Crowns of Glory and Honor

29 Monday Jun 2015

It seems to me that marriage has a very specific historical and cultural, specifically religious, understanding that has never, at least until very recently, had anything whatsoever to do with interpersonal love and the like. Marriage, for most of human history, has been about child bearing, community building, legitimacy, and inheritance—affairs of the state, so to speak. Of course, within the Church, which was the state in the West and the East for a time, marriage was also symbolic, of salvation, divine love, the Trinity, etc, but even still St Paul thought it of little worth “it is better to marry than to burn with lust.” (1 Cor. 7.9)

Indeed the RCC didn’t make it officially a sacrament until the 12th century. The Reformers didn’t even think it worthy of being made a sacrament when they broke from the Church as it didn’t meet their requirements of being founded by Jesus, preserved by the Apostles, and codified by the early Church. And, moreover, outside of marriage’s symbolic function in the Church, while spiritually refreshing, was miniscule in importance when compared to the weightier matters of inheritance and procreation, which were the primary drivers of marriage’s societal significance.

So, this rather modern idea that marriage is about romantic love is nonsensical. It’s not. Never has been. Of course friendship and interpersonal love have a part to play in marriage, no question, but only insofar as they accompany any relationship worth having, sexual or not. But romantic love is to be distinguished from marriage in much the same way that a person’s appearance is to be distinguished from that person.

However, what is happening in modern society is the secularizing of a religious custom by re-defining marriage as solely constituted by romantic love, as if the historical, cultural, specifically religious, context matters not, and all the responses in protest to this idea by means of natural law and the like miss the boat entirely, for that approach concedes the initial assumption—that marriage is, entirely, about earthly or human love, that is, interpersonal love, romantic love, eros. Given that assumption, there is no compelling secular argument against gay marriage, unless I am unaware of persuasive sociological data that clearly demonstrates the adverse social effects of gay sexual relationships (some recent data has been interpreted as demonstrating the adverse social effects of gay sexual relationships, but it is not clear to me what that data says).

Of course, there is no need to concede the assumption because it is plainly false, not only as a matter of history and culture, but also as a matter of a logically consistent metaphysics. For romantic love, not only in marriage, but in itself, only makes sense within the context of a sensible metaphysics with an accompanying spiritual symbolism; that is, when sexual and interpersonal love is directed toward some transcendental end, some deeper truth—the Good, for instance.

Indeed the irony here is that the best articulation of marriage being about romantic love is a distinctly Christian or, at the very least, religious or Platonic or what have you apology. That is, human love apologetics is a coherent elucidation of marriage only within a sufficiently religious or mystical metaphysics, where the destination of all love and desire is love and desire as such, that is, Love itself, the Good itself, Beauty itself, that is, God, properly understood.

Now, sure, the religious symbolism of marriage can be appropriated for secular purposes, as much religious symbolism has been over the centuries, but love, as modern society understands it, only makes sense when operating within some appropriate metaphysical system, where the signposts of that system point, beyond themselves, to deeper, more transcendent truths. Otherwise, love is mere sexual attraction or the gratification of desire or sensual pleasure or what have you. Consequently, it is no longer love, at least not the sort of love that modern society talks about in bad novels and superficial magazines and dreadful romantic comedies—unifying, conquering, social-norm-defying, dignity bestowing, and so on, love, the love of the Beatles song lyric, “all you need is love,” the supererogatory, extraordinary, non-obligatory kind of love.

Naturally, most of modern society agrees—“these are consenting adults who love each other” is the popular sentiment amongst folks of my generation concerning marriage, love and private choice being emphasized here.

But that sort of love, the dignity bestowing kind, is not a lucid and coherent concept when stripped of its metaphysical referents, love is not a metaphysical signification that can be situated in just any old metaphysical system. For instance, how could a naturalistic, materialistic understanding of love preserve the popular, common sense conviction about marriage as a dignity bestowing, love obsessed, eternal institution? It could not, at least not and remain logically consistent.

Indeed it is not so much that marriage, as a legal and social custom, bestows dignity on the persons being married—that is not the secular understanding of marriage at all—but that interpersonal love, romantic love, constitutes marriage as such, and, as a result, bestows dignity on married couples. Modern society thinks that marriage is synonymous with human love, with some legal documents and societal rituals attached. And, although in practice that statement is difficult to justify, I understand the sentiment—in the Orthodox Church, for instance, marriage is not a legal contract. But my point is simply that that understanding of love and marriage is only clear and coherent within the appropriate metaphysics, particularly a religious metaphysic.

However, what I am not saying is that people cannot be non-religious and be in love or religious and not be in love or what have you. I am merely stating that any proper understanding of love, be it romantic or not, must have some element of the transcendent; some final end or purpose, some telos, towards which it is striving, and this directedness toward the Agape immanent in and beyond all things can happen for atheists and theists alike, if it could not, it would not be love.

But to strip love of its metaphysical referents is to strip love of its meaning and its power. It can no longer bestow dignity, mend broken families, give aid to the poor, help the sick, and so forth, because that sort of love requires some non-natural element, some Logos or Agape immanent in all things or at least some transcendental end to be the ultimate destination of all desire as such. For instance, we don’t say that sexual attraction or the gratification of desire or sensual pleasure is dignity bestowing or can change the world for the better, do we? No. In fact, we probably say the opposite. But we do say that love can do those things.

