Here I want to clarify a few misconceptions about randomness before moving on, in future posts, to describing other biological processes that make use of it.

Misconception #1

Randomness is like “God of the Gaps”. With time, advancements in science will allow us to make accurate predictions in previously “random” systems.

Isaac Newton’s famous three laws of motion, described in his 1687 classic Principia Mathematica, have empowered physics students for centuries. Using these and Newton’s universal law of gravitation, you can predict the trajectory of everything from pool balls to planets. By the early nineteenth century, the idea of a “clockwork universe” was firmly established, and scientists believed that with time, science would be unlimited in its predictive power.

Although it could be true that we live in a “clockwork universe,”¹ two developments in the twentieth century shattered our hopes of having a fully predictable universe. The first was quantum mechanics, which describes how things work at an extremely small scale. One of the major discoveries in quantum mechanics was Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” which holds that the more certain one is about the location of a particle, the less certain in principle one can be about its momentum, and vice versa. At the quantum level, then, our predictive powers are ultimately limited.

Another discovery that destroyed all hope for a fully predictable universe was chaos. Mathematically chaotic systems are those which are extremely sensitive to changes in their initial conditions. Even fully deterministic systems can exhibit chaotic behavior and act in unpredictable ways. Consider a famous function, the logistic map²:

I know equations make people nervous, but stay with me! This one does some fascinating things. Here’s how it works: start with some initial value for x at time t = 0, and plug that in for x(t). Let’s start with = 0.2. R is just some constant value; let it be 2. Now we use the function to calculate the outcome in the next time step, t = 1:

We can use this value as input for the next step, and repeat this process over and over to find the output at each time point.

What happens? The answer is plotted in the figure below on the left. If we follow along the x-axis, which represents time, we see that the value of x goes toward 0.5 and stays there forever.

What if we start with the same , but increase R to 3.1? Following the same process as before, we get a very different result! The middle graph shows that the outcome oscillates between two values over time.

If you make R = 4, the function does something very strange. In the right-most plot, the function still fluctuates up and down, but it begins to look irregular. And if we change the initial condition, , just slightly, from .20 (blue solid line) to 0.2000000001 (red dotted line), we see they are virtually the same until somewhere around t = 14. After that point, they exhibit completely different behavior.

Several observations can be made here. First, the same equation can produce three different classes of behavior, simply by changing R and . These classes are called fixed-point (left), periodic (middle), and chaotic (right). Below the values of R that lead to chaos, the system is not sensitive to the initial value of . Over time, the system will either become a flat line or oscillate.

When R is greater than approximately 3.569946, however, the system becomes chaotic, and the outcome is extremely sensitive to changes in the initial value of . What this means is you would have to know the value of to infinite precision to predict its long term behavior. Since this is impossible in any kind of real-world application, the detailed behavior of a chaotic system is impossible to predict.

If this is true even for a simple, completely deterministic equation, how much more difficult is it to predict the behavior of a more complicated chaotic system, like a hurricane! Even the poor weathermen here in San Diego get it wrong sometimes, and the weather here doesn’t change very much.

So, between the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, and the sensitivity of chaotic systems, we now know that we are fundamentally limited in our predictive power––not just temporarily. Whether the systems we study are truly indeterministic is another (interesting) question, which of course has implications for divine action.

Misconception #2

Randomness means anything can happen, and all possibilities are equally likely.

People often think randomness means the outcome is completely open-ended, but you can’t roll a 7 on a 6-sided dice, nor draw a red marble from a bag of blue ones. Even random processes function according to rules. (The logistic map in the last section is another good example.)

Sometimes, the word random is used to mean unbiased. If you want to know who will win a political election, you make sure to poll a random sample of people, not just those hanging around a Tea Party rally. But the word random doesn’t have to mean that all possibilities are equally likely. When maternal and paternal chromosomes get together during conception, they exchange long sequences of DNA in a process called recombination. We now know that recombination happens more often in some places of the genome than others, but the specific sites where it will occur in a given embryo are impossible to predict. So recombination is random in the sense that it is unpredictable, but not in the sense that all outcomes are equally likely.

Misconception #3

Randomness always leads to disorder.

On the contrary, randomness often leads to exquisitely ordered and complex outcomes. In my next post, we'll watch a simulation of viral self-assembly from individual proteins bouncing around in a jar. You could repeat the simulation a thousand times and always get the same result, even though the particular assembly pathway would look different each time. That is, if the starting materials are present and the conditions (temperature, pH, etc) are right, you will always get a beautiful, highly symmetric virus. Random motion is the mechanism used to search “solution space” for a favorable outcome.

Fractals provide another great example of patterns emerging from randomness. Fractals are chaotic patterns with the same basic property: no matter how much you “zoom in,” the overall structure is maintained. Clouds, trees, crystals, and snow flakes are naturally-occurring fractals.

You can construct a fractal like the Sierpinski triangle shown at left by rolling a die and following simple rules.³ If 100 people in a room independently rolled a die 100 times and followed the rules, they would all have different sequences of rolls, but all would end up with the same pattern!

Thus, for many random processes, the fine details may be unpredictable along the way, but the macro-level outcome is foreseeable.

Summary

“Randomness,” when taken to mean unconquerable unpredictability, is inherent in many processes created by God, from hurricanes to viral assembly to genetic recombination to antibody production. Randomness means that the details of the future are unpredictable, and will stay that way regardless of scientific progress. That said, randomness is constrained by rules and often leads to complex patterns and macro-level order. More misconceptions about randomness no doubt lurk in all our minds, leading to suspicion when we hear phrases like, “evolution is random.” But hopefully, this post can help to clarify some of the confusion.

Notes

1. Philosophers of physics still debate whether there is some underlying deterministic structure to the universe, or whether events at the quantum level are indeterministic. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#QuaMec. In either case, we are fundamentally limited in our ability to make predictions about the outcomes of quantum events.
2. The logistic map is one of the best-studied equations in dynamical systems theory. The particular values used in the figure were taken from Melanie Mitchell’s excellent book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, and were created using MATLAB.
3. Thanks to Isaac Yonemoto for pointing this out.

If we want to talk about God, creation, and science, where should we start? It’s easy to begin with conflict. We can claim that the rise of modern science is the root of cultural decline. We can dive right into some of the contentious questions about how the Bible and science relate to each other. We can adopt a posture of defensiveness about what Christians believe and the ways in which some people think science threatens our beliefs.

But this is not a good place to start. The place to start is the place where all good Christian theology must start: with God.

“In the beginning, God….” These are the first words of the Bible. “I believe in God….” These are the first words of the Apostle’s Creed. If we want to develop wisdom and understanding about the relation between God and creation, then we need to start with the source of everything: God.

But how do we know anything about God? And how can we say anything about God? As we go about our daily lives, we can’t converse with God in exactly the same way that we might talk with our families, friends or neighbors. We can’t touch or smell God like a patch of green grass or taste Him like an apple. We can’t see him like an image on our TV screens. In theological terms, there is a sense in which God is “hidden” to our human senses. Many great Christian thinkers, such as Martin Luther, spent a good part of their lives reflecting on the “hiddenness” of God.

It may surprise you to hear God described as “hidden.” Those of us who have been in the Church for a while often are much more familiar with talk of how God has revealed Himself to us. We seem to gravitate towards detailed and systematic explanations of what we think we can know about God. God has, of course, revealed Himself to us – or else there would be very little point in trying to speak about Him. In scripture, in the proclamation of the Church, in the created world, and most importantly, in Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known. So why start with how God is “hidden?”

The very fact that God cannot be directly perceived by our ordinary human senses tells us something important about God and creation. God is “hidden” because He is “other.” God is not a patch of grass, and a patch of grass is not God. God is not an apple, and an apple is not God. God is not a television image or painting or statute, and a television image, painting or statute is not God. God is not a human being, and human beings are not God. God is not matter, the stuff of the created world, and matter is not God.

In theological terms, God is transcendent. “God” and “creation” are not the same thing. This is a basic idea that distinguishes Christian understandings of God from many other philosophies and religions. In fact, this emphasis on God’s transcendence is one important difference between the Hebrew and Christian theologies of creation and the prevailing ideas in the ancient near eastern world of the Biblical writers. It also distinguishes Christian thinking about God and creation from some of the important ideas that are common today.

In many ancient near eastern creation myths, the material creation was derived from the body of a god. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, for example, the female god Tiamat is killed by another god, Marduk, and the two halves of Tiamat’s corpse become the earth and the skies. In Egyptian mythology, many of the gods were related to material entities. Ra, for example, was the god of the Sun, Nut was god of the sky, and Geb was god of the earth. These stories reflect an ontology in which there is no sharp distinction between the gods and the material world. The Biblical literature, in contrast, separates the nature and being of the creator-God from the nature and being of His creation.

In contemporary popular Western culture, two of the most common ideas about God and creation really are very old notions dressed up in new clothes.

One is a thought you might hearon TV talk shows, in self-help books, or in popular music or movies: that “everything is one” or that “God is in everything and everyone.” This usually sounds like “pantheism” — the notion that God and the world around us really are essentially the same thing. In American popular culture, this often boils down to God becoming the same thing as our own individual selves. How often have you heard a line like this in a song or TV show or movie: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are?”

The truth of God’s transcendence means that the real basis for a meaningful and good life lies outside of our selves. We are part of creation, and therefore we are not God. We must look outside ourselves to find the source of life. Before we become too critical here, we need to preview for a moment another important theme in Christian theology: that God is also immanent. It is true that creation is an interconnected system and that God is always present throughout all of creation. It is also true that in our created humanity we are made for an intimate connection with God. It is right to look into ourselves as we seek God. As Augustine described in his Confessions, an honest search of the self should reveal a nature that is not self-sufficient, that is not meant to be alone, that longs for relationship with a beauty and harmony and love that the individual self cannot sustain. Augustine called this a “God-shaped void” at the heart of every person.

Yet we also need to be clear that, while the search may begin within our selves, it must not stop there. God is “other,” so we must continue beyond ourselves, in fact beyond everything we think we see, in order to find Him. And the paradox here is that we can only find the true meaning and purpose of our own selves by going beyond ourselves and finding the God who is other than us and who made us.

The other idea often expressed in our popular culture is that “matter is all there is.” Unfortunately, for some people this idea has become the standard for supposedly “scientific” thinking about the world. But this is not a “scientific” idea at all – it is a metaphysical statement (“metaphysical” just means “beyond the physical”) with roots going back to the ancient Greek Stoics. For many educated people in Western culture, if something cannot be verified with the human senses, it is not “real,” or at least it is not worthy of consideration as a matter of “fact” or “reason.”

There are many reasons why this way of thinking about what counts as truth or knowledge has become so influential. Our modern intellectual, political and social systems were shaped by the period from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries known as the “Enlightenment.” Even modern Christianity has been tinged in significant ways by Enlightenment thought.

The Enlightenment, of course, was not all bad. It gave us some great gifts, including the contemporary scientific method and the political frameworks, such as the U.S. Constitution, that support the freedoms we now take for granted.

But like many exciting moments in history, the Enlightenment produced some unbalanced perspectives. The ways in which human beings can know things in addition to observation of the tangible world around us were lost. The sorts of intuitions and experiences that human beings throughout history had understood to reach beyond reason were discredited. The thought that a transcendent God might have broken into history to reveal anything about Himself was mostly set aside.

Christian theology has always asserted that because God is transcendent, human observation and human reason are neither the starting point nor the ending point for true knowledge, wisdom and understanding. If matter is not all there is, then our search for truth cannot be limited to the material world alone. In fact, the beginning of knowledge and wisdom is the realization that God is beyond and other than the created world. Again, a word of balance is in order. Human observation and reason do matter, precisely because God created us as part of a world that is in important ways orderly and knowable. The great Christian thinker Anselm said that knowledge is the act of “faith seeking understanding.” “Understanding” – the sometimes difficult process of bringing all our resources, including reason, to bear on the search for truth – depends on and follows “faith.”

God’s transcendence means that the physical world does not represent the limits of what is true and real. Indeed, the physical world is not the beginning or end of what is true and real. The “beginning and end,” the “alpha and omega,” is the God who is beyond all our thoughts and imaginings.

That said, I genuinely empathize with those who are reluctant to abandon traditional theological concepts for newer, still- developing ones. Given spiritual leaders’ biblical mandate to protect their families and congregations against error, a responsibility for which God will hold them strictly accountable (James 3:1), I respect their refusal to expose their flock to ideologies they regard as conflicting with the Word of God.

I further understand pastors and theologians’ resistance to tethering theology—which is meant to provide a solid epistemological foundation—too closely to that intrinsically dynamic endeavor called science. All humans need ideological stability, perhaps especially so with respect to spiritual matters. Recognizing this, pastors rightly ask why they should abandon or substantially revise an internally-consistent systematic theology that has served the church with relative stability for many hundreds of years. Science, on the other hand, is a realm for adventurers, groundbreakers, and ideological athletes intent on not just polishing or expanding today’s body of knowledge, but shattering it when necessary. Resounding with the jousts and clashes of competing ideas and arguments, and the stunning reversals of ideas once widely held, science often appears to be a messy–even tumultuous–business. Spiritual shepherds are insistent that the epistemological dynamism that necessarily characterizes science never become the mainstay of the Christian experience, which must be fundamentally stable and dependable. They see wisdom in maintaining a safe distance between the Church and the choppy waters of science.

The question, then, is whether the waters of scientific thought, particularly with respect to the age of the earth and evolution, have sufficiently smoothed out to warrant conservative thinkers’ taking a deeper look. Of course, the catch-22 here is that this can’t be answered without actually embarking upon an expedition of exploration and investigation, much as I recently did. Once undertaken, however, the conservative explorer will likely be confronted by a formidable problem:

As I can personally attest, navigating the crowded forum of wildly-differing ideas as to how to resolve the faith-science divide can be terribly daunting. Making this especially disconcerting for the conservative is the sobering reality that amidst the chorus of conflicting theories, one finds very little substantive published input from respected conservative theologians. As a result, the conservative seeker is sure to find herself awash in an ocean of seemingly novel theological “solutions” that are fundamentally antithetical to her evangelical sensibilities. This is likely to result in the impression that there is in fact no way to reconcile the findings of modern science with the key doctrines of orthodox Christianity, and hence the termination of the endeavor. Not only was this dynamic a constant challenge to me, but has proved a stumbling block to many would-be seekers that I personally know.

