Does evolution concern the question of belief in God?

With God’s help

NRG – 2014

In this article I will try to draw lines to the image of the issue of the relationship between evolution and faith, which tends to confuse almost everyone who deals with it, both believers and atheists. Religious priests and preachers debate with atheist priests and preachers. Both sides speak and write with the same fanatical fervor, so it is no wonder that both sides do not always adhere to intellectual honesty. Each side tries to narrow the steps of the members of the opposing faction, and to deny them the right to express themselves. Each side accuses the other of lies, heresy, primitivism, a threat to morality, enlightenment and social order (and, strictly speaking, also of the murder of Arlozorov). To be honest, sometimes I get the feeling that both are right about this. Either way, viewers of these polemics come away embarrassed.

This confusion creates in many a feeling that we must choose whether to accept the neo-Darwinian scientific findings, or to prefer belief in God. There is one thing on which both atheists and creationists agree: belief in God and neo-Darwinism do not go together. I will try to show here that this common assumption is wrong. There is no need to choose. A person can be a believer in God and at the same time accept neo-Darwinism. Furthermore, in my opinion, these two are certainly reasonable, and therefore this combination is not only a possible position but the obvious perception. Nevertheless, my goal here is not to clarify whether or not there is a God. I focus here mainly on clarifying the role of neo-Darwinism in this debate. The brevity of the platform dictates a degree of schematicity in the discussion, but nevertheless I will try to the extent possible to contribute my contribution to making some order out of the mess.[1]

In the last third of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin published his book The Origin of Species. Since then, his theory, which has become very sophisticated in the meantime, has received many theoretical and empirical reinforcements. The accepted picture in the scientific world today is called neo-Darwinism. Its essence speaks of three components that can be described very schematically as follows: A. The formation of mutations (different protein chains that are created from distortions, random or not, in existing protein chains). Each such mutation is realized as a living creature (this is the phenotype, whose protein structure is essentially its genome). B. Natural selection (the struggle for survival of the creatures created from these mutations). In the end, the most "successful" survive. C. Genetics. The creatures that survive pass on their traits (including, of course, the successful ones created by natural selection) to their descendants. Now the process repeats itself, and from the chain created in the previous stage, mutations are again created that undergo natural selection and genetics, and so on. This is essentially how we came into the world (so that's it, it's not the stork).

Evolution and neo-Darwinism are scientific theories, and ostensibly we must examine their validity with scientific tools. However, Darwin himself already felt several questions concerning the theological implications of his theory, and indeed to this day many attack evolution and neo-Darwinism on theological, rather than necessarily scientific, grounds. The debate on these questions has not subsided to this day.

One type of question is a contradiction between the neo-Darwinian picture and the biblical account of creation (the beginning of Genesis). A second type is a contradiction between neo-Darwinism and belief in God per se. There is also a third type of question, which concerns the nature of God (good or evil) and the nature of his management of reality (providence), as these emerge from the neo-Darwinian picture.

Hundreds of years before the outbreak of evolution, deep in the Middle Ages, the biblical description of creation was perceived by many commentators as a description that was not necessarily historical-factual but rather more allegorical. Therefore, with regard to the first type of questions, I will content myself here with referring to the words of Maimonides in his book Moreh Hanebuchim, which outlines a principled path for such encounters. Maimonides writes that our perception of reality should not be determined by tradition or the Bible, but by scientific tools. Where science has spoken, there is no obstacle to an allegorical interpretation of the Bible (and in particular the beginning of the Book of Genesis, which, as we have already seen from the introduction, is perceived as a type of allegory). Questions of the third type depend on various theological concepts that there is no room here to detail, and therefore I will not deal with them here either. From now on, I will focus on questions of the second type: the relationship between neo-Darwinism and belief in God.

Contrary to popular belief, the interface between belief in God and evolution is limited. In fact, there is not much connection between these two issues. There is no obstacle to believing in God as the creator and leader of the world (at least in a very specific sense) while holding onto a neo-Darwinian picture. To the same extent, there is no obstacle to being an atheist who does not accept neo-Darwinism. The only interface between the two issues is in relation to the physico-theological evidence for the existence of God. That is all. For the sake of continuing the discussion, I will now present it briefly.

One of the central arguments in the philosophical-theological tradition for the existence of God is what Immanuel Kant called the "physico-theological argument." This argument comes in various shades and formulations, but in general it can be said that it is an argument based on the special nature of reality. A priest named William Paley, about forty years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, made the following argument:[2] "Suppose I am walking in a field and my foot bumps into a rock. If I were asked how the rock got there, I could answer that to the best of my knowledge it may have been there forever... But suppose I find a clock on the ground, and they ask me how the clock got there. Obviously I would not think of answering as before, that to the best of my knowledge the clock had been there forever." Reality is certainly more complex than a clock, says Paley, and therefore reality also requires us to conclude that it has a creator who created it. A well-known and more modern formulation is that of the famous twentieth-century British physicist and astronomer (that is, after Darwin), Fred Hoyle, who wrote that the chance of a protein chain forming by chance (he calculated it) is much lower than the chance that a strong wind passing over a junkyard will create a Boeing aircraft from them. These two arguments are nothing more than different formulations of the same conclusion: the complex nature of reality leads us to the conclusion that it has a component. The assumption underlying this inference is that something complex cannot come into being without a guiding hand. Neo-Darwinism attacks this assumption.