If love is nothing more than biology, it cannot be what we think it is, and it cannot do what we want it to do. It cannot change the world, because it can never point beyond itself to the true reality; it cannot fundamentally alter our vision of the world; it cannot escape the baser instincts and selfish tendencies of our species; it cannot act as our better angels.

Of course, evolutionary origins and genetic analysis and brain mapping may one day explain the neurophysiology of love, but that is just chemical sensations and neuropeptides and what have you, that no more explains love, properly understood, than a bicycle explains how to ride a bicycle. Love inspires self-sacrifice and total commitment to others. Love asks us to go beyond the call of duty, to act in ways that are not morally obligatory, to do the extraordinary, to do things that are not self-serving or instinctual. Indeed love asks us to rebel against our natural drives—to help the poor in Liberia or the dispossessed in Syria or criminals in prison; to love our enemies; to give to those who would steal from us; to love God and man. But scientific theories cannot ask these things of us because science cannot tell us what we ought to do. Scientific theories can predict and explain and unify natural phenomena, but scientific theories cannot act as the Cross on a hill pointing beyond itself to a world filled with love.

But if love carries with it ultimate significance, as the Cross intimates, then its power is limitless, on this point the modernists align themselves with Christ and St. Paul and St. John—love is a world-changer in the appropriate context.

Simply put, human love is not about Eros so much as it is about Agape. Eros is merely an instantiation of Agape, that is, Eros images Agape, Eros participates in Agape, to borrow from Plato. Agape is the essential nature of Eros; agape is the human loves’ essence. Human love, at least the common sense understanding of it, only makes sense within this metaphysical context. And, as such, any conception of marriage must account for this understanding of human love—one cannot infer the desired conclusion from any old set of premises. One cannot get the love of Christ, for instance, from naturalistic premises. And one cannot get marriage as entering a new reality without Christ—no matter the vows; no matter the promises; no matter the contract; no matter how much one person loves the other person.

However, modern society wants to do precisely that: to keep all the good stuff about love but not the metaphysical principles that justify it. Alas…any understanding of marriage that is built on so flimsy an understanding of love is doomed to collapse at the slightest breath of reality.

Of course, I should not be surprised at the banality of our age, where the insatiable thirst for more and more things and more and more desires is shaped and sustained. We are a society obsessed with buying stuff; with gratifying desires; with removing more impediments blocking the gratification of such desires. In such a society, ultimate goods give way to immediate goods. And such a society is, at least implicitly, non-Christian. Our holy texts are bad novels and Amazon; our religious duty is shopping and sex; our faith is private choice.

God becomes just another impediment standing in the way of our pleasure seeking. Christian virtues give way to greed and pride; lust and envy.

Transcendent values have no place in such a society, so they are replaced by price tags and pleasures.

Monkeys and Mud: Evolution, Origins, and Ancestors (Part II)

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by No Man's Land in Early Church, Evolution, Faith

≈ 197 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy, sin

Continuing yesterday’s post.

Original Sin and Polygenism

Ferrara asserts, “…polygenism cannot be reconciled with Genesis unless Genesis is reduced to a fable.”

Well, a genetic bottleneck of only two human beings as recent as the arrival of Homo sapiens would show up in our genomes. And it doesn’t, as studies based on genetic data from the Human Genome Project have shown.

Furthermore, genetic data demonstrate quite plainly, as recent studies have shown, that the genes of Homo sapiens do not originate from only two people in the last few million years of hominins. Beginning with the genetic data of the Human Genome Project, evolutionary geneticists work backwards from the genetic diversity of Homo sapiens to more ancient lineages, confirming in the process that the human population could not have been smaller than about 10,000 individuals. So, there was a population “bottleneck”—a strong indication that there is recent common ancestry in all humans—but it was nowhere near two people, which, among other things, seems to suggest that the evolutionary understanding of polygenism is not polygenism traditionally conceived.

Indeed, it seems very likely, at least from an empirical perspective, that we, modern humans, evolved from a small population, not a pair in a garden, but, of that small population, only a limited subset left descendants (or could leave descendants), which is not at all unexpected, given all genealogy works in this way, with most everyone leaving no ultimate descendants, and a very precious few capable of patrimony and matrimony. So, it is perfectly plausible that only a select few “Adams” and “Eves” left ultimate descendants, which makes it more reasonable to speculate that there was a metaphysically distinct male and female pair that was the origin of sin, as Edward Feser imagines.

Of course, the above theological approach requires a figurative understanding of early Genesis. But the idea that the Creation narrative is a fable is not at all a novel idea anyway.

I should mention, though, that I prefer the term “myth” over “fable”. And I prefer the ancient understanding of myth over the modern one. Indeed in modern culture the term ‘myth’ seems to be synonymous with untrue or silly or what have you, but for the ancients it meant something altogether different: myth was a way of revealing existential facts; a way of articulating a metaphysical vision about the world; a way for a culture to tell itself about itself, although, perhaps, my preference for and understanding of myth only reveals my metaphysical prejudices. Oh well… I digress.

