence of God's Spirit "hovering" (Genesis 1:2) and thereby influence the outcome in some manner beyond exploration by scientific tools.

• Even the most contentious issues don't undermine core tenets of evangelicalism. Many brilliant persons have reached the conclusion that there is good reason to believe in a God who works in creation, a God whose action is beyond the realm of scientific testability. (See this earlier posting for more detail.)

In the three months since the public launch of The BioLogos Foundation, I would have thought the strongest negative reaction would have come from religious conservatives. However, a quick scan of the blogosphere indicates that evangelicals who hold a young earth perspective have been almost silent about BioLogos. Within the Intelligent Design community, it is not the Christians who have been most vocal; by far our most vocal critic has been an orthodox Judaist. With a few exceptions, it is evangelical Christians who have been the strongest supporters of our effort to show that science and faith can be brought into harmony. I suppose we now have thousands of supportive letters from evangelical Christians who indicate they have identified with our books and, more recently, with the purposes of The BioLogos Foundation.

Still, almost 50 percent of Americans believe that humans were created pretty much in their current form about 10,000 years ago. So, given this huge number of people and the antiscientific sentiment it represents, it is puzzling that by far the most vocal criticism of BioLogos has come from people who purport to serve the advancement of the scientific view.

America is in a quandary that could have very significant consequences for the future of science and thereby for the future of technology in this country. BioLogos was created to try to help people of faith see that science does not have it wrong. We do this as people of faith ourselves. We coordinate efforts to end this dichotomy between science and faith, even -- and especially -- evangelical faith.

Why is it that a group concerned about the advancement of scientific ideals is our most vocal opponent? We support science, including the science of evolutionary biology. We think this incongruity implies that for them the issue is not the preservation of science in our fragile world. For them, the issue is that they want to use scientific data to justify their own political and philosophical ends. They are trying to present science as claiming something it does not claim to justify their nontheistic view of the world. They want to rid the world of philosophies grounded in theism. It is clear from their writing that they have taken no time to carefully study the host of philosophers who are theists or the elegant theology of some of the world's finest minds.

For starters, I recommend that their followers read Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism. In one of our recent blogs, guest writers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, who are agnostics themselves and authors of the book, Unscientific America, show heartfelt concern about the misuse of science by these individuals. In the future, we hope that many followers of the new atheists will come to care enough about science that they too will work for harmony and not discord.

So Dr. Collins has moved on to other important endeavors, but the question of what to do about this gulf between science and faith has not disappeared. The answer is not to stamp out the faith element from this world as some people are bent on doing. That will not work. The answer is, however, to protect faith, to nurture it, to inform it and to edify it. The BioLogos vision, which is shared by many people, will live on much longer than any of us, and it will certainly not fade just because our dear friend Francis is involved in another important activity.

The vision lives on. We will work to provide Christian schools and homeschooling networks with material that is both scientifically sound and theologically sensitive. It will be done by working with church leaders and the many other Christians who already care deeply about this issue. Eventually, many others will come to understand the strength of the scientific data, and they will be shown why the basic tenets of their faith are preserved and, indeed, enriched. We will offer workshops, courses, book clubs and conferences. Our blog and web site will remain active, and we will sponsor the development of more books and other media that help us appreciate the awe and wonder of creation.

The BioLogos Foundation, built by Dr. Collins and fueled initially by his energy and enthusiasm, has now been set in motion and is moving rapidly down the track. He may be moving in a different direction now, but BioLogos has too much momentum and too many supporters for it to slow down as we move toward the looming vision of bringing harmony to the findings of science and the life of faith.

Epilogue (added December, 2010)

*According to Alexa, a web-ranking service, over the past thirty days The BioLogos Forum ranks #116,633 in viewership among all websites in the world. By comparison, the Discovery Institute in the same time frame ranked #543,894 and Reasons to Believe ranked #327,158. So we have far surpassed these organizations in viewership. On the other hand, none of us compare to "Answers in Genesis" (AiG), a far more popular website, at #35,424. Furthermore, AiG has just announced plans to spend $150,000,000 on a young-earth-creation-based theme park. This organization continues to be a strong counter-force that is extremely well-funded. It is not easy to counter a movement which is fueled by resources like that. Nonetheless, we are committed to countering this movement and are committed to doing so in a spirit of Christian love.