Whence then change? I believe the breakthrough will begin with a particular subgroup of conservative evangelical pastors, elders, and theologians. I know firsthand that there are many who, truth be told, have not been entirely at peace with their fellow conservatives’ summary rejection of—and apologias against—the findings of mainstream science. They have a gnawing sense that devastation looms for the Church and her children unless detachment yields to engagement, and rhetoric to substance. These have likely admitted to themselves that despite stridently asserting anti-evolution/old-earth views, they actually don’t understand these views in depth (nearly every conservative pastor and elder I’ve spoken with has conceded this). To date, these shepherds and thinkers have remained silent about their misgivings, reluctant to be perceived by their congregations and peers as betraying true Christianity. Given the astonishing fruitfulness of modern science and the comparative barrenness of young-earth creationism, I believe these evangelical leaders may now finally regard themselves as justified in stepping forward and publicly questioning whether the latter is in fact the view that a truth-revealing God would have His people believe.

Indeed, if I may, I would exhort these, my fellow conservative evangelical shepherds and thinkers, to set aside all reticence and fear, emerge from anonymity, and storm the forum of discourse, engaging this most pressing matter with vigor, equanimity, and humility. In doing so, know upfront that there will be few handrails to guide; you will not be building upon an extensive precedence of published conservative thought. Rather, you will be pioneers, with the open prairie of contemplation and consideration before you and the Word of God as a faithful, orienting star. The journey will be at times confounding, often scary, and never without challenge. Yet only through such robust, self-critical analysis will you find yourself in a posture where God can correct and refine all that He would, and only after which will you be able to pass on to your flocks a cogent, truly harmonious portrait of our Lord and His Creation that finds rich consistency between His written and natural revelations. I firmly believe that the fuller, more deeply informed portrait of the Lord and His universe that emerges from this investigation will fill your congregations with an unprecedented new sense of awe at our beloved God as Creator, and profoundly enhance their worship of Him. This has certainly been the result of my own journey.

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

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

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

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

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

Interpretive communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New eyes, fresh air

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Keeping History Safe

In the cold morning air with the sun not yet over the ridge, the place to begin preparation for summiting Mount Darwin is to ponder the reasonableness of miracles. Many Totalizers would like to ban miracles from university consideration and inquiry. Trouble is: human history is awash with credible people reporting miracles.

Modern academic tradition tends to try and maintain order. For historians it behooves us professionally to avoid accounts of alleged spiritual events. We find comfort in a little logical gymnastics that keeps history safe for us to wander in, a deceptively formulaic avoidance method that helps us avoid what people are telling us about extraordinary events in the past.

David Hume popularly articulated this logical gymnastics in an essay titled “Of Miracles” that was eventually printed in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding (1748). “I flatter myself,” Hume triumphantly proclaimed, “that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.”

His everlasting check on superstition begins with a circular argument that because miracles can’t happen, a reasonable person should not even listen to reports of them. Hume taught that though the normal job of a historian was to listen to the testimony that comes down to us from the past, there is a point at which you can close your ears. Hume knew that historical testimony can get wild, so he came up with a way to domesticate the wildness, a way to make history a zoo rather than allow it to be a jungle. His “Of Miracles” has been tremendously influential in the discipline of human history over the last two hundred and fifty years, not because his ideas are strong, but because his ideas are useful. Get rid of “superstitious delusions,” and the discipline of history can be turned from a safari into a form of home economics. Hume’s domestication of history is seductively simple. Instead of following the Aristotelian tradition of linking the credibility of hard-to-believe testimony to the credibility of the testifier, Hume recommended disregarding the testifier and focusing only on the testimony. This effectively removed the persuasive power from hard-to-believe testimony. Miracles need the credibility of an eyewitness in order to have persuasive power. Hume cut the power source from the unwanted testimony.

Essentially, Hume adopted the modeling technique that Darwin later used and is best seen in Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Hume recommended gathering testimony from the past and every region to create a general model of what humans generally experience. Using this mass of information, one should generalize standards of common experience. Now if anyone reports a miracle, the alleged event can’t be true because it does not conform to the generalized standards of common experience. (Of course, Hume had already refused to allow that any reports of miracles could be used even to generalize common experience.) It’s tricky. Its logic is circular. But it works to weed out awkward, quirky information. It is as if a domineering GPS unit created a sphere to serve as an abstraction for the earth, then insisted that the earth can’t have wobbling poles and flattening in the upper latitudes because the sphere in the GPS shows it can’t be true. Given a useful and trustworthy GPS, don’t listen to a scientist who might tell you something different than what the GPS tells you.

The circularity of this argument has been noted ever since Hume first proposed it, but Hume was a good writer and said what a lot of people wanted to hear. Miracles are impossible so miracle reports can’t be true. Don’t even listen to reports of them.

Balancing Likelihoods

Also embedded in Hume’s essay is the awkward “rule of logic,” most often called “Balancing Likelihoods.” By combining math and logic in an odd way, Hume’s “Of Miracles “ offered another way for historians to avoid thinking about miracles. Balancing Likelihoods has many names but is probably best stated by David Hackett Fischer, in his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, as “the rule of probability:”

“[A]ll inferences from empirical evidence are probabilistic. It is not, therefore, sufficient to demonstrate merely that A was possibly the case. A historian must determine, as best he can, the probability of A in relation to the probability of alternatives. In the same fashion he cannot disprove A by demonstrating that not-A was possible, but only by demonstrating that not-A was more probable than A. This is the rule of probability.”

This seems to be practical but is impossible. Balancing Likelihoods, in the way described by Fischer, cannot be used by historians in any normal practice. It is a talisman to keep history mentally safe from the wildness that is reported to exist. Logicians, especially mathematicians, have long criticized intellectual constructions like this. The “probability” that Fischer writes about is seemingly mathematical, but the math is simply implied to give a sense of strength to human feelings.

Before Hume wrote “Of Miracles” probabilistic logic had been advancing rapidly and there was a great hope that mathematical analogies would strengthen human thinking—even Christian apologetics. “Pascal’s Wager,” the most famous mathematical apologetic from the seventeenth century, equated eternal salvation with mathematical infinity and then applied it to a gambling formula. Antoine Arnauld, in The Port-Royal Logic (1662), and John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Discourse on Miracles (1706), carried probabilistic math and logic into the handling of reported miracles. A half-century later, however, Hume reacted against Arnauld and Locke’s teachings that mathematical analogies could help in the discussion of the credibility of miracles. Hume insisted that to handle a reported miracle, a historian had to create two separate ratios, pro and con, for believability. The ratios were then to be weighed against each other. This is Fischer’s “rule of probability” quoted above. In the language of Hume’s era, this was proclaimed as the “calculus of good sense.”

Lorraine Daston, in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), offers an excellent study of Hume and the many eighteenth-century mathematicians who wanted to help bring rigorous quantitative thinking to what today would be called the humanities. Daston writes that by the 1840s, mathematicians realized that “the ‘calculus of good sense’ had become antithetical to good sense,” and that today most of what these early probabilists were trying to do is considered “patently absurd.”

In 1901, one of America’s preeminent philosopher-mathematician-logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote three essays attacking the way historians had adopted Hume’s bad logic: “A Preliminary Chapter, Toward an Examination of Hume’s Argument Against Miracles, in its Logic and in its History,” “Hume’s Arguments Against Miracles, and the Idea of Natural Law,” and “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies.” Peirce showed that historians are in error when they talk of judging testimony by balancing probabilities because “in a scientific sense, there are no ‘probabilities’ to be judged.”

Probability, Peirce wrote, “is the ratio of the frequency of occurrence of a specific event to a generic event.” A testimony “is neither a specific event, nor a generic event, but an individual event.” Peirce further pointed out that what people were justifying by claiming Balancing Likelihoods was really simply relating “what they prefer to do” to what they don’t prefer. “Likelihood is merely a reflection of our preconceived ideas.”

Historians like me who teach in universities about the reasonable credibility of Jesus’ resurrection need to be students of Peirce not Hume on the subject of assessing the credibility of reports that come down to us from ancient history. Dealing wisely with reports of events verging on the incredible is just part of the normal job of being grounded in the social study of our complex human past.

“Come to history as a doubter,” Richard Marius advises in a historical methods manual. “Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities. Historians don’t trust their sources. . . . Nothing is quite so destructive to a historian’s reputation as to present conclusions that prove gullibility.”

But Marius is wrong. In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt. In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting. Historians have to be close listeners, discerning listeners, wise listeners, who sometimes have to make harmonies and stretch for belief.

The main thing to see here—there is a lot to be said about quantum mechanics and most of it I don’t know since I am not a quantum mechanic, but fortunately we do not need to know a whole lot about it to see the important point here—the important point is this: the laws of quantum mechanics are probabilistic rather than deterministic.

So according to Newtonian mechanics, if you are given a complete description of some system and there isn’t any outside causal influence on the system, then if you ask what is that system going to be like in five minutes, there will be a particular answer. It will be a completely definite answer. Maybe you are not able to get that answer yourself; in fact, there are a lot of problems with actually working this out in detail (maybe you are not capable of doing that), but the laws entail a particular and completely definite answer to all the physical questions about that system. But that isn’t how it goes with quantum mechanics.

In quantum mechanics, if you are given a system of particles, then the quantum mechanical laws don’t say which configuration they will be in, but instead they assign probabilities to the possible outcomes. So there will be a whole continuum of possible outcomes, and the quantum mechanical laws will assign probabilities to these. Some of the outcomes, if you think of it like a distribution like that, at these edges these outcomes will be extremely unlikely; will be assigned extremely low probabilities—those in the middle, a much higher probability and so on, but it won’t tell you just which one will happen, just which one, in fact, will ensue. It only assigns these probabilities.

If that is the way things stand, then even if you leave out the bit about closed systems, miracles, walking on water, rising from the dead, they are clearly not incompatible with these laws, because these laws are just probabilistic. They say like probably things will be this, this, or this. This way of being has a probability of .13, for this one over here, a probability of .007. Miracles of walking on water [and] rising from the dead, these things are not incompatible with these laws. No doubt, with respect to these laws, they are very improbable, but of course, we already knew that.

So the point here is just this: with respect to the new picture, you don’t even have to add the thing about the systems being closed. Even if the system is a closed system, the laws still won’t entail a particular determinant outcome. Hence, these laws are not incompatible with such miracles as walking on water or somebody rising from the dead. In that way, the new picture is quite different than the old picture. It is quite an important difference—a very substantial and important difference.

Now the next thing I want to note though that very many philosophers, theologians, and scientists who are wholly aware of this quantum mechanical revolution still apparently find a problem with miracles and with special divine interaction, generally. There is the divine action project so called by Wesley Wildman in a paper he wrote. It has been a fifteen-year series of conferences and publications that began in 1988. So far these conferences have resulted in five or six books of essays involving some fifty or more authors from various fields of science together with philosophers and theologians including many of the most prominent writers in the field, for example, John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacock, Nancy Murphy, Philip Clayton, and many others. This whole divine action project is a very serious and impressive attempt to come to grips with the topic of divine action in the world.

Now the interesting thing here is that nearly all of these authors believe that a satisfactory account of God’s action in the world would have to be non-interventionistic. [It] would have a satisfactory account of divine action in the world. [It] would have to be such that it doesn’t involve God’s intervening in the world, really, doesn’t involve God’s acting specially in the world. So says Wesley Wildman, he says, “The project tried to be sensitive to issues of theological consistency.”

For example, the idea of God sustaining nature and its law-like regularities with one hand, while miraculously intervening, abrogating or ignoring these regularities with the other hand, struck most members as dangerously close to outright contradiction. Most participants certainly felt that God would not create an orderly world in which it was impossible for the Creator to act without violating the created structures of order.

Now, when you think about that, there has got to be something wrong with that—the created structures of order (as we now understand them) are understood from the quantum mechanical point of view, and you don’t violate them. God wouldn’t be violating these structures, these laws by causing somebody to rise from the dead (or as far as that goes, by creating a full-grown horse) because the laws don’t say exactly what is going to happen. They only assign these probabilities. Again, no doubt the probability of a full grown horse suddenly emerging right here is very low, but not incompatible with the laws.

There is one more point I want to make here. I think the people that did this divine action project were still sort of hung up on the same sort of thing that people were hung up on before… the same sort of thing those theologians that I mentioned were hung up on… I want to say two things about that.

First of all, even as I say, you set aside the restriction of the laws to causally closed systems; even so, you still won’t get any contradiction with divine special action. That is one. The other thing I want to say is that you really can’t even say what intervention is! I mean, what is intervention on the quantum mechanical level? What would that actually be? There is a way of saying on the old picture what divine intervention would be, but there isn’t anything, as far as I can see, available on the new picture.

Suppose you ask one of these people, “Ok, you don’t like intervention, so tell me, what would an intervention be? Could you tell me what it is?" I mean, if you can’t tell me what an intervention would be, then it is sort of peculiar to be so much against them—you tend to be against things such that you know what they are, not against things such that one cannot even say what they are.

Well, here is one possibility: you might say God does something (A) that causes a state of affairs that would not have occurred if God had not done (A). So imagine the interlocutor saying, “Well that is what divine intervention would be, whether divine intervention would be,” but that can’t be right because then any act of conservation would be an intervention, and they are not worried about conservation, they are just worried about special divine action. So that could not be a good suggestion.

The second one might be this one: God performs an act (A), which is neither conservation nor creation, but causes a state of affairs that would not have happened if he had not performed that action (A), but isn’t that really just acting specially in the world? I mean we are trying to give an account of acting specially in the world, which does not involve intervention. Well, if this is how we understand intervention, well then intervention and acting specially in the world would be the same thing. From that point of view, what they really are trying to do (if you did accept [option] two) you would be trying to give an idea of, an account of divine action in the world that didn’t involve divine action in the world, and of course, that is going to be really hard!