Many scholars and theologians—since the early days of Christianity—have recognized the allegorical nature of Genesis. Indeed many present-day Christians probably interpret several passages in Genesis non-literally without even realizing it (Gen. 3.9—Adam and Eve hid from God).

For example, within the very first passages of Genesis two different Creation narratives are offered up. In Chapter 1 through the early verses of Chapter 2 one gets the standard creation narrative, in which God creates man and woman on the sixth day after light, earth, fish, and so forth. However, in chapter 2 verse 4, a different narrative begins, in which God creates man, then messes about with the garden and creates animals, and only after this is completed, does God create woman from Adam’s rib.

Of course, these two differing narratives are not contradictory, if the two narratives are understood as only attempting to express a deep existential fact about reality—that the world was created by God and that we are his creatures. But I would argue that they cannot both be historically and scientifically correct, if all of Genesis is seen as descriptive fact.

The Bible is inerrant in spiritual truth, in matters of faith, but not in matters which are of little significance to the moral and spiritual vision of the Christian life. Hence Augustine, in his commentary on Genesis, asserted, “In the matter of the shape of heaven, the sacred writers did not wish to teach men facts that could be of no avail for their salvation.”

Augustine is echoed by Joseph Ratzinger: “The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God…does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are.”

Augustine even worked out a doctrine of rationes seminales (seminal principles) that attempted to explain the origin of species and solve the problem of Genesis 1.3-19 where it says that God creates light on the first day but the Sun on the fourth day. In fact, Augustine went so far as to comment that the words “light” and “days” have no literal understanding in this context, which is probably the most popular exegetical conviction in all of western Christianity.

Moreover, Augustine’s doctrine of rationes seminales could conceivably be extended into a doctrine of the evolution of species, because it postulates that, while all things were created at once, all things did not exist fully formed simultaneously. But I digress.

The exegesis of Augustine, Ratzinger, and so many others ranging from the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas and Philo and the Alexandrian Fathers to Origen and Ambrose to Aquinas and Anselm to C.S. Lewis and Karl Barth, reminds us, I think, that the Bible is about faith in God; it is not an authority on scientific matters; its purpose is not scientific, but religious.

Furthermore, classical Christianity does not even understand the creation of the world as some origin or evolution of the universe as such. The question of creation is not about some event or events that occurred at the Big Bang or in some primordial soup or in the incorporation of DNA and proteins or the change from hominid to Adam or any kind of change at all, for change implies existence, the classical understanding of creation has always been concerned with the timeless relation “between logical possibility and logical necessity, the contingent and the necessary, the conditioned and the unconditioned,” as Hart stated. “The mystical,” Wittgenstein once remarked, “is not how the world is but that it is.”

Creation, properly understood, serves to remind us that “every creature exists by grace, because by grace he was created,” as Anselm noted. That is, God created the universe and all that therein is. Hence, we owe our existence to him. It is by his grace that we exist at all.

Of course, the rub for Mr. Ferrara, as it is for many Christians, is that polygenism seems to pose a threat to the doctrine of original sin—the sinful state of humanity as a result of the Fall, which is precisely the sort of thing that, prima facie, could be of significance to the moral and spiritual vision of the Christian life. Perhaps, if one is overly attached to some strange pre-Fall period of original innocence when man knew God perfectly, then this line of thought may have some merit (although God wasn’t trying to create mechanical automatons, was he?). But, alas, the orthodox Christian need not commit herself to the Augustinian tradition on original sin, which is a poor understanding of Pauline theology anyway.

Indeed the Augustinian understanding of original sin was nothing if not a theological attempt to guarantee that man rather than God would be held responsible for the Fall; a noble attempt to uphold the goodness of God in much the same way Hermogenes was motivated to maintain God created the world out of preexisting matter to save God from the responsibility of evil. But, much like Tertullian reminded Hermogenes, there are better ways to achieve this same end. Indeed ways that salvage common sense and science, and in Tertullian’s case, God, as classical Christianity understands him.

In fact, John Hick reminds us, in Evil and the God of Love, that even before the time of Augustine an additional reply to creation and sin had already been put forward within the emerging Christian tradition, one that depended upon the Greek-speaking Fathers, of whom the most influential was St. Irenaeus.

Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, according to Hick, distinguished two stages of the creation of mankind. In the first stage, man was brought into existence as a rational agent endowed with the ability to experience great moral and spiritual development. For Irenaeus, man was not the innocent pre-fallen Adam and Eve of the Augustinian tradition, but an under-developed creature, at the start of a long journey of spiritual and moral development.

In the second stage, the present stage, mankind is slowly but surely becoming reshaped through the grace of God and his or her own free will into “children of God.” Irenaeus explains that in the first stage man is made in the image of God and in the second stage being made into the likeness of God, using Genesis 1.26 as the basis for this understanding.

The Irenaean understanding of creation is not one where God’s purpose was to create some pre-Fall utopian society, where mankind would experience an abundance of pleasure and knowledge. Rather the world is a place of transformation, where man struggles with the tasks of the mundane, of ordinary existence, of both pleasure and pain, in order that he or she may become “a child of God.”