**Gifts from existing donors qualify to the extent that they are over and above that donated last year

Today I am a Christian with a deep sense of the grace of God and an ongoing feeling of wonder at the redeeming power of the Lord in all of creation and in my own life. I remain a scientist, as I have been for the past 30 years. I find tremendous satisfaction in my absolute conviction that science and faith are complementary and mutually supportive. My faith is strengthened by what I know of the natural world, and my scientific thinking has been given a great boost by my faith in the creative power of the Lord.

What sort of journey led me from my youth of fervent atheism to where I am today? The answer is simple: God called me, insistently and clearly, though it took me decades to finally listen and hear.

I remember the first clarion call quite clearly. As a young man I saw the film “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew” by Passolini. In the film, the musical score alternates between a number of sharply contrasting styles. After the crucifixion, a slow, somber, Russian hymn reflects the mood of despair and loss felt by Mary and the disciples. This music continues as the women and John visit the tomb on the third day. The stone of the door is rolled back and the tomb is revealed as empty. At that instant the music immediately changes to a joyous African melody from a piece called the Missa Luba.

The effect this moment of the film had on me was intense and dramatic. I felt a shiver of emotion, and a sense of miraculous joy. The art of the filmmaker had conveyed—through music and visual splendor—the truth of the Gospels to me. As John started running to spread the word to his friends, I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could believe in the lovely myth of the resurrection. And then I thought no, this is just a trick of my mind to elicit emotions originally evolved to allow for human beings to experience empathy, and so on. (See Dennett for a full explanation of how we are “fooled” by such feelings).

So while the seed had been planted, it grew slowly, and required a great deal of care and tending to finally bear fruit. I read the Gospels. I became interested in mysticism and transcendence. I started attending a Catholic Church. All of this was interesting in an intellectual sense, but it had nothing to do with faith. I was an observer, a sympathetic and friendly one, but I was still on the outside looking in.

Meanwhile I worked at doing scientific research, and read Dawkins and Gould, Lewis Thomas and Carl Sagan. I have always been fervent in my admiration for the explanatory power of evolutionary theory, and even communicated with Dawkins concerning one of Darwin’s letters that I discovered in the British Museum, which got a mention in The Devil’s Chaplain.

I was finally given the gift of God’s grace directly from Christ in a dramatic and undeniable way. But in order to fully accept this gift, and to know that I belong to Christ, body and soul, I needed to reconcile this new faith with my scientific sense of reason. As it turned out, I found this (as many others have) to be surprisingly straightforward, especially after reading The Language of God. My journey to faith began with art and emotion, but it reached fruition with my growing understanding of how the characteristics of the natural universe point to God.

My scientific world-view encouraged me to ask questions, some of them unusual for a scientist: Why does beauty exist? Consider the magical Ode to Joy, or every note ever penned by Bach, or Kandinsky’s paintings, or the elegance of Einstein’s fundamental equations. Look at the wonderful mathematical artifact of the Mandelbrot set, a pure fractal, conceived by the genius of man’s mind, and only made visible by modern computer graphics. Yes, these are all works of man, and man is a wondrous creation. But why is the universe beautiful? What is the source of this beauty?

When we look at nature and see that the apparently-artificial, mathematically-strange concept of a non-scalar, self-similar fractal can be found in almost all biological structures (including DNA), as well as in clouds, coastlines, mountains, and galaxies, we must wonder at the source of all of this complexity, all of this beauty.

We know from physics that our world is stochastic, not strictly deterministic. In other words, it changes according to seemingly “random” influences, allowing for—even insisting on—creativity and surprise at every turn. It is beautiful, not dull; highly complex, not simple. Biological organisms appear to have been formed with the innate ability to evolve. And human beings, organisms with a soul, represent the grandest mystery of all.