Well, you might try other ones, too. For example, number three: God performs an act that is very improbable given the previous states of the world, but then you want to ask, “Well, what’s the problem with that?” If that is what intervention is, what should be the problem with it? Why shouldn’t God perform improbable acts? If God wants to perform improbable acts, who is to prevent him? That is ok, no problem with that.

Or, number four: there are various lower level generalizations not entailed by quantum mechanics on which we rely, and that is true. I mean things like bread nourishes, people don’t walk on water or rise from the dead—these are generalizations—we all rely on them and believe them, and you might say God intervenes when he causes an event contrary to one of those generalizations, but again, what would be the problem with that? We would think these lower level regularities and generalizations are like the law of the Medes and Persians so that once God has established each one of them, not even he can act contrary to it. In any event, this sort of objection isn’t scientific, it is philosophical or theological.

So, I say, there is nothing in science, either under the old or the new picture, that conflicts with or even calls into question special divine action—including miracles. My general conclusion is that lots of people have raised this problem; they say miracles are incompatible with science. H. Allen Orr said that as well as the philosophers and theologians I mentioned earlier. It is a very common idea that if you believe in miracles, you are somehow not accepting science; you are going contrary to science. My conclusion is that that’s not true at all, either under the old or the new picture; there isn’t any conflict between thinking God acts specially in the world and enthusiastically endorsing all of contemporary physics or whatever science you like. Thank you.

From a presentation sponsored by Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, and delivered February 12, 2012 at EV Free Church, Fullerton, CA. Used by permission.

Suppose a man falls among thieves, or wild beasts; is shipwrecked at sea by a sudden gale; is killed by a falling house or tree. Suppose another man wandering through the desert finds help in his straits; having been tossed by the waves, reaches harbor; miraculously escapes death by a finger’s breadth. Carnal reason ascribes all such happenings, whether prosperous or adverse, to fortune. But anyone who has been taught by Christ’s lips that all the hairs if his head are numbered [Matt. 10:30] will look further afield for a cause, and will consider that all events are governed by God’s secret plan.

In this passage, Calvin presents belief in “fortune” as evidence of carnal reasoning, and statements like this one have contributed to a widely-held notion that modern scientific understandings of the role that randomness plays in nature is inconsistent with belief in divine providence. In other words, if “randomness” equals blind and capricious “fortune,” then how can God be said to be working all things to his ends?

But Calvin could not have known of the very different understanding of randomness held by today’s scholars. Physical scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians have not yet agreed on a single unambiguous definition of the term “randomness,” but among these scientists, the term consistently refers to a family of related concepts focusing on unpredictability of the outcomes of single events and the absence of pattern in sequences of outcomes. I like this statement by John Polkinghorne, “Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.” In Polkinghorne’s view, chance is an agent of creativity and can be perceived as being purposeful.

In fact, there are abundant examples of phenomena in nature in which randomness plays a role one could understand as being purposeful. For example, osmosis is a marvelous mechanism that enables all 10 trillion cells in our bodies to be nourished – it depends on the random motion of molecules. The human immune system is able to defend the body against attacks from millions of different microorganisms using a relatively small number of building blocks and random combinations of these to fashion defenses specific to each adversary. We never take a breath and find it to be all nitrogen or carbon dioxide – random motion of molecules keeps oxygen close to uniformly distributed throughout the atmosphere.

In 2007, a British statistician, David Bartholomew published God, Chance, and Purpose in which he argues that God “can have it both ways”—that he can use low level randomness to accomplish divine purposes while simultaneously maintaining order at a higher level. Of course, we cannot prove that God ordained these random processes to achieve divine purposes in the world. But to a person of faith, such an interpretation in both consistent with the observations we make in science and with the Scriptural notion of God’s providential care for the world.

Considerations like these led the John Templeton Foundation to provide a generous grant of $1.69 million to support a new research initiative on the theme of Randomness and Divine providence. Beginning this past summer, the program has the purpose of providing support for solid theoretical exploration of the kinds of ideas and possibilities expressed above—involving theology, philosophy, natural science, mathematics, and statistics. The grant will support individual scholars and teams of scholars who are willing to devote a significant amount of time between March of 2013 and June of 2015 to such work, and the project’s request for proposals suggests the following as questions researchers might pursue:

• How might God work providentially through indeterminate processes? Can recent advances in understanding the nature of randomness offered by algorithmic information theory, physics, biology, and other sciences provide insight into this question?
• Can we bring clarity to the concept of "randomness"? Philosophers and scientists have tried on occasion to give precise definitions of when a process is random, but more work needs to be done on the question. How do (or should) conceptions of randomness vary across academic disciplines?
• What are some possible implications of randomness for hiding or unfolding divine creativity and purpose in the world? Could God use randomness to (1) generate creativity, (2) hide divine actions, or (3) unfold information? Why might God do so?
• How might we identify and come to understand a significant collection of nondeterministic processes in which agents could intentionally employ randomness to bring about purposeful results?
• How might we mathematically and physically model random processes in ways that help us understand how divine providence could be exercised in a "chance-governed" world?
• How do "laws and orders" in nature interplay with "chance and randomness" in bringing about results that can be interpreted as aspects of divine providence?
• Might randomness be evidence of limitations in human knowledge but nothing more? Or might it be evidence of ontological indeterminism? Might this be tested?
• What implications does randomness have for aspects of God’s relationship with the physical world such as God’s relationship to time and God’s role in causation? How might randomness be reconciled with God’s foreknowledge?
• How might an understanding of providence based on an extended Molinism and/or open theology incorporate randomness? For example, could an extended Molinism provide a plausible account of the relationship between quantum mechanics and divine providence?
• What are some theodical implications of randomness, particularly for the issue of natural evil?
• How have the theological traditions of Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin addressed chance and fortune? In what ways might they incorporate ontological randomness?
• How do or could religions other than the Judeo/Christian tradition understand and incorporate randomness?
• How is the concept of randomness understood by advocates of secularism, naturalism, and new atheism? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these usages?
• How might an understanding of randomness in the world alter our conceptions of divinity, especially our understanding of divine providence?

Despite the range of issues mentioned above, research is by no means restricted only to these topics. In fact, the structure of the program is designed to foster collaboration and build community between scholars, with the end of expanding the range and integration of their work: two conferences will be held to bring scholars together with each other and then with members of the public—one at Calvin College in 2013 and the other at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2015. To get more information and to learn how to submit a proposal, see the project website; then join us in exploring the truth that all creation glorifies God—even randomness!

But it is also important that we engage believers who disagree with us (on human origins, especially) with charity and humility as a witness to our common identity in Christ—that we may be known by our love for each other in tandem with our demonstrated love for the secular world that does not yet claim Christ as Lord and Savior.

While the BioLogos Foundation is committed to both of these aspects, we are especially pleased that our desire to engage in gracious dialogue with fellow believers who reject biological evolution has been receiving increased and very favorable attention in both the Christian and secular press. More importantly, we are being joined in that reconciling project by those who have often been defined primarily as our “opponents,” rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

First, A Tale of Two Scientists, the cover story of Christianity Today’s July-August 2012 issue, featured the accounts of BioLogos Foundation President Darrel Falk and Todd Wood, Director of the Center for Creation Research at Bryan University. Though Wood does not accept biological evolution on theological grounds, both men recognize its strength and explanatory power. But more importantly, both reject the warfare model between science and faith (and between Christians who think differently) as being, in Wood’s words, “detrimental to the Church.”

Second, our Southern Baptist Voices series has become a model for how such dialogue can be pursued, even in the sometimes no-holds-barred context of the web. Several installments in our ongoing dialogue with Southern Baptist theologians have been covered by the Erin Roach of the Baptist Press (on May 25th , June 6th, and July 3rd) and on on July 19th by Lillian Kwan of the Christian Post. And just this past week, Associated Press reporter Travis Loller highlighted the series in an article picked up by the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets across the country.

To make it easier for readers to find the entire Southern Baptist Voices series and join in the conversation themselves, we’ve launched a new landing page here: Southern Baptist Voices. It is our hope and prayer that this initiative will set the stage for future dialogue between evolutionary creationists and those who hold other perspectives, as well.

I am using the term in the same sense. Like Ramm, I don’t regard theistic evolution as a concordist view, even though some TE proponents like to say that evolution can be “harmonized” with Genesis. At the same time, Ramm completely rejected Price’s recent creation and Flood Geology, and he obviously did not consider that view to be a type of concordism either. Why not? On first glance, the YEC view might seem to fall within Ramm’s definition of concordism, and the authors of one of the books recommended in the first column in this series classify it as a type of concordism. However, the harmony sought by YEC proponents comes at the cost of entirely rejecting the standard geologic record, which they replace with Flood Geology. That isn’t what Ramm had in mind by seeking a “harmony.”

Often the concordist view is called “progressive creation,” another term that Ramm used with much approval: “We believe that the fundamental pattern of creation is progressive creation,” he wrote prominently in italics. Indeed, it is sometimes assumed that Ramm invented both terms, “concordism” and “progressive creation,” when in fact he did no such thing. If anything, the latter term is even older than the former, having been used to refer to an OEC interpretation of natural history for about two centuries. The first American author to use it may have been Benjamin Silliman, an evangelical who was appointed the first professor of natural history at Yale by another evangelical, Yale’s president Timothy Dwight. Silliman was the single most influential figure in American science during the nineteenth century. In his Outline of the Course of Geological Lectures Given in Yale College (1829), Silliman spoke of “the progressive creation, life, death and sepulture [fossilization], of animals and plants.” On another occasion he noted how the Bible describes “a successive creation of plants and animals, ending with man,” and that geology “proves this history to be true.”

Clearly, then, the concordist or progressive creationist view has been around for a long time. Let’s examine its main components.

Core Tenets or Assumptions of Concordism

(1) The Bible and science (mainly geology and astronomy) are BOTH reliable sources of knowledge about the origin of the earth and the universe. God has written two “books” for our instruction, the book of nature and the book of scripture. Since God is the author of both “books,” they must agree when properly interpreted.

If this strikes you as worded deliberately to sound like Galileo, you’re right—but only because so many proponents of the concordist view also have Galileo very much in their minds. The basic scheme is neatly depicted in this diagram:

Recall Galileo’s belief that the book of nature, written in the divine and unambiguous language of mathematics, should be used to help interpret the book of scripture, written in the richer but more ambiguous language spoken by the ordinary persons for whom its vital message of salvation was intended. When they accept the evidence for an ancient earth, Silliman and many other evangelical scholars right down to our own day believe they have merely applied Galileo’s logic to a different set of biblical texts.

(2) Scientific evidence, when properly interpreted, is consistent with the Bible, when properly interpreted.

Galileo again: because both “books” are written by the same Author, they must agree. As he said in his Letter to Christina, “the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error.”

What about those who interpret the book of nature? Can they ever be mistaken? Should they ever yield to those who interpret the book of scripture? Evolution was not the source of Galileo’s concerns, but concordists today would give the nod to scripture mainly when it comes to evolution—especially human evolution. Regardless of how much evolution they accept for other organisms, concordists hold strongly to the separate creation of Adam and Eve as the first human beings. They believe that Genesis 1 was intended to be at least broadly historical, even though it does not provide detailed scientific information.

Mainstream conclusions in geology and cosmology, however, are almost always accepted; indeed, Hugh Ross and some other OECs not only accept the “big bang” theory of the universe, they actively promote it as central to Christian apologetics, because it presents us with a universe that is not eternal and that appears to be exquisitely designed as a home for living creatures, including ourselves.

(3) The Bible does NOT tell us the age of the earth.

Two main concordist approaches to resolving the tension between Genesis and scientific dating of the earth have been popular since the mid-nineteenth century: the “day-age theory,” which still has numerous advocates (including Ross), and the “gap theory,” which is now nearly extinct. One hundred years ago, however, the gap theory was probably the more popular option among conservative Protestants, and it remained so until the 1960s and 1970s, when the rapid spread of Scientific Creationism all but relegated the gap view to the dust bin.

The Gap Theory

The gap theory posits a “gap” of untold length between “the beginning” of Genesis 1:1 and the first “day” of creation, starting with Genesis 1:3; the formless void of Gen 1:2 corresponds to this “gap.” Verse 1 refers to the original creation of the earth and the universe “in the beginning,” not to world as we now find it. The fossils represent creatures that populated the original creation. Current living creatures come from a second creation, after the “gap,” when God made them in six literal days, culminating in the creation of Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago.

Although the creation of humanity matches the traditional biblical chronology—a major reason for the popularity of the gap theory in its heyday—the original creation cannot be dated from the Bible. Whether it happened 100 million years ago (as scientists thought around 1900) or billions of years ago (as scientists thought for much of the twentieth century), does not matter one bit to the Bible. Geologists can say whatever they wish about the age of the earth. The Scofield Reference Bible, originally published by Oxford University Press in 1909, taught the gap theory to generations of conservative Protestants in the English speaking world. The headings alone indicate Scofield’s endorsement of the gap theory, and he waited no longer than the second footnote to spell it out: “The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.” (NOTE: the date “B.C. 4004" in the middle column refers to the start of the six days, not to “the beginning.” I’ll elaborate on that date in part two of this column.)

As Scofield’s third note shows, the gap theory was usually placed within an elaborate theological structure about the fall of Satan and the angels, based on certain prophetic texts (see below). A full discussion would take us far afield, but something should be said about how gap theorists interpret Genesis 1:2, the crucial verse for their model. Scofield sticks with the King James Version, “the earth was without form, and void,” doing the exegetical work in his notes, but others like to render it as, “the earth became a waste place,”, drawing out the implication (in their view) that God destroyed the original creation, laying waste to it in an act of judgment, leaving us with fossils of the pre-Adamic world.