There is also Karl Barth’s theological expounding, channeling his inner Pelagius, of the “sin of the origin,” in Christ and Adam, wherein he claims that one must see Christ, not Adam, as the de jure head of all humanity. That is, Adam, and all his descendants, must be viewed through the lens of Christ and the Cross; man must not be contemplated in terms of Adam and his sin, rather man must be explicated in terms of the Logos himself in the man Jesus. Of course, one can look back, in the throes of sentimentality, to the Garden, but there is nothing in Adam of any real theological import. He was merely the first sinner, a first among equals. Adam does not confer anything upon us, not even sin. We do not sin because we are followers of Adam or because we have been “tainted” by him, but because we freely choose to sin. Adam’s actions do not condemn mankind, our own actions condemn us, Barth thinks, for we are all sinners, and sin is implied in our very existence.

For me, I think we are all of us part of Adam’s rebellion against God, and as such we suffer the consequences of Adam’s sin, but we do not bear the guilt of that sin, for Adam’s sin is his own. We don’t inherit Adam’s guilt but his rebellion. And rebellion need not, necessarily, manifest itself in the body of one man or one woman. Indeed rebellion is usually a collective endeavor. So I see no dire moral or spiritual need to interpret the names “Adam” and “Eve” literally in order that the consequences of rebellion—sin and death—be passed on to the rest of humanity.

However, for some Roman Catholics, the Magisterium has spoken on the matter of polygenism and original sin, and any attempt at reconciling the two is an exercise in futility, I have been told. Well, for those faithful Catholics, I offer, as I don’t see how I could explain it any better, the inimitable Edward Feser’s perspective:

“…that I there rehearsed a proposal developed by Mike Flynn and Kenneth Kemp to the effect that we need to distinguish the notion of a creature which is human in a strict metaphysical sense from that of a creature which is “human” merely in a looser, purely physiological sense. The latter sort of creature would be more or less just like us in its bodily attributes but would lack our intellectual powers, which are incorporeal. In short, it would lack a human soul. Hence, though genetically it would appear human, it would not be a rational animal and thus not be human in the strict metaphysical sense. Now, this physiologically “human” but non-rational sort of creature is essentially what Pius XII, John Paul II, and the philosophers and theologians quoted above have in mind when they speak of a scenario in which the human body arises via evolutionary processes…Call this pair “Adam” and “Eve.” Adam and Eve have descendents, and God infuses into each of them rational souls of their own, so that they too are human in the strict metaphysical sense. Suppose that some of these descendents interbreed with creatures of the non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” sort. The offspring that result would also have rational souls since they have Adam and Eve as ancestors (even if they also have non-rational creatures as ancestors). This interbreeding carries on for some time, but eventually the population of non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” creatures dies out, leaving only those creatures who are human in the strict metaphysical sense.”

“On this scenario, the modern human population has the genes it does because it is descended from this group of several thousand individuals, initially only two of whom had rational or human souls. But only those later individuals who had this pair among their ancestors (even if they also had as ancestors members of the original group which did not have human souls) have descendents living today. In that sense, every modern human is both descended from an original population of several thousand and from an original pair. There is no contradiction, because the claim that modern humans are descended from an original pair does not entail that they received all their genes from that pair alone.”

“Of course, this is speculative. No one is claiming to know that this is actually what happened, or that Catholic teaching requires this specific scenario. The point is just that it shows, in a way consistent with what Catholic orthodoxy and Thomistic philosophy allow vis-à-vis evolution, that the genetic evidence is not in fact in conflict with the doctrine of original sin.”

The point here, though, is not to argue for one theological rendition over another, but simply to illustrate that there are numerous ways of cashing out original sin without reference to a traditionally historical Adam and Eve. And these interpretations of the “sin of the origin” are perfectly consonant with classical Christianity, properly understood.

Scientific Fables and Legends

However, with all that said, I do tend to agree with Mr. Ferrara that when “science” begins to speculate about the whole of experience, although these speculations may be initiated in a science, it is no longer science as such. It becomes something of a fable in its own right, when some scientific concept or template or theory that has been defined, tested, improved, and so forth, within a very specific context, is taken out of that context, expanded, and then utilized to explain questions and aspects of reality far beyond the scope of its original context, it becomes more fable than science. In this sense, Dawkinsian ND is a fable, a naturalistic fable of sorts, because it takes the TOE out of its context and uses it to articulate a vision about all of metaphysical reality.

Of course, this is not to say that biological theory cannot contribute something to the understanding of human nature and, perhaps, even provide valuable theological insights. But in reductionist, speculative, etc ND forms it functions essentially as legend, and an illogical legend at that—when it speaks on the mysteries of God, existence, consciousness, intentionality, higher causality, rationality of the world, and so forth—only a deep confusion could cause one to mistake these things as admitting of a material or natural solution.

Bad “God”: An Atrophied Metaphysics

Occasionally, when I am thinking about these peculiar debates over evolution amongst my fellow Christians, my mind shifts to metaphysics. Indeed I think, like so many before me, from Abbot to Teilhard, that in evolutionary thought there exists a most magnificent theory of the imaginative possibilities of life, as Dickinson opined, one deserving of a God from “whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things,” as Augustine put it, a God both beyond being and being itself.