Why is it so remarkable that we live in a stochastic universe? We can predict the result if we toss 1000 coins, treat a million cells with a mutagen, examine the behavior of a billion molecules, or trace the fate of trillions of subatomic particles. In that sense our science can describe the world very well. But, we know nothing about what happens when you toss a single coin, explore the mutational fate of a single cell, try to predict the path of a single photon, or look at the life of a single human being. It indeed appears magical (especially when we examine the science of quantum theory) that our universe is fundamentally stochastic at the level of the individual. I believe that this property of the natural laws we describe through science was built in by the Creator to allow for chance, beauty, evolution, humanity and even faith. What we perceive as random chance is not the enemy of faith, but the opposite. It is God’s tool.

We are able through science to find magnificent and overwhelming evidence for God’s intervention and on-going engagement in our world, from its creation to our everyday lives, in every aspect of reality, including in our ongoing discoveries of the secrets of the natural world. We now know that the universe was not always here. It had a beginning. It was created. That is Gospel, but it is also science.

But although we find many pointers to divinity, God so designed the world that His hand in its creation can never be proven beyond doubt. If that were not true, then free will and the beauty of faith would disappear. Faith is a gift to be accepted by an open heart, and an open mind. The knowledge of God’s grace cannot be forced on anyone by the discovery of any irrefutable fact that proves His existence. But the converse is also true. No scientific endeavor will ever prove the absence of God, and so we are free to believe.

The best thing about my journey from atheism to faith is that it isn’t over. I have learned a lot, but there is much more to explore, and I would like to thank BioLogos for being the vehicle for so much exploration of the natural works of the Lord in the context of His amazing grace.

There is a strange, hyperbolic expression favored by the New Atheists: "cramming religion down the throats of children." The idea, and even the wording, appears with regularity in the anti-religious writings of people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Jerry Coyne. Most recently we saw a lament on Coyne's blog about proselytizing down under, which he labeled "a particularly noxious specimen of religious tomfoolery" that makes him question whether "the U.S. is the worst in cramming religion down the throats of its kids."

This language evokes the harshest of images. What is a secular reader, unfamiliar with how religious children are actually raised, to think? They have never seen a Christmas pageant where dozens of happy children sing cute choruses under the direction of dedicated volunteer staff; they have not seen teenagers gathered in prayerful support around one of their friends whose little brother was just killed in a terrible accident; they have not seen older teens holding bake sales so they can raise enough money to spend two weeks in Haiti helping people in need. Instead, they must picture stern-faced parents dragging kids against their will to indoctrination sessions where they sit on hard wooden chairs until they affirm a set of beliefs in settings reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. After years of such training, the once-open-minded children mature into narrow-minded adults who carry out the narrow-minded agendas of their parents -- oppose healthcare, gay marriage, stem-cell research, Muslims, and anything else they can think of -- and begin the process of having their own kids, with a new generation of throats down which more toxic ideas will be crammed.

I have been thinking about this charge of "cramming religion down kids throats" this week as the semester gets underway at Eastern Nazarene College on Boston's South Shore, where I have taught since 1984. I have 30 students from various backgrounds in a freshman seminar called Contemporary Questions. Most of them are from conservative Protestant traditions. I suspect that Coyne and Dawkins would nod knowingly to each other that these are indeed kids who had religion crammed down their throats. No doubt they would look with pity on my students, indoctrinated as they are already with religion, and then foolishly enrolling in a Christian college to protect their superstitions from the light of reason. And these poor, benighted students have the additional misfortune to be placed in a class taught by me.

My students don't look like this to me, however. As far as I can tell, they are all religious, to varying degrees, but their religion doesn't look harsh and judgmental as though it were forced on them. None of them seems interested in mounting crusades, bashing sinners, or signing up for witch-hunts. Whatever they had crammed down their throats, like the bland vegetables in their baby food, doesn't seem to have made them unhealthy.

The Contemporary Questions class begins with considerations of what we can know and how we know it. We are reading The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by the famous skeptic Martin Gardner, who passed away recently. In their journals my students are reflecting on their beliefs with a new philosophical rigor. One of them wrote: "The only thing I know with clarity is that I want to love all and do whatever I can to make sure that the life I have been given does not go to waste." What a terrible thing to have had crammed down one's throat as a child!