In some versions of the gap view, the original creation included pre-Adamite people—that is, humans who were not descended from Adam and Eve. This idea that took many forms, some with racist overtones. Perhaps this strikes you as a bit surprising, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a commonplace conception among Protestants, and not unknown to Catholics either. A prominent example would be The Pre-Adamite Earth: A Contribution to Theological Science (1846), a very popular book by the English Congregational minister John Harris. Historian David Livingstone has written the definitive history of this fascinating idea. For more, see this interview, but there is no substitute for reading the book itself! Let me make an invitation: who wants to borrow a copy and provide their own commentary here?

In all versions of the gap theory, however, fossils are vestiges of the pre-Adamic world, produced when it was destroyed; they are not a record of evolutionary history. All modern animals and many plants were created recently, in six literal days. Despite what YECs often say, there is just no way to see the gap theory as an “evolutionist” interpretation of Genesis!

The "Day-Age" Theory

The day-age theory takes the “days” in Genesis 1 as periods of indefinite length, such that neither the age of the earth nor the duration of any particular period in creation history can be determined from the Bible. The basis for this view is that the Hebrew word “yom” (day) can also mean an indefinite period of time. According to Hugh Ross, the leading advocate of progressive creation today, if the Hebrews had wanted to refer to a long period of indefinite length, they would have used the word “yom.” Thus, he claims to be giving a literal interpretation when he upholds the day-age view.

Numerous varieties of the day-age view have been proposed since the eighteenth century, too many to review here. They all teach that the major kinds of plants and animals were created separately, over the eons of earth history; the fossil record shows reliably which came earlier and which came later. Thus, the creation was accomplished “progressively,” as Silliman held in 1829 and Ross holds today. Ross thinks God performed millions of acts of special creation, but concordists differ substantially among themselves on the magnitude of the number for this.

Concordists mostly agree, however, that the first true humans were Adam and Eve, and that they were created ex nihilo—but, how recently were they created? Can the biblical 6,000 years be stretched far enough to encompass fossils of modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) dating back perhaps to nearly 200,000 years? Can the biblical picture of Adam’s children living amidst cities and agriculture be reconciled with extensive evidence of humans who lived long before either existed? I’m no anthropologist, but anyone can see the relevance of such questions for this position.

(4) The Flood was a real historical event, but it was not responsible for producing the fossils; rather, fossils are relics of organisms that were mainly here before humans.

The last of the four basic assumptions shared by concordists is that they reject Flood Geology and accept the standard geologic column. Hugh Ross and some others believe that the flood was geographically localized, covering part of the ancient Near East but not the whole globe. This is called the “local flood” view. Biblical scholar Paul Seely briefly assesses this view in light of current knowledge here, but a full discussion of the issues goes well beyond of the scope of this online course. Anyone with appropriate expertise is invited to place comments below. The main point is that the flood has no geological significance for concordists, whether or not it was geographically “local.”

Looking Ahead

Our look at concordism concludes on July 3 with some conclusions about the OEC view and further historical comments. I’ll pay attention to your comments in the meantime.

For more, be sure to read Randall Pruim's recent series Randomness and God’s Governance, Kathryn Applegate's post That's Random: A Look at Viral Self-Assembly, and our FAQ How Do Randomness and Chance Align with Belief in God's Sovereignty and Purpose?.

Author's Note

I am so thankful that I grew up in a Christian environment, which both kindled and nurtured my relationship with Jesus Christ. The Biblical instruction I received from my parents, pastors, and teachers has been invaluable as I walk out my love for the Lord from day to day. However, there was one specific topic growing up which was not fully addressed, namely evolutionary theory.

Coming from a conservative Christian background, evolution was given little or no thought because of its seeming contradiction to the creation story in Genesis. To me, evolution meant a monkey became a human, and as far as I knew, I had never seen that happen! So, of course, it appeared too improbable to hold any truth. When it was discussed, an inadequate picture of its ideas was often painted, which caused immediate suspicion and rejection of the theory. I don’t think this was intentional, but most Christians have never learned an unbiased, in-depth theory of evolution that is completely detached from societal agendas and philosophical conclusions. Therefore, their explanations of the theory are often misinformed.

My senior year of high school, I took AP Biology, and finally learned the scientific reasoning supporting this theory. I was surprised by how logical and obvious the mechanisms of change (such as mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, and so on) were that gave rise to new species. My subsequent response was, “No wonder people believe evolution occurred.” At that point, I was convinced that microevolution (evolution within a species) existed, but I was still questioning macroevolution.

Now, being at Point Loma Nazarene University as an undergrad in the Biology-Chemistry major and a year-round, student intern at BioLogos, my understanding of evolution has expanded enormously. I have enjoyed critically thinking through the evidence for evolution and reading articles that tackle difficult issues at the interface of science and Christian faith. Ultimately, I know that God has created all things, but the processes he used surpass my small understanding.

My personal wrestling with evolution and quest for truth has led to times of prayer and studying God’s Word, which has deepened my love for him in ways I cannot express. The first chapters of Genesis, in particular, have come alive. My whole life, the creation story was a straightforward list of facts about the creation of the world; I never searched further. I didn’t even perceive the truths Genesis declared over my very identity and God’s character. The more I study his Word and handiwork, I glimpse the awesomeness and majesty of the Creator, who loves me much more than I know. There is still so much to learn, but I am confident that he will lead me into all truth as I seek him out.

I desire to give others the opportunity to see evolution accurately and to distinguish it from the traditional, philosophical, and personal conclusions that too often cloud the scientific theory. I believe these conclusions alienate Christians from evolution more than the scientific theory itself. Ultimately, I do not mean to convince someone about evolution, but simply to give them the freedom to understand it.

Therefore, my goal for this podcast is two-fold:

• First, to offer a new perspective on randomness within natural processes that removes its negative connotations (especially as it relates to evolution).
• Second, to expose why evolution is powerless to support conclusions beyond the physical realm.

This will hopefully encourage others to study evolutionary theory and draw their own conclusions about its meaning in the framework of their faith.

(Written by the BioLogos editorial team)

In a recent lecture in Washington, D.C., Intelligent Design advocate Stephen Meyer noted that scientists and theologians are generally uncomfortable with the idea of "supernatural intervention" in natural processes such as evolution. He then posed the question, “What's so bad about supernatural intervention?” Meyer’s comment touches on a point of particular tension among Christians engaged in understanding how our science and our theology interact: the nature of divine action.

Much of the confusion in this area, however, stems from the inexact meaning of intervention, which—like evolution or Darwinism—implies different things to different people. All Christians affirm that God works powerfully in the world, doing extraordinary acts of creation and salvation. In common conversation, then, intervention tends to mean simply “acts that are recognizably or obviously God’s,” whether as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea or as subtle as an individual believer hearing a clear call to repentance or to mission from the Lord. Even in this most casual sense, intervention tends to mean special occasions of God’s providential care, rather than his ordinary sustaining work.

But to Christian scientists and philosophers trying to understand God’s action in creation—especially how he might go about his sustaining role—intervention has another connotation: namely, that recognizing something as “divine action” requires it to be in violation of the natural laws which God himself established. Put another way, many Christian thinkers associate the word intervention with the idea that to act in the world God “must” act from outside the world. That view is a central tenet of deism, not Christianity. One response to Meyer’s comment, then, is to ask whether intervention is the only (or even a helpful) way of thinking about God’s work in biological creation. Is there another way of talking about “divine action” that does not restrict God's work to only extraordinary events? Can we conceive of divine action in a way God is never absent, distant, or in any way removed from the creation he sustains at every moment?

Finding such an alternative vocabulary to talk about the different ways God acts in his creation is the purpose of this short series introducing the work of theologian and physicist Robert John Russell. Russell’s book Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega explores the history of Christian thinking about divine action and proposes one model for how we might understand it in light of Scripture, the traditions of the church, and contemporary scientific explorations of the material world.

To be clear, Russell argues that God does unmistakably act in the world. He singles out the bodily resurrection of Jesus not only as a prime example, but as a truly unique event distinct even from Christ’s other miraculous acts during his ministry on earth. That is, the resurrection was an in-breaking of God’s new reality into the present one, something “beyond miraculous.” This series, though, offers his perspective on the more basic issue of how God might be at work in what we have called the “ordinary processes” of his world.

We begin our three-part series below with Professor Russell’s description of how views of divine action have changed throughout history (excerpted from Chapter 4 of Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega).

Historical background to the problem of divine action

The notion of God’s acting in the world is central to the biblical witness. From the call of Abraham and the Exodus from Egypt to the birth, ministry, death and raising of Jesus and the founding of the church at Pentecost, God is represented as making new things happen. Through these “mighty acts,” God creates and saves. Rather than seeing divine acts as occasional events in what are otherwise entirely natural and historical processes, both the Hebrews and the early Christians conceived of God as the creator of the world and of divine action as the continuing basis of all that happens in nature and in history.

The view that God works in and through all the processes of the world continued throughout Patristic and Medieval times. For example, God was understood as the first or primary cause of all events—where all natural causes are instrumental or secondary causes through which God works. The conviction that God acts universally in all events, and that we act together with God in specific events, was maintained by the Reformers and the ensuing Protestant orthodoxy. John Calvin (1509-1564) argued that God is in absolute control over the world and at the same time maintained that people are responsible for evil deeds. Questions about human freedom and the reality of evil were seen more as problems requiring serious theological attention than as reasons for abandoning belief in God’s universal agency.

Moreover, faith in God the creator was articulated through two distinct but interwoven doctrines: creation and providence. The doctrine of creation asserts that the ultimate source and absolute ground of the universe is God. Without God, the universe would not exist, nor would it exist as “universe.” Creation theology, in turn, has often included three related but distinct claims: 1) the universe had a beginning; 2) the universe depends absolutely and at every moment on God for its sheer existence; and 3) the universe is the locus of God’s continuing activity as Creator. The first two have traditionally been grouped in terms of creatio ex nihilo(creation from nothing), and the third in terms of creatio continua (continuing creation).

The doctrine of providence presupposes a doctrine of creation, but adds significantly to it. While creation stresses that God is the cause of all existence, providence stresses that God is the cause of the meaning and purpose of all that is. God not only creates but guides and directs the universe towards the fulfilling of God’s purposes. These purposes are mostly hidden to us, though they may be partially seen after the fact in the course of natural and historical events. The way God achieves them is hidden, too. Only in the eschatological future will God’s action throughout the history of the universe be fully revealed and our faith in it confirmed. General providence refers to God’s universal action in guiding all events; special providence refers to God’s particular acts in specific moments, whether found in personal life or in history.

Divine intervention arises in the Enlightenment

The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and Enlightenment philosophy in the eighteenth, however, led many to reject the traditional views of divine action. Although Isaac Newton (1643-1727) argued for the essential role of God in relation to the metaphysical underpinnings of his mechanical system, and in this way defended the sovereignty of God in relation to nature, Newtonian mechanics depicted a causally closed universe with little, if any, room for God’s special action in specific events—and then only by intervention: that is, by acting as from outside that closed system. A century later, Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827, pictured left) combined the determinism of Newton’s equations with epistemological reductionism (the properties and behavior of the whole are reducible to those of the parts) and metaphysical reductionism (the whole is simply composed of its parts), to portray all of nature as a causally closed, impersonal mechanism. This in turn led to the concept of interventionism: if God were really to act in specific events in nature, God would apparently have to break the remorseless lock-step of natural cause and effect by intervening in the sequence and violating the laws of nature in the process.

The eighteenth century also saw the rise and fall of deism, in which the scope of divine agency was limited to an initial act of creation. According to deism, the universe was like a clock which, once built and set in place, proceeded to run on its own. David Hume (1711-1776) challenged the deistic (and theistic) arguments for God as first cause and as designer. In response, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, pictured right) constructed a new metaphysical system which emphasized the mind’s role in organizing sense-data through universal categories of intuition and forms of sensibility. According to Kant, the sphere of religion lies not in our knowing (the activity of pure reason) but in our sense of moral obligation (the activity of practical reason). It is our ethical system, not our knowledge of nature, that requires us to postulate God, freedom and the immortality of the soul. The consequence of Kant’s thought for the West was the philosophical separation of the domains of science and religion into “two worlds”—a move which was to have an immeasurable effect on Christian theology up to the present.

Theology splits into conservative and liberal interpretations of divine action

As a consequence of the philosophical division of science and religion, theology in the nineteenth century was faced with a fundamental challenge not only to its contents and structure, but even to its method. The variety of responses to this challenge tend to fall into two groups: “liberals” largely accepted and worked within the terms of the discussion that modernity dictated while “conservatives” upheld traditional formulations and tended to reject “modernity.” The earliest and most influential figure among liberals was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who responded to Kant by locating religion as neither a knowing nor a doing. Instead religion is grounded in personal piety—the feeling of absolute dependence.

Schleiermacher held that theological assertions emerge from the immediacy of the religious self-consciousness. He understood God’s relation to the world in terms of “universal divine immanence” [the idea that God is present to the entire cosmos at all times], and he blurred the distinction between creation and providence by collapsing the later into the former. In a famous move he defined miracle as “. . . simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant.” Schleiermacher’s arguments became characteristic of liberal Protestant theology throughout the nineteenth century and continued into much of twentieth century theological work.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of Darwinian evolution, which combined random variation and natural selection to explain biological complexity. To some in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the fundamental role of chance in nature seemed to undercut any notion of divine action in the world; to others, such as the Anglo-Catholic liberal movement in Britain and America, Darwinian evolution could be accommodated and even integrated into theology without interventionism, since God works immanently in and through the very processes of nature. In contrast, religious conservatives tended either to reject evolution as a whole or give it a limited acceptance with the proviso that the objective acts of special providence constitute divine interventions in nature.

The rise of neo-orthodoxy in the twentieth century

Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century was largely shaped by Karl Barth. In his rejection of nineteenth-century liberal theology, Barth returned theology to its biblical roots and focused it on the God who is “wholly other.” Recognizing that a religion founded exclusively on subjective experience is vulnerable to the critiques of Feuerbach and Freud, Barth and his followers held fast to the objective action of God in creating and redeeming the world. “The Gospel is . . . not an event, nor an experience, nor an emotion—however delicate! ... It is a communication which presumes faith in the living God, and which creates that which it presumes.” The ‘God who acts’ became a hallmark of the ensuing “biblical theology” movement which arose in the 1940s and 1950s. To many this movement seemed to offer a tertium quid between liberal and conservative theologies.