For many Christian theologians, the TOE represents a reverie of nature’s enigma that might well rescue the present-age from the idiotic Cartesian analogies and doltish anthropomorphisms that have been passed-down from a historical period where mechanistic philosophies had some genuine relevance to the physics and metaphysics of the day.

However, as Hart argues, we remain trapped in the mechanistic metaphysics of a bygone age, where evolution has been aligned with a mechanistic understanding of nature, and natural selection has simply assumed the position previously played by “God”. Nature for most of us is simply an enormous gadget either created by an “Intelligent Designer” or exists, miraculously, as a brute fact. Traditional theological problems about being, higher causality, consciousness, rational structure of the world, and so forth have now been replaced by pseudo-theological problems of a distinctly mechanical nature about physical origins, biological complexity, and so on.

Indeed I find it difficult to contain my dismay when someone like Mr. Ferrara claims one can find evidence of God by identifying individual examples of seeming causal breakdown in the processes and mechanisms of the natural world—e.g., animal body plans or DNA or eukaryotic cells or what have you—which necessitates some occult “invisible hand” directing the show, so to speak.

My disquiet is the result of how God is treated here. As if he is just some notable physical force or law of nature or physical constant found somewhere out there in nature, among all the other forces and laws and constants: not that in whom everything lives and moves and has its being, not the only true and eternal essence, the only true reality, but a law among other laws, a thing among other things; a god among all other gods, encompassed within some physical system. If this is true, then right reason enjoins that one look for evidence of the Divine in nature’s own physical structure. But that approach for discovering God is almost like looking for evidence of the mathematician in the formal symbols on a chalkboard—refusing to countenance that you will not find the mathematician there as some symbol or formula or theorem, not even where there are eraser marks, but that the mathematician is still there, on the chalkboard, in every symbol and equation and is, in fact, the source of the work’s existence—God, as Plotinus noted, “cannot be any existing thing, but is prior to all existents.”

To be sure, as Hart points out, if there is some demiurge “out there,” assembling nucleotides and eukaryotic cells and animal body plans and what have you, then that entity, is a contingent being, a part of the physical order, another part among parts, but not the summum bonum, not the apex of being, not the one who is “wholly everywhere…nothing contain the whole of thee,” as Augustine declared, and, consequently, not God, and that is Mr. Ferrara’s heresy—reducing God to a being among beings.

Of course, if such a demiurge does not exist, then who cares? The existence or non-existence of some demiurge “out there” has nothing meaningful to say about the mysteries of being and truth. The question of being is not a question for biology or physics. In fact, it is not even a question those disciplines can meaningfully ask.

However, the question about the origin and evolution of life is relevant to scientific research and theorizing in disciplines ranging from geology and botany to biogeography and genetics. It is an empirical question, not a theological one. And any attempt to disprove evolution is going to have to puzzle out the multitude of fossils, the genetic comparisons between species, the physiological comparisons between species, biogeography, embryology, vestigial structures, DNA sequencing, the predictions about where fossils will be found, the predictions when common ancestors will appear in the fossil record, the predictions about what they will look like, and many other areas of inquiry. As well as formulate a rival theory that explains and predicts the data better than the TOE, and no comparable theory, in this regard, has been forthcoming.

Again, the question of whether animal man was generated by a mechanical process in a day or by a process of growth continuing through the millennia; or whether, in that process or that day, one Adam or two Adams or no Adams were produced, is quite irrelevant to the one who believes God breathes divine life into man, for one who believes that in God we live, move, and have our being, for that person every day is a creative day. And he or she can say with the same confidence of Teilhard de Chardin that “even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.”

Monkeys and Mud: Evolution, Origins, and Ancestors (Part I)

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by No Man's Land in Evolution, Faith

≈ 79 Comments

The romance between Christianity and the physical sciences has not been a painless one since at least the Renaissance. From the 17^th century to the 21^st century Christianity and physical science have quarreled over astronom^y,geology (twice), biology, psychology, and cosmology. Of course, the most serious squabble between science and Christianity, since the 19^th century, has been over Darwinian evolution, and the original article and my response to it, demonstrates, I think, how divided Christianity has been over the idea that life on earth has evolved.

In an article entitled, “The Neo-Catholic Planet of the Apes,” Christopher Ferrara, insists that neo-Darwinism (ND), especially as popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheist writers, and the theory of evolution (TOE) generally, undermine the whole of the Christian faith. And in articulating this vision Mr. Ferrara has a three-fold argument: (i) the TOE is empirically false and conceptually muddled, (ii) the TOE cannot be reconciled with the plain statements of Genesis’ early passages and doctrines that have been born from those passages, especially original sin, and (iii) the denial of design in nature is virtually the denial of God—this conviction is tacitly assumed throughout the article.

What can one say about this argument, beyond the obvious historical fact that it is, more or less, unchanged in form since at least 1860—although, Bishop Wilberforce’s historical portrait on the subject of evolution is not at all flattering, he was not an obscurantist, for he denounced the TOE for what it was in his own time—largely conjecture.