Religious affirmations have become complex in our pluralistic age, and my students seem to get this, even as it challenges their faith. One wrote, "I am currently struggling so much about denying someone else's beliefs because mine are 'truth.'" Another noted, "I seriously struggle with the prospect that had I been raised in Saudi Arabia completely immersed in their belief system, I would be a Muslim."

These students are 18 years old and have been in college for two weeks. A month ago they were living at home with their parents, no doubt sitting on hard wooden chairs with bright lights in their eyes having religion crammed down their throats. And yet already they are wrestling, from a foundation of faith, with the world they will navigate as adults, a world that is more complex than that of their childhood.

Not long ago my daughter, a college junior, had lunch with a childhood friend. The two of them grew up in an affluent, white suburb of Boston. When the check came, my daughter suggested that they leave a generous tip for the middle-aged, obviously blue-collar waitress. After all, she said, they both came from privileged backgrounds and should be generous. An argument ensued. It seems that my daughter's friend had been raised to believe that less privileged people were simply lazy and that there was no reason to subsidize their laziness with generous tips. The affluence that she and her family enjoyed were entirely the result of their own hard work, and anyone who had less than they did was a slacker. This self-serving socioeconomic theory had, it seems, been "crammed down her throat" by her parents, who, by the way, sent her to an affluent white college where just about everyone had the same idea.

Parents put lots of things down the throats of their children -- religion, language, vegetables, ice cream, bacon, tofu, ideas of race, politics, gender and economics. This complex mix is occasionally toxic. But in the complex mixture that produces good citizens, there is no reason to single out religion as problematic. I am quite content to turn the future over to my students.

Unbelievable, isn’t it, that there are still students at this university who believe in stories from the Bible, said Martin, an older colleague, at one of the formal dinners around which the traditional life of Oxford University revolves. But Martin, I answered, their faith probably doesn’t differ much from mine. I can still see his face go pale while he nearly choked on his glass of St. Emilion Grand Cru Classé: How can you believe in such things nowadays – Walking on water, a resurrection from the dead? Those are miracles, and aren’t you a scientist?

Oh, how interesting, say John and Ruth, a couple that I have just met at the end of a church service. You are a scientist. They look a bit unsure of what to say next and John blurts out, I read recently that we still don’t understand how birds can fly so many miles to the south and yet return to exactly the same place each summer. Scientists can’t explain this; it is a miracle, don’t you think?

I never quite know what to say next in such conversations. Perhaps nine years of living in Britain have made me too sensitive to that most cardinal of English social sins – causing embarrassment. But there is more to it than that. Behind these statements lies a tangle of complex intellectual issues related to the definition and scope of science, the nature of God’s action in the world, and the reliability and interpretation of the Bible. These have exercised many of greatest minds in history:

The debate between atheism and religious belief has gone on for centuries, and just about every aspect of it has been explored to the point where even philosophers seem bored with it. The outcome is stalemate.

So says my Oxford colleague Alister McGrath. Although these subtleties are well known to philosophers and historians of science, public discourse on science and religion often seems blissfully unaware of them.

Miracles as violations of the laws of nature?

Everyone brings a set of presuppositions to the table. To make progress, these should first be brought out into the open. Without time for an honest conversation in which we can listen to each other in depth, I won’t know exactly what Martin, John, or Ruth’s presuppositions are. But, for the sake of this blog, I will be a bit presumptuous and venture a guess. My guess would be that, although both seem to be on opposite sides of a vast divide, they are in fact influenced by a similar perspective on science and miracles, one first laid down by the great sceptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote:

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.

This language of “miracles as violations of the laws of nature” has framed the debate ever since. Martin, John and Ruth, perhaps without realizing it, are living under the long shadow of David Hume.

Martin may think that science is the only reliable route to gaining knowledge about the world, and that, since belief in miracles is obviously unscientific, such belief must ipso facto be false. John and Ruth may feel a similar tension between science and miracles, and are therefore encouraged by any natural process that seems inexplicable. Weakening the power of science would seem to strengthen the case for God acting in the world: If we know that today God miraculously steers a bird back to its original habitat after a long return flight to the south, then it is easier to believe that 2000 years ago he turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana.

Now, as a Christian scientist who believes in the miracles of the Bible, I take issue with both of the views above. But to explain this better, I need to first take a step back and answer two critical questions: What do I mean by science, and what does the Bible say about miracles?