But do Barthian neo-orthodoxy and the biblical theology movement actually produce a credible account of divine action? On the one hand neo-orthodoxy attempts to distance itself from liberal theology by retaining biblical language about God acting through wondrous events and by viewing revelation as including an objective act. Yet on the other hand, it, like liberalism, accepts the modern premise that nature is a closed causal system, as depicted by classical physics. The result is that neo-orthodoxy seems to assert a contradiction: God does act objectively in nature (as conservatives believe) and God does so without intervening, violating, suspending or obstructing the ordinary processes of nature understood as a closed causal system (as liberals believe).

A third way between liberal and conservative theologies

Any purported “third option” will require an intelligible concept of objectively special providence which does not entail divine intervention. Such a concept could serve as a genuine tertium quid to conservative and liberal notions of special providence, combining strengths borrowed from each. Specifically, we will seek to speak about special divine acts in which God acts objectively in an unusual and particularly meaningful way in, with, and through events which serve to mediate God’s action. We will seek to do so without entertaining—in fact by refusing—the additional claim that God must intervene in, or at least suspend, the laws of nature. Those laws are themselves the result of and description of God’s continuous creation, after all. I call this type of divine action Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA).

In part 2 of this series, Tom Burnett will explore in more depth what Russell takes to be wrong with the Enlightenment concept of “supernatural intervention.” Part 3 will explain and clarify Russell’s theory of NIODA.

From Chapter 4, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act? New Approaches to Divine Action In Light Of Contemporary Science,” in Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega by Robert John Russell, copyright © 2008 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers. All rights reserved. No further reproduction allowed without the written permission of the publisher.

Many of the games I enjoyed playing involve a combination of strategy and randomness: card games of various sorts, backgammon, and board games like Monopoly and Parcheesi. Some games that rely exclusively on chance (like War and Candy Land) or too heavily on chance (like Sorry) quickly became uninteresting to me. In fact, for Sorry, War, and several other games, I introduced additional rules to change the balance of strategy and luck—for example, by allowing each player to hold a hand of cards rather than merely flip a card and follow its bidding.

When my children were young, I played many games with them, especially those involving some amount of chance. I always play to win, so games of pure strategy like chess gave me too great an advantage—at least when they were still young. I still remember the first time I played the German game Mitternachtspartie with my children and some of their cousins. The game uses a die on which the number 5 has been replaced with the image of Hugo the ghost. Each player rolls the die and moves one of his figures the specified number of squares, unless Hugo is rolled, in which case Hugo moves instead.

I quickly worked out the expected distance Hugo would move for each of my turns and the expected number of squares I would get to move my own figures each turn. Using that information, I could strategically place my figures in the opening portion of the game. I fully expected to win this first game, since my young children were going to have to learn from experience what I already knew by the mathematics of probability. I lost—badly. As it turned out, the die had two Hugos on it. So compared to my expectations, Hugo moved twice as often, and my figures moved slightly less far. That combination turned the carefully calculated positioning of my figures into a disaster.

From Fun and Games to Science

I still enjoy playing games, including games that involve chance. But these days I encounter randomness even more often in my profession. I was trained as a mathematician and now work at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Like many scientists, I use randomness on a daily basis as part of our toolkit for modeling and investigating all sorts of phenomena. Models known as stochastic models, which explicitly incorporate random components, often via simulation in computer software, are used to model everything from diffusion to genetics to quantum mechanics. Insurance companies and financial institutions use stochastic models to manage risk. If we include all the applications of statistics, then almost no area of science is untouched by the use of randomness.

Most of the time, scientists and game players alike don’t devote much thought to just what makes randomness tick. But they both know that the better they understand the probabilities, the more successful they are. Nevertheless, if you ask many of them what it means for something to be random, they may struggle to put it into words. I won’t try to give a precise definition either, but it is important that we have some idea what we are talking about, so let’s consider one of the prototypical examples of randomness: the tossing of a fair coin.

If I flip a coin, the result could be heads or tails. Until I flip the coin, I don’t know which it will be. In this sense, the coin toss is unpredictable. If the coin is fair, each result is equally likely, so while I cannot say in advance whether a particular result will be heads or tails, I can say something about a large number of flips: approximately half should be heads and the other half tails.

A little mathematics even allows me to determine a range around 50% in which the percentage will almost surely lie. For example, if I flip a fair coin 1,000 times, the percentage of heads will most likely be between 45% and 55% (where “most likely” means a 99% chance). If the percentage of heads lies outside this range—especially if it is quite far outside this range—I am going to be suspicious that the coin flipping process is not fair. That’s one of the key ideas in statistics: not only can we calculate the frequency with which an event occurs, but we can compare data to a stochastic model to see if they are compatible or incompatible.

There are several interesting things we can learn by considering a coin toss. First, probability calculations rely on assumptions. If the assumptions are incorrect, then the probability calculations will also be incorrect. For example, if the coin is biased (such as one that is heads 60% of the time), but we assume it is fair, then the probability calculations given above will be wrong. Of course, if the assumptions are not too far from correct, the results may still be sufficiently accurate for scientific conclusions. If we have an appropriate way to collect data, then we can test our assumptions by comparing data to projections made based on the assumptions.

Second, “random” does not imply “equally likely.” A fair coin should have equal probabilities of heads or tails, but a biased coin is no less random. It’s just different. It is not as simple to handle arithmetically as a situation in which all outcomes are equally likely, but it is not otherwise special. It is a common mistake to assume random events are equally likely when they are not (or when that assumption is not justified).

Third, randomness is about the process. It is a fun experiment to flip a penny 100 times, then spin a penny 100 times and record the side that is showing when it finally tips over, then to stand the penny on end (this takes a steady hand and a little practice) and record which side is showing after pounding the table. These are three different processes, and they do not yield the same results.

Fourth, random processes produce patterns. I sometimes ask my students to mentally flip a coin and record the results as a sequence of letters (e.g., “HTTHHTHT”). Then I have them actually flip a coin and record the results. If the sequences are long enough, I can almost always tell them which is which. The sequences imagined by the students tend to have too few runs of consecutive heads or tails. The sequences based on real coin flips usually include several heads in a row. People not familiar with randomness are often surprised at the patterns that result and assume that the process must not have been random when they perceive a pattern. Our eyes and minds are drawn to similarities and patterns—even those that are produced purely randomly. This can lead us to draw false conclusions from coincidences of all sorts.

Consider the image in Figure 1. It was constructed using a computer to randomly throw 300 darts at a square board. Every position on the board was equally likely to be hit by a dart. This does not, however, mean that the dots are evenly spaced. There are 100 smaller squares. The average is three dots per square. But your eye is likely drawn to some clusters and voids. My eye also catches a graceful downward swoop in the lower part of the upper left quarter. All of this is exactly what we should expect from this random process. If we repeated this experiment, we should expect similar results. Several of the smaller squares would be empty and some others would have two or three times the average number of dots, but these clusters and voids would appear in different places.

Finally, randomness can be used to produce patterns intentionally. Consider the two pictures in Figure 2. You may think the two pictures are identical, but they are not. However, they were each constructed using the same random process:

1. Start at the lower left corner of the big triangle.
2. Randomly choose one of the three corners of the big triangle.
3. Move half way to that corner, placing a dot at the new location.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, 50,000 times.

The first few steps of this process for each image are illustrated in Figure 3. Although the final images look very similar, the route taken to get there is very different. In fact, the only point the two images have in common is the starting point. As the creator of the program that generated these images, I knew full well that the result would resemble a fractal image known to mathematicians as Sierpinski’s Triangle, even though I did not know or exercise any control over how the individual points would be selected.

Despite our familiarity with children’s games and the importance of stochastic models throughout the sciences, many Christians have a reaction to randomness that falls somewhere between uneasy and antagonistic. And yet, those same Christians may well watch the evening news to learn about public opinion polls forecasting upcoming elections, take prescription drugs approved by the FDA based on statistics found in clinical trials, obtain electrical power from a nuclear power plant that uses random fission reactions, and insure their cars with companies that rely on stochastic models to set the rates. The foundation of each of these activities is a thorough understanding of randomness that begins with the simple description above.

So where does the uneasiness come from? Likely it comes from the feeling that taking randomness seriously means not taking God seriously. Or put more strongly, it comes from a fear that believing in randomness means not believing in God. Next week we’ll address that problem by asking the question, “Could God use randomness to achieve his purposes?”

In the 1950s, Cage began using various methods of “casting lots” to determine how elements of his music would be chosen and arranged—principally the Chinese system of I Ching. His controversial program was to distance himself from his own creative process, and he explored many additional strategies to transform the role of “creator” into one of “observer.” Most famous of these was his musical composition, “4.33,” which consisted of a pianist sitting at the instrument doing nothing at all for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, while musician and audience listened to the ambient sounds of the concert hall. Yet contrary to that main thrust of Cage’s work, a description of the activities during the week-long residency at the Mountain Lake Workshop where the New River Watercolor Series were made suggests that choice, constraint, and intention were integral and inescapable tools in putting randomness to work for creative ends.

Here’s art historian and theorist Howard Risatti’s description of Cage’s plan of action for the New River Watercolors, from the website of artist Ray Kass, who runs the Mountain Lake program and was Cage’s collaborator for his work there:

Following upon [a previous (1983) Mountain Lake workshop] “painting experiment,” stones collected from the New River were sorted into three groups according to size, which were separately numbered; numerous and varied brushes were divided into two separately numbered groups; likewise, feathers to paint with, colors and washes, and papers were also divided and numbered. In this way, chance procedures using pages of random numbers that were now generated by a computer program could be used to determine the specific materials utilized for each painting (e.g., which painting instruments, what type of paper and which colors, how many washes, which stones to paint around, where to locate the stones on the paper).

While this list enumerates all the specific variables that Cage and his team submitted to chance, there was an incredible level of personal engagement with the materials: Cage didn’t just show us drawings of where the I Ching said the rocks ought to be, he (or his assistants) placed them on the paper and used them as guides to paint around. Large custom brushes were constructed to lay on washes of color, and even the paints were hand mixed, combined, and diluted according to his desires.

Cage’s use of chance, then, was not a “hands off” process, but neither was it a matter of total control: Cage selected processes to create a space of play between himself and the materials he used: the feather between himself and the paper, for instance, introduced variability of resistance and spring, its ability to hold paint, the width of the line. All of these things were elements of material ‘freedom,’ areas in which Cage asked the stuff he used to make the paintings to take part in the process—to contribute its own identity to the intentional, purposeful, and determined work of creating “based on chance.” This should not be surprising, as all art, all creation that we can observe, happens as a dialectic between materials and the creator, and such engagement and interaction in no way lessons the purpose of making, the end in sight.

Kass’ book The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors, gives a much more complete account of the tools, processes, and interpersonal reactions between Cage, Kass, and the team of student assistants who helped at almost every stage of the creation of the works. The book goes to great length to honor Cage’s ideal of being present in but not controlling the outcomes (not least by nearly always putting words like “choice” in quotation marks), but the description of his process makes the centrality of Cage’s personal aesthetic and artistic motives inescapable, even more than his physical engagement. What comes through perhaps even more than the way Cage intended to allow chance to ‘guide the creative process’ is that way Cage, himself, not only set the parameters of the chance he allowed into the system, not only engaged directly with the materials during the process, but also exercised judgment over the results, both in process and at the end:

“Cage decided he didn’t want the images of the stones to overlap or go off the sides of the paper. To guarantee this restriction, he created conditions and rules to limit their possible placements.” (p. 51)

“For this single painting [Series IV, #1, pictured above] Cage chose to confine the images of the rocks to a lower area of the paper that represented the proportion of the “golden rectangle. . .” (p. 57)

“While “choice” established much of the work’s nature, “chance” highlighted the intrinsic nature of the materials to reveal a refreshing presence.” (p. 59)

“[H]e initially decided to remove [the first painting of Series III] from the group, and then, liking it more, changed his mind and returned it to the group that would be signed.” (p. 56)

This last note is particularly interesting in that it highlights the fact that Cage was claiming these paintings, naming himself as their author, and was attentive to which ones he approved of enough to call his own. There is no way around the fact that Cage was subjectively as well as objectively the maker of these works: the author of the procedures by which they came to be, but well as the judge (and sometimes redeemer) of the results. For Cage, randomness was a tool, no different than the brushes or rocks or paints is that its specific parameters were chosen at the outset, and always used within the context of his over-arching vision. Perhaps we may likewise think of God’s use of chance—constrained by and tuned to the material conditions he established at the birth of the cosmos—as a way to both engage with and allow freedom for the creation itself.

With any work of art it is reasonable to ask, “Is it beautiful?” or more tellingly, “Would I hang this on my wall?” Seeing Cage’s watercolors for first time without any knowledge of the process or the relative fame of Cage himself, some might be intrigued by the structure of the work (the proportions of the golden rectangle, the overlapping stone shapes, the colors of the paint) while others would be completely uninterested, perhaps even after hearing about how they were made and seeing them in the context of the rest of the New River Watercolor series. But if you had been there in the shop as an assistant, or even observer, if you had been party to the relationships that developed even over the few days Cage spent at the Mountain Lake Workshop, your sense of the beauty of these paintings (and perhaps even scraps of paper Cage used to try out brushes or washes), would take on a different meaning, in much the way we treasure the crayon drawings of our children not because they are spectacular art, but because they are tokens of our relationship.

I make that observation to emphasize one other aspect of Cage’s creative process: that Cage was the instigator first and foremost of relationships of creation. His process created not only paintings but the fellowship that developed as the work was being done. That social, interpersonal dimension is what gives the objects a depth of meaning beyond their material composition, and suggests the particular roles humanity has been given by God. One role is to join into the creative process as lesser, but not unimportant co-creators with him; the other is to observe, recognize and celebrate his activity in the world. Where some will see randomness as evidence of an absent God, our knowledge of this most personal and participatory aspect of creation points us to the God who is with us.