I should state, at the outset, that I agree with Mr. Ferrara that ND, understood in reductionist and scientific dualist terms, is incompatible with Christianity—it is, more or less, a speculative naturalistic metaphysical thesis after all. However, reductionist, dualist, and purely speculative forms of ND, by which I mean theses that advocate a metaphysics of naturalistic materialism as the message of evolution, is not the TOE, which, simply put, is Darwin’s theory of evolution, as developed in the light of Mendelian genetics and our understanding of the place of DNA in the transmission of inherited information. And Mr. Ferrara seems determined to equate the logical incoherence and mendaciousness of reductionist, scientific dualist, and adaptationist forms of ND with the TOE, as his article intimates rather clearly, which I think is an inappropriate and intellectually second-rate, exceedingly second-rate really, isomorphism, ceteris paribus.

Truth be told, overlooking the false synonymy, Ferrara’s implicit argument (iii) advocates the notion that God can be located somewhere out there in the cosmos, in the natural order, a cause among causes, which very well may be heresy, at least when Ferrara’s argument is interpreted in terms of classical Christianity (I’ll expound on this in the second post). But let us try to meet the initial thrust of his argument, (i) and (ii), on its own terms.

For starters, at least in my own research, Richard Dawkins is in the minority among evolutionary biologists in thinking that the explanation of complex design is the central problem in evolutionary biology, although many adherents of the New Atheism probably agree with Dawkins on this point (which is unsurprising given their metaphysical commitments.) I say that because no one even knows what a good fit between organisms and environment means as a question, much less explain it.

Of course, most evolutionary biologists believe natural selection to be responsible for complex design, as complex design is popularly understood, but complex design is a rather vague concept with no clear way to understand it in a biological sense. Not to mention, Dawkins’ explanation of complex design rests on a number of tendentious assumptions about the causal primacy of genes and an inherently problematic adaptationism—for instance, a lock and key understanding of niches. Of course, Dawkins is an imbecile (The Selfish Gene has to be the worst “science” book ever written. And it is certainly the worst metaphor in the literature for how evolution works), so there’s that.

The point is, though, that the problem of explaining complex design is a conceptual confusion. Indeed, the problem of explaining complex design is only a problem for a specific understanding of the TOE—reductionist, dualist, and purely speculative neo-Darwinism, where metaphysical commitments control scientific hypotheses. Insofar as that is true, I would argue that the problem of explaining complex design is a pseudo-problem for most of evolutionary biology—it works grammatically as a question but it is meaningless nonetheless.

Also, as mentioned above, Mr. Ferrara equates a very specific understanding of neo-Darwinism (e.g., the understanding of Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris et al) with the TOE, and that is a false equivalence relation. That sort of neo-Darwinism does not equal the theory of evolution. And I don’t see how it could. Reductionist, dualist, and purely speculative forms of ND are basically metaphysical theses, and adaptationist forms of ND have serious conceptual and empirical difficulties, but the TOE does not equal those explanations of evolutionary history, although the TOE has certain metaphysical assumptions built into it—regularity of nature, intelligibility of the world, and so forth and its own problems. But the central tenets of Dawkinsian ND, so to speak, have more to do with a naturalist metaphysics than with a strictly scientific account of natural phenomena—ideas about determinism, materialism, ultimate purpose, etc.

The TOE, as Kim Sterelny and Griffiths suppose, on the other hand, merely “stipulates, that variation, heritability, differential fitness, and conditions admitting of cumulative selection resulting in selection on organisms, produce gradual change in populations over time. Such gradual change, continued over long periods of time results in both adaptation and differentiation as distinct populations become adapted to distinct environments,” and of course at some point speciation occurs, usually when two populations are reproductively isolated. Of course, there is a lot to unpack in that statement, and some of it is up for debate like the degree to which selection is operative, the nature of speciation, and so on, but the basic idea—life on earth evolved—is not up for debate, and nothing in the scientific literature proposes such a thing.

Yet still others state the TOE even more simply (too simply for my taste) and claim that evolution is simply changes in gene frequencies within populations, which is basically what most reductionist, dualist, and adaptationist neo-Darwinists would claim, although, to my mind, that overestimates the evolutionary “specialness” of the gene—the gene is not the only unit of selection capable of forming lineages over evolutionary time. But I digress.

The point is that the TOE is not a metaphysical thesis, it is not a theory about metaphysical reality, it is simply a theory about the workings of the natural world; it is merely a theory about the process of life’s diversification, about its causes and mechanisms, not some master philosophy about the whole of reality. And, as such, the TOE is of a completely different nature than the propositions of a reductionist and dualist ND. Indeed the TOE is a collection of factual statements, not philosophical ones. Of course, factual questions have repercussions for philosophical views, and so perhaps our digression had a point.

The Fossil Record and Transitional Forms

Mr. Ferrara states, “The innumerable transitional forms preceding emerging new species that Darwin expected the fossil record to show were never forthcoming, even though evolution by small mutations conserved by natural selection would logically produce vastly more transitional than terminal forms.”