Defining Science

The problem of deciding where to draw the lines around science has vexed generations of philosophers. Like many unsolved issues, it has been given its own name—“the demarcation problem.” Although one can determine with some degree of consensus what the extremes of the science/non-science continuum are, exactly where the boundary lies is fuzzy. This doesn’t mean, however, that we cannot recognize science when we see it, but rather that a watertight definition is difficult to create. The old fashioned idea (still taught in many schools) that scientific practice follows a well-defined linear process—first make an observation, then state a hypothesis, and then test that hypothesis—is certainly far too simple.

In his next post, Louis will explain that science is rather more like a tapestry woven together from many threads (experimental results, interpretations, explanations, etc.).

Doubt is an assault on faith. We know this because doubts lead to such destructive emotions as fear, depression, anger, irritability, and stress.

Clearly, God does not want us to doubt. Right?

Wrong.

There is a benefit of doubt. Doubt is a gift of God to move us from trusting ourselves to trusting him.

Doubt forces us to examine what we believe about God—and this can be unsettling. What we thought was our “faith in God” sometimes winds up being little more than faith in ourselves—our own ability to grasp God, to possess him our way, to have him figured out.

Doubt is God’s way of tearing down the private fantasy we have constructed about him—where what we think about God is without further need of reflection, no longer open to growth. Doubt does not mean that God is “dying” for us. Doubt signals that we are beginning to die to ourselves, and that can be very painful—dying usually is.

In the words of some theologians, doubt helps tear down the idols we have constructed in making God into our own image. Or, to borrow a term from psychology, doubt helps us see the bankruptcy of our false self, which is that self we have made up to cope with the confusion of life, to put all things—even God—“in order.” Doubt backs us into a corner and forces us to look beyond the dysfunction of our false selves, of the “idols of our heart,” toward a greater intimacy with God where he is in control, not we.

Do not resist doubt but patiently and honestly pass through it. Welcome it as a gift. Ask God what he might be teaching you about him, and about yourself.

You are not alone. Read the Psalms of lament where doubt is a plaguing reality. Read Ecclesiastes where Qoheleth’s entire universe of meaning is crumbling before him and he shakes his fist at God himself. Read about Job, whose personal narrative is being erased and rewritten before his eyes.

These three biblical examples are not there to warn us but instead to model for us what this process of destabilization and disorientation can look like. Core-shaking doubt is a normal part of the spiritual life. Passing through these times—not around them—leads to greater spiritual depth and intimacy with God.

The 16th century mystic theologian John of the Cross spoke famously of the “dark night of the soul.” This dark night is the sense of painful alienation and distance from God that causes much distress, anxiety, and depression in the believer. Sooner or later all Christians experience this state, and when they do some feel like giving up. Since God feels so far away, since they have lost their sense of belonging to God in that old familiar way, they conclude that they no longer have faith. And so they despair even more.

But like a church bell on a clear winter night, it is in the crisp darkness of doubt that God’s voice carries farther and more clearly. St. John’s great insight is that this dark night is a special sign of God’s presence, where our false sense of comfort is being stripped away and we are left naked before God and asked simply to trust. Then we begin to see that “alienation from God” was nothing of the sort. The dark night is God telling to us to let go of the small version of God we have been carrying around and to prepare for something deeper.

Rachel Held Evans says it well: “In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.”¹ She reminds us that the Christian life is a journey: we must learn to “live in the questions.” We will then learn to expect from God not the promise of ready answers, but the promise to move us out of our carefully crafted zones of comfort to a better place.

For some, thinking through the issues of evolution and Christianity trigger feelings of doubt. For others the issues are very different. But the point is the same. Something enters your life that you did not expect, and do not particularly welcome. You are so racked with doubt that you do not know how you can take another step, or why you should even bother at all. That is not the end of faith. That is when the journey can begin in earnest.

Being a Christian does not mean being certain of everything all the time. Doubt is a normal and important part of the Christian life. When God seems most absent, it may be then that he is speaking to you most clearly. It is then that you realize that your faith is not a fortress but a journey, and God means to take you “further up and further in.”

Notes

1. Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 119.