With God’s creation as with human art, we may (or may not) marvel at any one particular “work,” or even think the specifics of how it was made are interesting or attractive; but knowledge of and fellowship with the artist transforms our appreciation of the process as well as its results. When we know the maker, we come to recognize and treasure even the most “random” bits of his handiwork, and name them as his, nonetheless.

For Further Reading:

Ray Kass. The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors, 2011.

Website for John Cage Centennial Festival, Washington, DC. September 2012.



]]> Sun, 13 May 12 12:53:04 -0700 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/southern-baptist-voices-a-biologos-response-to-william-dembski-part-i?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/southern-baptist-voices-a-biologos-response-to-william-dembski-part-i?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication We think that God created all living organisms, including humans, through the evolutionary process. But acceptance of creation through evolution does not mean that we reject the notion of a miracle-working God. On the contrary...

This ongoing series grew out of a conversation that Kenneth Keathley, the Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and I had last year. We agreed that he would solicit a set of essays from scholars at Southern Baptist Seminaries who would specifically identify their concerns about what they perceive to be the BioLogos view of creation. In response to this request, Dr. William Dembski of Southwestern Baptist Seminary submitted the essay “Is Darwinism Theologically Neutral?” Although I do not consider my view Darwinian, I am sure that my view and that of others associated with BioLogos is perceived that way by some, so this gives me an opportunity not only to respond to his analysis, but to clarify my position on creation and how I think it is distinct from what Dembski calls “Darwinism."

God’s Activity in Creation

I will begin by summarizing my view of the nature of God’s activity in creation. I think that God created all living organisms, including humans, through the evolutionary process. Acceptance of creation through evolution does not mean that I reject the notion of a miracle-working God. On the contrary, I believe in the miracles of Scripture, and I believe that we’ve experienced God’s supernatural activity in our own lives. I stand in awe of a personal God whose activity is not constrained by natural laws, but also includes supernatural acts.

But what are the natural laws? Are not the the laws of nature simply a description of God’s ongoing and non-ceasing activity in the universe? The Law of Gravity, for example, is not something that God set up in the beginning, thereafter recusing himself from further involvement and exiting from the scene. Instead, the Law of Gravity works as it does because of the ongoing activity of God’s Spirit in the universe. So consistent is that activity that it can be described mathematically through scientific analysis. If God ceased to be active, however, then not only would the matter of this universe no longer function in a way which enables a mathematical description of gravity, matter itself would cease to exist. Paul, referring to Christ, writes “All things are created by him and through him.” Continuing, he goes on to state that “He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). So he created in the beginning and, indeed, “…without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:3) But it doesn’t end there: his ongoing activity is necessary for the universe to function. As the writer to the Hebrews declares “He sustains all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:4) The laws of nature, then, are simply a description of the ongoing activity of God which—because it is so consistent, dependable, and pervasive—points to the trustworthiness of God. Put another way, the activity of God is not restricted to that which we call the supernatural; it is all God’s activity. It is just that some aspects of God’s activity are so consistently repeatable that we can develop laws which describe the regularity of the divine activity which “holds” and “sustains” the universe. This latter type of activity is no less magnificent just because God does it continuously. Indeed, the Psalmist marveled at God’s natural activity and worshipfully reflected upon it.

On the other hand, the God we know through Scripture and personal experience also works in ways that are not mathematically predictable. We call this aspect of God’s action supernatural, and we seem to think of this facet of God’s work—this law-defying activity—as being more God-like. Indeed calling it super-natural suggests we think of it as God’s “turbo-charged” activity. But are not miracles simply a reflection of God choosing to work in a unique, non-customary manner to accomplish God’s purposes in God’s time? (See here for more detail.) When God works in this way, Scripture generally presents such activity in the context and purpose of God’s desire to enter into or renew a relationship with an individual or with a community of people. For example, God’s miraculous involvement in the lives of the elderly couple, Abraham and Sarah, led to the birth of their son, Isaac, and marks the beginning of God’s very special relationship with their descendents. God’s interaction with Moses through the burning bush initiated a new phase of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people as they moved out of slavery and back into the Promised Land. And of course, the supreme examples of miraculous activity are the incarnation, the empty tomb, and the resurrected Body. We worship a personal God whose desire for an ongoing loving relationship with humankind is first laid out in the early chapters of Genesis, but does not end there. In all divine activity—supernatural and natural—God is just being who God is: Creator, Sustainer, and loving Father. There are not two sets of activities, even though we label them “super” and “ordinary.” All are “super,” because all describe the activity of our supernatural God. Some are regular, predictable and ongoing, while other activities of God are not, for reasons often based in the fact that God is lovingly responsive and relational.

The Genesis narrative gives us no details about the mechanism by which God brought the universe and life into existence. God gave the charge: “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky..., “ “Let the waters bring forth…,” “Let the land bring forth…,” “Let the birds multiply…,” and, in response, we are told, it happened. Scripture does not explain how it happened, although as we read God’s other book—the book of nature—we see that God’s work extended over a long period of time. In these details, the Bible does not say whether the “bringing forth” was fulfilled through God’s natural activity (that which is regular, ongoing, and can be described by science) or God’s supernatural activity (that which is not regular and predictable). Given the many examples of supernatural activity in Scripture, we human beings tend to expect that for something as special as creation of stars or new species, supernatural activity would have been required. But we cannot derive this from the scriptural account and, therefore, it is wise not to second-guess how God might have worked based on the Scriptures.

Indeed, the distinction is softened by Scripture itself, which often speaks of God’s natural activity in ways that sound supernatural. For example, the Psalmist writes of God opening his hand to feed the living creatures (Psalm 104:28). We know how God does this and so did the Psalmist—he did it through natural means—but it was still God’s process and God’s provisions. Job speaks of thunder as being the voice of God (Job 40:9). We know God’s natural activity produces thunder and we can describe the laws that are responsible for it, but the fact that we know how it works certainly doesn’t negate the point being made in the book of Job. When the Psalmist describes the heavens as being the work of his fingers (Psalm 8:3), this does not negate astronomy’s description of the regular and ongoing processes that give rise to stars in God’s universe. Those processes are natural, but they are every bit as much God’s activity as if he were to take huge balls of matter and miraculously fashion sparkling stars with his hands.

Still, given that there is extensive supernatural activity exhibited in God’s interaction with Israel and in the life of Jesus, it is entirely possible that he did work supernaturally in fulfilling the creation command, as well. Even though the miracles described in the Bible primarily serve some theological or pastoral purpose that stems from God’s earnest desire to make his presence known and to deepen his relationship with humankind, we should reserve judgment about whether only God’s natural activity was responsible. It is not clear though, that supernatural activity would often be God’s chosen mode of action millions of years before humans had arrived. Thus, we should not assume with certainty that God would choose to use supernatural flurries of activity if his ongoing regular activity—that described through natural laws—would accomplish the same end, albeit over a longer period of time. For all we know, God may prefer slowness, even though we seem to be inclined to think that faster is better. After all, in the history of Israel and the church, God gave no new prophecy for 400 years before the coming of Christ, and it took the early church five centuries to come to a clear—albeit mysterious—understanding of the Trinity. Even now, two thousand years after Christ, we wait for his return.

In the next part, Darrel responds to Dembski’s lists of non-negotiables and clarifies how he sees BioLogos as different from “Darwinism”.

It is reasonably well known among evangelical Christians that all living humans trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a single woman (a so-called “mitochondrial Eve”) and that all living males similarly trace their Y-chromosome DNA back to a single male (a so-called “Y-chromosome Adam”). These individuals are commonly assumed by evangelicals to be the Biblical Adam and Eve, the first humans alive and the progenitors of the entire human race. While most young-earth and old-earth creationist organizations make this claim, perhaps one of the best-known organizations to do so is the old-earth creationist / anti-evolution organization Reasons to Believe, who have produced numerous articles, podcasts, and even entire books on the subject.

In contrast to this common evangelical understanding, the scientific picture is rather different. Mitochondrial Eve, though the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all humans, was but one of a large population living about 180,000 years ago. So too for Y-chromosome Adam: he was also a member of a large population, and he lived about 50,000 years ago. As has been discussed several times here at BioLogos, there are multiple lines of evidence that indicate the human population has never been below around 10,000 members at any time in its history: we branched off as a large population to form our own species.

When presented with the evidence for human population sizes over our evolutionary history, a common point of confusion for evangelicals is how this evidence fits with Mitochondrial Eve. How can we all come from one woman (and one man) but also come from a large population of 10,000 individuals? Aren’t these two observations in conflict?

The answer is no, these lines of evidence fit together. Humans do come from a large population, and all present-day humans do inherit mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA from specific individuals in the past. The reason for the apparent discrepancy lies in how mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA are inherited, as we shall see below.

Mitochondria are organelles responsible for energy conversion, and they contain their own small, circular chromosome that they replicate apart from regular chromosomes in the cell nucleus. Mitochondria are not passed on to progeny through sperm, but only through the egg: as such, mitochondrial DNA is passed on solely through the maternal line. Consider a small pedigree (family tree) below. Circles represent females, males are represented with squares. In this family, one grandmother (the woman at the top right of the pedigree) has passed on her mitochondrial DNA to her sons and daughter, but only her daughter passes it on to the next generation. All individuals who have this grandmother’s mitochondrial DNA are shown in blue:

Conversely, if we examine Y-chromosome inheritance in this same family, we would see that (obviously) women cannot pass it on to their children. Here, the red lines show all males who have descended from a grandfather of the family (the male at the top left of the pedigree):

Now we are ready to examine how these types of DNA are inherited in a larger group, and compare their modes of inheritance with regular chromosomal DNA. While it is not possible to draw out a pedigree for a population of 10,000 individuals, let’s examine a smaller group to see how a specific mitochondrial sequence can “take over” a population of organisms (note that this effect applies to other organisms besides humans that use an XX – XY system of sex chromosomes).

In the family tree below, three mitochondrial DNA variants are present in the first generation (the top row of the pedigree) and a represented with different colors (green, blue and red). Tracing the inheritance of these mitochondrial DNA versions through the family tree shows that all living members of this population (the bottom two rows) have inherited the red version only. The blue and green versions eventually hit a dead end where they were not passed on (either through females who did not have children, or males). As such, all living individuals can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to this group’s “mitochondrial Eve”, the woman at the top right of the tree with the “Mito 3” variant.

Let’s now examine Y-chromosome inheritance patterns in the exact same family tree. Suppose there are three Y chromosome variants present in the first generations:

Here we can see that the current population has inherited its Y-chromosome DNA from one individual as well (variant 1, the red lines) and that the other Y-chromosome variants (blue and green) hit dead ends through males that did not reproduce or men who only had daughters. All living members of the population trace their Y chromosome DNA back to an individual (filled in with yellow) who lived two generations after their most recent matrilineal common ancestor (the woman at the top right).

Now we are ready to examine regular chromosomal inheritance in this same family tree. Genetic variation on chromosomes other than the Y can be passed through either gender without problem, and individuals can have two variants at a time (one on the chromosome inherited from mom, the other on the chromosome inherited from dad). These key differences (compared to how mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes are inherited) produce a very different effect. In this same family, numerous variants (represented by the different colors) have been transmitted to the present generation without loss:

Notice the middle couple in the first generation in the pedigree. This man’s Y chromosome did not make it to the present day, and similarly his wife’s mitochondrial DNA did not make it either (scroll up to see this if you need to refresh your memory). So, they contributed nothing to the current generation, right? Not at all: both of them have passed on regular chromosomal variation to the present day (traced as blue and black lines).

In other words, it would be incorrect to examine this population, determine (correctly) that they share common mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome ancestors, and then go on to conclude that these two individuals were an ancestral pair that started this entire family. We know that this group descends from a larger population, because genetic variation in the present population is too large to explain as coming from one pair (there are five colors, or genetic variants in this population, and the max any one pair could carry is four, with two each).

While this example examines a small family, the same principles apply to larger groups: mitochondrial and Y-chromosome lineages, though interesting, cannot be used to estimate population sizes over time. For that type of work, regular chromosomal variation should be examined. Present day human genetic variation indicates that though we all share a common mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome source, these individuals came from a population of at least 10,000 individuals, and that they lived over 100,000 years apart. If you are interested in examining the evidence for human population sizes, Darrel Falk and I have discussed it previously.

In summary, anti-evolutionary groups, such as Reasons to Believe, that claim that the evidence for Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam supports an ancestral couple for the entire human race are not interpreting the data correctly. They have failed to account for the unique pattern of inheritance these types of DNA have in populations.

Photo courtesy of Lewis Schofield.

Introduction

Today BioLogos begins a series that we think ought to have significant impact on evangelical churches far beyond the local congregation in Arlington, Massachusetts where it was first delivered. A recent editorial in Christianity Today stated that many Christians likely face another "Galileo moment." In that earlier era, finding that the earth moved around the sun--and not the other way around--caused the Church to reorient its understanding of certain scriptural passages. Today, interconnecting strands of evidence all of which lie at the heart of biology, geology, physics and astronomy require segments of the Church to carefully evaluate its magnificent creation narrative--it needs to be certain it is hearing God's message in the way that God intends for it to be understood. It is healthy for the conservative wing of Christianity to be carefully examining the genre of the creation narrative. It has had to do this once before and, it is appropriate to prayerfully seek clarity once again. Christians are truth-seekers and God's Spirit will guide the process as we sincerely seek that wisdom which is from above.

Oratory, at its best, has long been an important key in opening the door to new and dramatically important insights. Pastor David Swaim of Highrock Church in the Boston suburb of Arlington illustrates this poignantly. In fact his sermon is so significant, we've asked permission to post it in serial form so that each of us can deeply reflect on his words in a protracted fashion. We encourage you to let others who are conflicted over this issue know about the series so that they can follow it. Indeed, we believe It will be a great series for small group discussions--we need to lovingly support each other as we seek God's guidance in coming to understand God's truths.