Of course, this is true in part. While it is estimated that somewhere between 20 million and 4 billion species have existed on earth in its history, we only have record of about 250,000 or so fossil species, which puts us at possessing around less than 1 percent of the fossil record.

So, yes, the fossil record is incomplete, but the problem is that for the majority, probably around 90 percent, of the history of life, all species were soft-bodied, and soft-bodied parts of plants and animals are not easily fossilized, because once an organism dies, it is usually destroyed by bacteria, weather, other creatures, and so forth. (Think of a dead carcass on the side of the road.) So, very few organisms were and are even fossilized, and of that number even fewer are actually discovered—could you, dear readers, find your buried childhood pets, which is orders of magnitude more likely than finding thousands of millions of years old fossils?

Indeed it is not at all surprising, taking into account the large number of soft-bodied species to have existed and the amount of time involved in the evolution of life on earth, that we don’t have more information on transitional forms.

However, even though the fossil record is tremendously incomplete, we do have enough fossil evidence to give us a good idea about how evolution occurred within lineages, something for which Mr. Ferrara says he has no objection in principle. A few examples:

(a) Over an 8 million year period there is clear evidence in the fossil record that the species Globorotalia conoidea evolved.
(b) Trilobites. Clear evolutionary change in the pygidial ribs.
(c) Pseudocubus vema. Clear evolutionary change in thorax size.

And how lineages broke away from each other. A few examples of transitional forms:

(d) Tiktaalik roseae—intermediate between (lobe-finned fish) Eusthenopteron foordi and (tetrapod) Acanthostega gunnari. This transitional form is noticeable in its limbs and ribs, which has a bone structure between that of the lobe-finned fish and the tetrapod. And there are numerous others between fish and amphibian.
(e) Archaeopteryx lithographica. Intermediate between reptile and bird.
(f) Sinornithousaurus millenii. Intermediate between modern birds and its ancestors.
(g) Microraptor gui and Mei long—more intermediate bird-reptile creatures
(h) The whale fossil record—we have a great fossil record of transitional whales.
(i) Sphecomyrma freyi—transitional ant.
(j) Haikouella lanceolata—transitional snake.
(k) Hyracotherium to Equus—fossil record of the horse
(l) Hundreds of fossil homininds

These examples should make perfectly clear that evolution occurred, and the fossil record demonstrates this by showing gradual change within lineages (a-c), the breaking off of lineages (d-l), and transitional forms (d-l).

The Cambrian “Explosion”

Ferrara continues: “…the “Cambrian explosion,” in which the basic body plans of the animal phyla appear abruptly in the fossil record without prior incipient stages, confounds evolutionists to this day, despite their flimsy attempts to explain away this massive embarrassment for their beloved theory.”

First, there seems to be some scholarly agreement that there was an explosive diversification of animal life early in the Cambrian. However, there is a difference between diversification—number of species—and disparity—more basic body plans. Mr. Ferrara’s understanding of the Cambrian depends upon the latter, and disparity is a rather murky concept. I am not even sure disparity is a real and biologically important property. It seems, at least to me, that disparity is more eisegesis than exegesis, as NT scholars say. That is, more of a projection onto (reading into), than an objective feature of nature (reading out). But even if it is an objective feature of nature, how does one measure disparity? Or how is it genealogically informative? Gould tried to formulate it precisely, so that it might be tested, but failed, does Mr. Ferrara have some clarification on the matter? None is offered in the article, and I doubt any could be.

Second, a number of the creatures found in the Burgess fauna have been reclassified and put in extant phyla. So, the degree to which disparity was greater—more body plans—is questionable indeed, at least among arthopods (insects, crabs, and kin), which is Gould’s exemplar. Indeed the status of this “explosion” remains a matter of controversy—the Precambrian animals only failed to survive to our time, and were soft-bodied, so we haven’t detected them in the fossil record, which gives us the appearance of an explosion, is one famous explanation for the “explosion”. Also, the relation between the Cambrian fauna and the Ediacarian fauna, its predecessor, is highly contested—Edicarian fauna was present worldwide, so there was animal life before the Cambrian.

Third, as Ridley has pointed out, it seems straightforwardly fallacious to infer from features that are currently exemplified to greater disparity in the Cambrian. How do features that are now present have any bearing on greater disparity then? That is, the fact that chelicerates and trilobites look a certain way now does not say anything about greater disparity in Cambrian, because what importance is a trait that allows us to distinguish between chelicerates and trilobites now have to do with disparity in the Cambrian?

Fourth, no one rules out, not even Dawkins, that a major evolutionary change can occur in a single generation—by some wildly advantageous mutation or cataclysmic event or what have you. Everyone just agrees that such changes are exceedingly rare, and that most adaptive change occurs in a long series of small alterations—cumulative selection—as the record of the history of life bears out, even Gould agrees with this aspect of the TOE. And nothing in Mr. Ferrara’s article contradicts that belief.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, the Cambrian explosion has to do primarily with animal life. Single-celled organisms and plant life are excluded. If anything this should diminish any extravagant claim about the diversification of life during the Cambrian; we should be very careful about privileging our evolutionary theory too much in favor of one area of evolution–metazoan. For instance, vascular plants evolved on land after the Cambrian, which means that plant diversity did not peak in the Cambrian. Also, bacterium, the most common organism, has very great disparity, in Gould’s sense, at the present time, given how very different their basic metabolic systems are, so why prejudice our talk about disparity in favor of metazoan evolution? Why not say we have greater disparity in the Holocene than at any other epoch?

Gould, Adaptationism, RNA, and Cells

Ferrara maintains: “…that model is under increasing pressure from revisionists within the evolution establishment who know a loser when they see one. In 1980 the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, then the world’s most renowned evolutionist, reluctantly conceded that it would seem that model “as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.””

But Gould is not challenging evolution as such, but a certain understanding of evolution that places undue importance on natural selection and the causal primacy of genes: adaptationism. For Gould, chance plays a more important role than genes. In fact, chance plays a huge role when populations are small—this is the basic idea of genetic drift. Also, mass extinction looms large in Gould’s thought in explaining evolutionary history. That is, survival is more about good fortune than fitness. As a result, selection plays a less powerful role for Gould, because selection needs a good amount of variation, and Gould thinks the amount of variants available to any population is limited.

In Gould’s mind, as Sterelny has made clear, species spend most of their life never-changing in body or behavior. Evolutionary change happens quickly, in bursts. Species come into existence, remain phenotypically the same, and then either go extinct or break off into other species. This is punctuated equilibrium.

Gould is also skeptical of Dawkins’ gene selectionism, because he doubts genes have a large enough effect on organismal fitness over, say, features of the environment.

So, sure, there are differences within evolutionary theory, between Gould et al and Dawkins et al, but Gould never questions the TOE as such, rather Gould is criticizing certain assumptions of and inferences drawn from the TOE that he thinks are conceptually confused, empirically lacking, and/or methodologically imprudent. Indeed Gould’s biggest criticism of adaptationism might be about its methodology—adaptationists tell just-so stories—a hypothesis about what a trait’s selective history might have been and what function it has now as a result.

However, nowhere does Gould question the basic biological fact that life has evolved over long periods of time.

Yet Ferrara continues: “Evolution’s credibility problem begins at the very beginning of evolutionary time: protein synthesis is impossible without the chromosomal DNA “code,” but DNA depends on proteins for its tightly coiled structure, self-repair, and the direction of protein synthesis itself—a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. Worse, in a cell the DNA code imparts information to RNA for the assembly of proteins by a process called transcription. But how did DNA “evolve” this function without RNA already being present to serve as the transcript, and how did RNA arise without its DNA complement, especially in view of RNA’s highly unstable nature?”

That says nothing about the credibility of evolution as such, it disputes a very bad idea of how evolution works, that is, Dawkins’ gene selectionism. But it does not dispute evolution as such. Indeed it is no real surprise that the first molecule of life was not DNA, it was something like RNA, and that is a well-known fact in evolutionary biology.

Moreover, we know that RNA can play both roles—can have both the information-carrying capacity and the ability to catalyze chemical reactions. Indeed, one of the RNA catalysts that we know about has precisely the sort of activity that would be required at the beginning of life, as Cech and Altman demonstrated. Which is to say, it has the ability to construct other RNA molecules properly. And this discovery solves the chicken-and-egg problem because these RNA molecules—ribozymes—can fill the two roles of heredity and metabolism, roles usually filled by DNA and proteins. So it is perfectly plausible that RNA was serving this function at the beginning of life, so to speak, and other macromolecules like DNA and proteins came along later in the process.

But, of course, we don’t know, exactly, how life began. But we do know that reflexive chemical processes, in the absence of life and in early earth environmental conditions, can give rise to organic compounds, and recent work has demonstrated how ribosyme RNA molecules could have brought about that RNA evolutionary phase, so to speak.

However, Ferrara contends, “…there is the building block of animal life, the eukaryotic cell. Evolutionists have no credible explanation for how mindless processes could produce a biological world-within-a-world…”

Well, to borrow from Ayala, once RNA molecules were configured that could propagate by copying themselves but were susceptible to some error or mutation in the synthesis of new RNA molecules, then natural selection would happen, presumably, leading to more extensive molecular configuration and eventually to cells. First, of course, simple cells like bacteria (prokaryotes), and later to more advanced cells like animals (eukaryotes). One basic kind of prokaryote is the archaebacteria, which have a strange metabolism. This means that archaebacteria can survive in extreme environments and in incredible ways, for example, in deep ocean hydrothermal vents. The other kind is eubacteria, which are the bacteria that live in us and in our food, and the eubacteria are what the eukaryotes branched off from.

Now, as Ayala and Sober have argued, natural selection is just the differential reproduction of differing hereditary variants. So, once there were primitive cells capable of reproduction, some would, in theory, reproduce more effectively than others. Hence the traits of the cells that reproduced more effectively would increase in frequency amongst the population at the expense of those that reproduced less effectively. And the ones that reproduced more effectively were more than likely the ones that had a more precise heredity and more efficient metabolism.

While these occurrences are extraordinary, perhaps, even miraculous, to some extent, there is nothing in the above explanation that requires the intervention of occult forces, and nothing in the explanation violates any aspect of classical Christianity, properly understood.

Part II next…