In this sermon, Swaim discusses our belief in God as creator, or “Maker of heaven and earth”, as the Apostle’s Creeds so poetically states. To begin, he reminds us that some passages in the Bible, like the parable of the prodigal son, convey deep truths even though they are not historical accounts. Asking “the wrong questions”—questions that focus on arbitrary details—about such stories can cause us to miss out on their intended message. In a similar way, he says, it is possible that we might be asking the “wrong questions” about the opening chapters of Genesis. In recent years, conflict has erupted because a literal reading of Genesis seems to contradict the findings of science. Swaim suggests, however, that accepting scientific evidence about things like evolution and the age of the earth need not rule out faith in Scripture.

If you wish to jump ahead and hear the sermon in its entirety, you may do so here.

Introduction written by the BioLogos editorial team.

"Maker of Heaven and Earth" (transcript)

One of my favorite parables is that of the lost son. There’s a lot to it. Basically, it’s a story that Jesus told about a young man who insulted his father by demanding his share of the inheritance early, then ran off to spend that money on wild living, and found himself destitute when the money was gone. In desperation, he returned to his father, asking to work as a servant. But instead of being angry, his father joyfully embraced his lost son and threw a huge feast to celebrate his return. It is a great story that Jesus tells to help us understand God’s amazing grace.

How many of you know this story? Raise your hand, if you would. Okay. Now I want to make sure I’m clear…that’s a lot of you…I don’t mean just like, you know it because I just told it to you. I mean you know it because you’ve heard a sermon on this before, or maybe you’ve read it on your own. Raise your hand high if that’s true of you. Wow, still a lot of you. That’s perfect because I actually have a couple of questions maybe you can help me with. You see, it says that the father saw the son while he was still a long way off. Can anybody tell me how far off was the son at that point? Anybody know that? Because, you know, they didn’t have glasses back then, and the father was really old, so how far could he really see? It just doesn’t really add up for me. Can anybody tell me about that? Nobody? Okay. Well I have another question. Maybe this one’s easier. What town did that family live in? Does anybody know that? No? Nobody? What town they lived in? People, this is one of the greatest stories of all time! This is a story that has changed thousands of lives, including many of yours! How can you say that you know this story, that you understand this story, if you don’t even understand these basic facts? Okay, well maybe this is easier. Speaking of family, the Bible’s into family values, so I want to know—where’s the mother? Can anybody tell me? Is this family not intact? What’s wrong? Did they get a divorce maybe? And how come the father ended up with the custody of the sons? And why did they only have two? Families back then had much bigger families. Maybe they just got divorced too early? But I mean he seems so nice—why do you think she left? Anybody know these things? I mean I just don’t get it. You all tell me you know this story, and yet you don’t understand just these simple things about it.

Obviously, my questions miss the whole point of the story. There was no mother, or for that matter, no father or son either. This never actually happened. It’s just a parable. It’s one of the many marvelous stories that Jesus told in order to help us understand something that was hard to see. Now does that make it so that this story isn’t true? No, it is true. This story communicates some of the most important truths in the universe—about God’s nature, and the way that we relate to him. There are many passages in scripture that promise God’s love, or praise God’s love, or even try to explain God’s love. But this passage helps us grasp that truth in a way that’s much more effectively communicated than just through direct reporting. This way helps us feel it. This event never happened, but it’s one of the truest stories in the world. And what a shame for someone to dismiss it as irrelevant because it’s not literal history, or miss the point by asking the wrong kinds of questions.

Now I bring this up because just like my questions miss the point of the lost son parable, so, I fear, many of us ask the wrong questions about the beginning of the book of Genesis, which we read from just a few minutes ago. Not only does this generate needless confusion and division, it also makes us miss the point, miss the life-changing truths that we could see if we asked the right questions. Right now we’re in a sermon series studying the Apostle’s Creed, an ancient declaration of faith in the God of the Bible. And today, we’re considering the word “creator.” So, Genesis seemed like the right place to go.

Like the story of the lost son, most of you know the basic outline: God created the universe in six days and then napped on the seventh (so those of you who nap through my sermons every Sunday, you’re in good company!). But by adding up all the names of the people mentioned in Genesis, and throughout the rest of the Bible, seventeenth century Bishop Ussher determined that the creation of Adam and Eve, and everything else, happened in 4,004 BC—about 6,000 years ago. And that’s great. But you’re probably also aware that this creates some tension with contemporary scientists who suggest a different timeline. Considering the evidence offered by the size and expansion rate of the universe, plate tectonics, fossil evidence, and genetics, their best guess is that the universe was created by a big bang about 13 billion years ago, the earth appeared about 4.5 billion years ago, and the earliest humans existed about 200,000 years ago. In the past 300 years, this has become a very heated debate. Apparently, we need to choose whether we believe in science or in scripture. At least that’s the claim made by the most strident voices on each side, so the general population seems to have accepted that if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution, and if you believe in evolution then you can’t believe in God.

This topic arouses passions and anxieties in many people, including some in this room. No matter what your perspective is, I’m probably going to say something today that you’ll disagree with, and might even make you angry. There’ll be plenty of time for you to set me straight in the coming weeks. But for the next half hour, in order to allow the possibility that we might hear something new, or even learn from the Holy Spirit, let’s lay aside our defensiveness so that we can at least consider why we are so attached to whatever ideas we have, and evaluate whether our devotion to one truth may be blinding us to others. As scientists have discovered more and more evidence supporting the basic evolutionary theory outlined in Darwin’s Origin of Species, Christians have responded in a variety of ways.

Science has been right about so many things, so some Christians have embraced evolution and felt forced to abandon their trust, not only in the truth of Scripture, but also in the God it describes. Other Christians, including many renowned scientists, have fought back by pointing out the many flaws in evolutionary theory and proposing alternative theories of their own. These include Young Earth Creation, which asserts that the earth was created in six days six thousand years ago, and offers thoughtful explanations to reconcile the findings of science with the words of Genesis 1. Old Earth Creationists do the same thing, but contend that each of the days in Genesis could represent an epoch, or a million years, or whatever amount of time, instead of just a 24-hour day. This is linguistically legitimate—it’s a fine interpretation of the Hebrew word “day” in Genesis—and it recognizes that it’s hard to measure a day before the invention of the sun in day four, anyway. So, Old Earth Creationism opens up many possibilities to reconcile scientific claims about the age of the earth with a literal interpretation of Genesis. Theistic Evolution takes further steps to accommodate evolution while still honoring God as the one who created heaven and earth and everything in them through the evolutionary process. This is attractive because it eliminates the conflict between science and scripture, but it requires a very different way of reading Genesis. They suggest that, like I did with the parable of the prodigal son earlier, perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions about Genesis so that we’re inventing an unnecessary argument, and even worse, we’re also missing what the first chapters of Genesis really are all about.

In the next installment, to be posted tomorrow, Pastor Swaim goes on to discuss the Genesis passage in detail.

]]> Mon, 17 Oct 11 08:00:03 -0700 David Swaim http://biologos.org/blog/evolution-is-god-just-playing-dice?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/evolution-is-god-just-playing-dice?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication With his standard panache, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued strenuously that evolution had no inherent directionality. We are mere accidents; a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree". This article first appeared on The Huffington Post.

"Reply the tape a million times ... and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again" (Stephen Jay Gould from "Wonderful Life", 1989 p. 289, Harvard University Press.).

With his standard panache, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued strenuously that evolution had no inherent directionality. It was a cosmic crapshoot - in no way destined to produce anything complex, self-conscious or human. We are mere accidents; a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree" ("Wonderful Life" p. 291). Highly fortunate indeed! Eons ago, a dinosaur-dominated earth held little promise for mammalian ascendancy (let alone primates or humans). Our distant ancestors might have remained little more than scurrying nuisances nipping at the feet of giants if not for a most unlikely calamity - a massive meteor strike which swept away the dinos and forever altered the earth's bio-saga. Who would have guessed?

Evolution's capricious nature seemed to represent a severe stumbling block for the Abrahamaic religious traditions. In their narrative, humans represented the culmination of God's creative work - the very purpose for creation itself. But evolution is an awfully shoddy way of enacting a divine plan. Gould delighted in annoying the faithful by emphasizing this very point:

"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce" ("The Panda's Thumb", 1980, pp. 20-1).

Theologians, however, were quick to point out that the chance element in evolution was neither new nor necessarily contrary to the Judeo-Christian view of God. Human history was replete with chance; evolution only extended the theme. Moreover, chance allowed for freedom - a virtue high on God's agenda. However theologically sound these retorts may have been, their force was often lost on the average believer. The accidental nature of human existence provided just another reason to reject evolution altogether in order to preserve God's special concern for humanity.

Gould was a talented science writer, but he overplayed evolution's whimsy. Increasingly, science is showing that the evolutionary process has many built in constraints which limit its possibilities and bias its pathways. Take, for example, the ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence - the tendency for highly diverse species to independently evolve similar adaptive (analogous, not homologous) traits. Most of us are familiar with the saber-toothed tiger, the scourge of our hominin ancestors. Less familiar are a group of South American marsupials called the thylacosmilids who independently evolved similar protruding saber-teeth. Convergence can also be seen in a number of specifically human traits. For example, we share a mode of locomotion, bipedalism, with birds, kangaroos, and some dinos. The lateralized and convoluted structure of our brains can also be found in octopi, this despite the fact that vertebrates and cephalopods diverged from one another over 450 million years ago.

In his book "Life's Solution" (2003, Cambridge Press) Cambridge Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris documents scores of examples of convergent evolution from insect body designs to the social systems of dolphins and chimpanzees (both fission-fusion). The important lesson is that there are only a limited number of ways that evolution can solve the adaptive problems posed by the earth's ecosystems. Time and again, evolution stumbles upon the same general design features from which to fashion adaptive traits.

Now add to this the Baldwin effect - an idea originally proposed in 1896 wherein organisms are posited to actively shape their own selective forces. For example, suppose some fairly intelligent primates begin fashioning tools, giving them access to new resources and a competitive advantage over non-tool users. Any genetic predisposition facilitating tool use would also be positively selected.

A severe limitation on Baldwin effects has always been the unpredictability of genetic mutation. For any heritable genetic changes to occur (so the thinking has always been) our tool wielding primate would just have to wait around and hope for a lucky "tool use" mutation to pop up. But maybe not. Two recent books, Jablonka and Lamb's "Evolution in Four Dimensions" (2005 MIT press) and Kirschner and Gerhart's "The Plausibility of Life" (2005, Yale University Press) discuss connections between recent work in genetics and Baldwinian processes. What if the primate's tool use actually raised the probability that a tool-relevant genetic change would take place which could then be passed along to offspring?

Recent genetic research (in a field called epigenetics) shows that experiences occurring over one's lifetime can produce heritable genetic changes. For example, mice exposed to two weeks of environmental enrichment (more social interaction, activity, novel objects to explore) show evidence of enhanced memory function (not surprising). More surprising is that their offspring also show evidence of enhanced memory even though they were never exposed to environmental enrichment (Journal of Neuroscience, 29, p. 1496). Thus, the increased environmental stimulation created a genetic change in the parents that was then transmitted to offspring. This change appears to involved altered patterns of gene regulation (how genes are turned on and off during development). Similar effects have been noted in humans (see European Journal of Human Genetics, 14, p. 159).

Convergence, epigenetic inheritance, and Baldwin effects are only a few of the mechanisms serving as directional constraints on evolution's pathways. In his review of the various factors affecting the evolutionary process, anthropologist Melvin Konner concludes:

"There are no intrinsic driving factors in evolution, but there are intrinsic constraints and canalized paths along which either evolution or development may more easily proceed" ("The Evolution of Childhood," Harvard Press, 2010, p. 59, emphasis in original).

Of course, none of these constraining factors guarantee our arrival on the evolutionary stage. They do, however, raise the odds that in time a complex, rational, self-aware creature capable of entertaining both scientific and religious ideas might emerge.

The more we understand evolution, the less it seems like neither the bogeyman that creationists fear nor the universal God-dissolving acid some atheists crave.

While these are indeed complex questions, some of the problems do stem from misunderstandings about what randomness means in a scientific sense and what role it plays in evolution. To help clarify some of these details, we offer these resources.

The “Randomness” installment of our Distinctions series (first posted earlier this year) looks at some of the basic misconceptions about the role of randomness in evolution. While it is understood by many simply to mean blind, undirected and purposeless, in truth, randomness is far more complex and awe-inspiring than this overly-simplified definition. Whether through genetic mutations or the combinations that occur between sperm and eggs, these processes can be seen as the continual unfolding of something that is decidedly not random--creation itself. Randomness, in essence, generates certainty. This is further illustrated in the second video.

In the clip “Randomness” from the upcoming film A Leap of Truth by Ryan Pettey, Richard Colling, Ard Louis, and John Polkinghorne offer several examples of random processes leading to order rather than disorder. As Dr. Louis points out, the scientific definition of “randomness” is quite different from our everyday understanding of the word. In fact, random generation is the most efficient way to generate complexity. Polkinghorne further notes that we live in a world where the balance of random mutations is almost perfectly tuned for fruitful life on Earth. This, we learn, is God's process: Randomness given time, can lead to that which is nearly certain.

This is beautifully illustrated in the following re-post from last year. Here, in a blog called "That's Random," Kathryn Applegate offers two examples of random motion leading to certainty in the process of assembling a virus. Because random processes can lead to that which is almost certain, it is not at all surprising that this has frequently been used by God over billions of years to create order out of chaos--God's creation, by God's way, in God's time.

That's Random

You hear it all the time: “That’s so random!” When used by people of my generation, the word “random” can simply mean “cool” or “surprising.” Or it can mean something like “disconnected,” as in the phrase, “I had a random thought” (which returns 189,000 hits on Google, by the way—random!).

Despite this usage, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability, and that it often implies a lack of conscious intentionality. But what do mathematicians and scientists mean when they say something is random? Can a random process lead to an ordered, even predictable outcome? Is there evidence that God makes use of random processes to fulfill his creative purposes?

These are big questions, and we won’t address them all today. But I think randomness is an important topic to cover for two reasons: 1) it is integral to many processes in biology (and math, physics, chemistry, etc.), and 2) it is commonly misunderstood to be incompatible with Christianity.

As I said above, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability. If you pick a card “at random” from a shuffled deck, you have a small probability of drawing an ace (4 out of 52, or a 7.7% chance). If you flip a coin, you have an equal probability of getting heads or tails.

Randomness also seems to imply a lack of intentionality or purposefulness. After all, you might hope for an ace when you draw a card, but you can’t choose one on purpose. You might call heads when you flip a coin, but you can’t know beforehand what the outcome will be. Thus the outcome is indeterminate, but is it purposeless? Not necessarily. Indeterminacy simply means the result cannot be predicted from the outset.

It should be noted that indeterminacy does not imply that God does not have foreknowledge of future events. Christians ought not to be uncomfortable with the idea of God interacting with his creation through chance. We often describe a seemingly-random (i.e. unplanned by us) sequence of events as being “providential,” or planned by God. A good introduction to the way divine action could drive physical processes can be found in this Question.

In biology, it is very hard or impossible to calculate precise probabilities for most processes, so when we say a process is random, we typically mean it is extremely unpredictable. Eventually we will discuss randomness within biological evolution, but first we must consider some simpler processes, like the self-assembly of a virus.

Viruses are remarkably efficient entities. Coiled tightly within a protein-based shell is a small amount of DNA needed for self-replication. The shell, called a capsid, is made of many repeating protein subunits and is therefore highly symmetrical (see figure). Important biomedical insights have certainly been gleaned from structural studies of viruses, but viruses also teach us about the emergence of order from non-order.

The virus life cycle has four main steps: 1) enter a host cell, 2) hijack the cell’s replication and translation machinery to make many copies of itself, 3) assemble into many virus particles, and 4) exit the cell to invade another host.

When I first learned about this process, I found it very hard to believe it just “happens.” The idea that a bunch of molecules bumping into each other inside a crowded cell could spontaneously assembly into a fully-functional virus seemed a bit far-fetched. Many viral capsids have over 100 protein subunits that must interact with each other in just the right way, or it won’t work. Surely there must be something driving this process, right?

There is! Random motion. I had to see it to believe it. I distinctly remember sitting in class during my first year of graduate school when the professor demonstrated self-assembly of a virus using a 3D model as shown in the following video. In less than 30 seconds, you can watch a jumbled heap of proteins become a beautifully ordered structure.

As the narrator explains, sub-assemblies form and break apart en route to the most stable structure, the full capsid. As the sub-assemblies begin to form, further associations with free subunits become more favorable and as a result occur rapidly, while the final steps may take considerably longer. While the subunits in the model are rigid, in reality the proteins take on multiple conformations, allowing the capsid to “breathe.”

Amazing as it is, the system we just considered—one virus capsid in a jar—is pretty simple. One wonders how self-assembly can happen in a crowded cell, where there are countless other molecules diffusing around, potentially getting in the way. We can’t directly see how it happens in a cell, but we can reconstitute the process in a test tube using different combinations of constituent molecules.

Consider two viruses, where each protein subunit in one virus is the mirror image of the corresponding subunit in the other. Putting the two viruses together by hand would be pretty tricky, because the constituent parts look so similar. But random motion can do the job in short order:

From this model, we can see clearly, in real-time, how distinct complex structures can arise from their parts randomly interacting with one another. Many large viruses also use special scaffolding proteins to assist in the assembly process, and some even use their own genomes as a scaffold. In addition, two closely-related viruses that happen to infect the same cell can exchange parts to create a new virus. This is one way viruses can evolve quickly to evade the host’s immune system.

Here we have seen how viruses demonstrate a principle inherent in God’s world—that order can emerge out of chaos from random processes.

Early years

I grew up in northern British Columbia, Canada, in a small town called Terrace, where I spent a lot of time in the woods with my father and brother hunting and fishing. Little did I know how spoiled we were –Terrace and its environs are a world-class destination for outdoor pursuits, especially fishing. As a hunter, my father was always interested in patterns in nature: what animals fed on, where they moved at certain times, and so on. Even as a child I can remember being similarly interested in how nature worked. Often, while dad fished, I was the one brandishing a net, bucket at the ready, to see what critters I could scoop up and examine. While my peers at school wanted to be astronauts and firemen, I dreamed of being a scientist some day.

My local church setting was pretty much a wash when it came to science. Science was not held up as a potential vocation, but neither was it denigrated as suspect. Creation science did not seem to be a priority, but rather global missions. As such, science–faith issues were seldom, if ever, discussed in the church I grew up in. I can vaguely recall one dust-up over eschatology, which was perhaps the first time I realized that not all Christians agree on everything when it comes to interpreting the Bible. I cannot, however, recall any similar discussion about the means by which God created.

High school

Despite evolution being almost a complete non-issue in my local church, I seemed to acquire a generic, evangelical, anti-evolutionary position by default. Certainly I knew of no Christians who accepted it, and I can still recall the feeling of dread I would get even at hearing the word evolution spoken aloud. That word, in my mind, was effectively synonymous with atheism. Fortunately, even in high school biology class evolution seemed to be a complete non-issue too, for as far as I can recall evolution was not a subject I was exposed to in high school. In fact, in high school I found biology to be intensely boring – it seemed to me to be mere regurgitation of information. Chemistry and physics seemed much more interesting, and I suspect now the reason for the appeal they held for me then was that they were taught from their underlying principles: atomic theory, Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. What was missing was the theoretical underpinnings of biology: a way to organize the laundry list of information into a context. It would be a long time before I realized that evolution was the theoretical underpinning that was missing from my biology experience. Given my dread of the topic, had this been pressed on me in high school I may have never pursued a career in biology.

As a high school student I had left behind my childhood desire to be a scientist. After all, I knew no scientists, and had no notion of how one might become one. In my small-town, northern Canadian setting, a medical doctor was about as close as one came to a scientific career that I was aware of. Accordingly, I set my sights on medicine, and off I went to the University of British Columbia in the fall of 1992. Biology seemed a natural choice for an aspiring doctor, so that was what I chose.

One church incident that I do recall with great clarity happened just before I left for university. There were several recent grads in the congregation: some were headed to Bible College, and others, such as myself, were off to “secular” universities. Our congregation had a time of prayer for all of us, but the contrast was stark: prayers of thanksgiving and blessing for those bible-school bound, but for those of us heading into the lion’s den, prayers of supplication that we not lose our faith in the process. I can remember steeling myself for the upcoming battle, where professors tried to snare me with their atheistic teachings and peers likewise pressured me to give up my faith. One battle I knew was coming was the evolution one: certainly, as a biology student, this would be one of the challenges I would have to face.

University 101

To my delight, I found that university was not going to require me to hold my breath spiritually for four years. Soon I was involved with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and enjoying the friendship of many other Christian students. Biology, however, remained boring and laundry-list like. My grades in chemistry and physics were still higher than those within my declared major of biology. The one bright spot was that evolution barely seemed to rate a mention except in passing. Certainly no compelling evidence for evolution was ever mentioned – professors seemed too intent on teaching the details of their fields to provide a wider evolutionary context. Even the introductory survey courses seemed more intent on a mere description of biodiversity rather than any detailed understanding of how that diversity arose. I did note that there was a 400-level evolution course, but thankfully it was an optional elective. Avoiding the evolution issue was easier than I had thought: I simply skipped taking that elective.

At the start of my third year, with my grades still marginal for medical school, I somehow decided to upgrade into a biology “honors” student. This meant two things: working on an undergraduate research thesis with a faculty member, and attending an “honors seminar” class with other students in the same program.

Experiencing my first taste of research was electrifying: here at last was genuine science! Not long after, my upper-level classes seemed a lot more interesting and relevant, and also much easier. My grades improved dramatically, and medical school looked to be a live option once more – except for the fact that my childhood interest in science had blossomed again.

Standing against evolution

The undergraduate thesis seminar class included an assignment that required students to familiarize themselves with the research of one of the professors in the department. As the list of potential faculty and their research interests was read, one caught my attention: the work of Dolph Schluter on experimental evolution. I decided to take the opportunity to score a few hits on the so-called “theory” by signing up for this topic. What followed can only be described now as a painful memory: full of ignorance and confidence, I trotted out every long-refuted, anti-evolutionary argument in the book (in fact, if memory serves, my “research” was nothing beyond skimming one anti-evolutionary book for its arguments). I remember that the class was quite engaged by the presentation, and there was some vigorous back-and-forth with some of the students who knew the science better than I because of their research work. I can only imagine what the thesis class faculty supervisor was thinking at the time. The worst part was that Dolph himself arrived early for his own presentation to the class, which was to follow my own. As such, he was able to hear a good portion of my nonsense.

Fortunately for me, Dolph had no interest in what would have been a very easy dressing-down. Rather, he restrained himself to a few words to the rest of the class on their lack of knowledge. Personally, I thought I had scored a victory for the faith, against the evils of evolution.

In the next post in this series, I’ll describe my introduction to, and enthusiastic embrace of, the Intelligent Design Movement.

Suppose you have some marbles rolling around randomly at the bottom of a box. Now take the box and tilt it so that the marbles roll to one corner. Jiggle a bit so that they come to rest in a reasonably stable pattern and, more than likely, some of the marbles will collect into a "snowflake" configuration such as this:

This arrangement is referred to as "hexagonal closest packing;" something often seen in honeycombs or oranges stacked at a fruit stand. There's nothing magical about this: it's simply gravity pushing spherical objects into a stable pattern. A little order out of chaos. But that's the deceiving part according to University of Delaware physicist Stephen Barr. In his book, "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith" (2003, University of Norte Dame Press, pp. 77-78), Barr uses this simple example to show that what looks like order out of chaos is actually order out of even greater order. This, he contends, ought to give one pause before concluding that science has unquestionably vindicated a materialistic view of the universe.

So how do the marbles show order out of greater order? The orderliness of the snowflake pattern can be measured by counting its symmetries -- that is, how many ways can you rotate it and still have the identical pattern. For example, if rotated five degrees it won't be exactly the same, but if rotated 60 degrees it will be. Rotating the pattern in sixty degree increments (60º, 120º, 180º, etc.) produces identical patterns, thus it has six symmetries. But since you can flip it and then repeat the rotations the actual total comes to 12 symmetries.

The underlying reason for these 12 symmetries is the spherical shape of the marbles. If you started with other shapes, say seven forks or mini Jack Daniels bottles or whatever, they would not have fallen into the snowflake pattern to begin with and thus the symmetries (if any) would be different. So these 12 symmetries arise because of the particular properties of spheres being acted upon by gravity. So how many symmetries do spheres have? Since you can rotate a sphere by any amount and it will still be the same, it has an infinite number of symmetries. Thus, the order seen at the "higher" snowflake level (12 symmetries) is only a miniscule fraction of the unseen order at the "deeper," spherical level (infinite symmetry).

The marble example has a more natural analogue in crystal formation. When the pressure and temperature are right, crystals form in substances such as diamond, calcite or mica. The crystals arrange themselves into a lattice pattern. A diamond lattice, for example, is called a "hex-octahedral group," and it contains 48 symmetries. However, the order of the diamond lattice is but a small fraction of the order found in the carbon atoms composing the lattice. As with the marbles, there is a "spherical" sameness about the carbon atoms that lead to a nearly infinite number of symmetries at the atomic level. Thus, once again, the order that we observe at the higher crystal level is but a minute fraction of what exists at the deeper atomic level.

This idea that the deeper we go in the physical universe the more order we find is repeated over and over again, according to Barr, in such things as naturally occurring geometric patterns (e.g. a nautilus shell), planetary motions and the properties of elementary particles (protons, neutrons, etc.). In every case the observable order is only a tiny surface manifestation of an even greater order at a deeper, more obscure level. Order does not arise from chaos, nor does it arise from nothing. It arises from an even richer order "below."

So from where does the deepest order originate? From a naturalistic standpoint, we don't know because we have yet to uncover nature's deepest laws. However, even if we reveal these laws, the question of why they give rise to such profound order will still remain a puzzle. The pervasive order of our universe appears to go beyond necessity into the gratuitous. "Life could have evolved just as it did even if there had been occasional lapses in the orderliness of nature," claims Barr (p. 108). Life has already managed to survive numerous cosmic, climatic and ecological challenges; occasional small-scale violations of the law of conservation or angular momentum would unlikely have proved prohibitive.

To avoid an immaterial Creator as the ultimate explanation for the universe's deep order, the materialist, argues Barr, must either accept the laws of physics as "brute facts" (i.e. they just are and we don't ask why they are) or he (she) must appeal to chance (usually in the form of multiple universes with variable laws of physics). If ours is but one of an infinity of universes (or possibly "domains" within a multiverse) then simply by chance a universe will arise with physical laws such as ours. While this is certainly possible, a critical point Barr emphasizes is that proposing an infinity of unobservable entities is no more scientifically defensible than proposing a single unobservable one (God). Indeed, sustaining a purely materialistic view of the universe, Barr asserts, requires repeatedly pleading for a multiplicity of envisioned infinities -- of universes, planets, durations, realities, observers, etc. -- a habit that severely undercuts the materialist position.

"...the materialist, in order to avoid drawing unpalatable conclusions from scientific discoveries, has to postulate unobservable infinities of things. How ironic that, having renounced belief in God because God is not material or observable ... the atheist may be driven to postulate not one but an infinitude of unobservables in the material world itself!" (p. 75).

Ultimate questions, such as the ones Barr poses, stand outside of scientific certainty and even if they undermine materialism, they do not immediately or necessarily validate the Christian God or any God for that matter. But I don't take Barr's arguments as religious evangelism. Rather, I take them as scientific evangelism. The spirit of inquiry animates science. That spirit is equally violated whether we stop asking questions out of fear that God might be the answer or we stop out of fear that God might not be the answer. Just keep asking questions and follow honestly where the argument leads.