Hoyle's Boeing argument has been met with scorn and ridicule, and is now called "Hoyle's fallacy" by many atheists. The reason for this is that neo-Darwinism shows the possibility of the formation of a complex system without a guiding external hand, thereby undermining the assumption that something complex requires such a hand. The difference between life and Hoyle's airplane or Paley's clock is that life arises in a gradual process that includes the formation of mutations, natural selection, and genetic inheritance. This process is not a one-time accidental formation of a protein chain or a living organism, as Hoyle assumes ("the improbable mountain", in Dawkins's formulation), but rather, a slope that expresses the decomposition of the process (the mountain) into many very small steps, each of which is certainly possible. In general terms, neo-Darwinism proposes a mechanism for the formation of complex organisms without a guiding external hand, thereby challenging the assumption underlying the physico-theological view.

The conclusion is that even if we accept the neo-Darwinist picture (which, to the best of my judgment, has no scientific substitute at the moment), and even if we accept the claim (which is incorrect in my opinion. See below) that neo-Darwinism is there to refute the premise of the physico-theological argument, at most we are in a situation in which one piece of evidence for the existence of God has failed. Does this mean that there is no God? Not necessarily. First, even when the argument fails, the conclusion does not necessarily fail. At most, it becomes unnecessary. Second, even if one piece of evidence fails, there are several other pieces of evidence left. One valid piece of evidence is enough to adopt the conclusion. Furthermore, many will say that belief in God does not require evidence at all. In their view, this is a basic intuition that can be adopted even without philosophical evidence. Just as an example, there is no evidence that what I see in front of me actually exists. Is that why I cannot believe that it really exists? Many of us will say that this is a basic intuition, and that is enough for them to adopt it. In any case, even if you do not accept all of this and come to the conclusion that there is indeed no God, my intention here is not to prove or convince of the existence of God. My purpose here is only to explain the (limited) place of neo-Darwinism in the theological debate.

Does neo-Darwinism actually refute the physico-theological argument? It turns out that even in this limited dimension, the situation is not as simple as the priests of evolutionary atheism tend to say. Neo-Darwinism does not really perform even this limited role. Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent priests of neo-Darwinist atheism, writes that before the emergence of evolution, we had to adopt belief in God (because of the physico-theological argument), but neo-Darwinism refutes it definitively. We have already discussed one of its errors: even if neo-Darwinism refutes the physico-theological argument, it does not lead to an atheistic position. Now it seems that it has another error: neo-Darwinism does not even refute the physico-theological argument. Moreover, to a large extent, it even enhances its power. The conclusion regarding the existence of a guiding hand is only strengthened in the neo-Darwinian picture.

The evolutionary process takes place within a framework of rigid laws. We usually assume that these laws are the laws of physics (without entering into the question of reductionism here). This means that any small change in the laws of physics would prevent the evolutionary process (the so-called fine tuning). So, what neo-Darwinism actually offers us is at most a reversal of the physico-theological view: instead of asking how life is created, we should ask how the special laws of nature that enable the formation of life came into being.

Let's take an example to illustrate the point. Suppose we saw Paley's clock lying on the sand in front of us, and we ask how this clock was created. And suppose the answer we get is that there is some natural process that can be described by a set of laws, which takes us from a collection of parts to a complex clock (or from a collection of spare parts to an airplane). In essence, it is a clock (or airplane) factory that operates according to a set of laws. Does this make it unnecessary to assume that this clock has a manufacturer? Of course not. These laws simply describe how it works and the manufacturer's plan. If someone were to explain to us the laws of operation of a computer, would this make it unnecessary to conclude that this computer has a manufacturer? Of course not. The laws only describe how it works and the manufacturer's plans. This is exactly the case with regard to the creation of life. Neo-Darwinism offers us a description using a few basic laws, which describe the creation of life. This is a description of how the manufacturer works. Here too, the description through laws does not concern the question of whether or not there is a manufacturer.

The brevity of the subject does not allow me to go into finer points. Therefore, I will only note that even if the laws of physics had existed from time immemorial (to the extent that one can speak of "from time immemorial" in the context of the Big Bang), the correspondence between them (which allows for the formation of life) still requires an explanation. Not a causal explanation, but an explanation in terms of sufficient reason.[3] It is important to understand that such an explanation cannot be given in terms of evolution, since we do not know the formation, random or otherwise, of systems of natural laws, nor natural selection and their genetics. Furthermore, even if such an explanation were found, by its very nature it would be formulated in terms of other, second-order natural laws (which are responsible for the formation of first-order systems of natural laws). Now the question will move on to these natural laws (who created them and how their nature allows for the formation of special and adapted natural laws such as in our world). The only way to deal with this argument is through what is known as the "anthropic argument." This argument suggests that there may have been many experiments in which systems of different natural laws were created, and we are in the same experiment that succeeded in creating life like ours. Beyond the other problems with this bizarre proposal, one of the fundamental problems with it is that it is based on the assumption of the existence of multitudes of universes that none of us have observed and for which we have no real basis to assume that they exist (except for very authoritative statements by some priests of atheism). Of course, we do not know the processes of the formation of universes and/or systems of natural laws. If these proposals are the alternative of "common sense," or science, to the "primitive" and unfounded conclusion about the existence of a Creator for our world, then it seems to me that we have somewhat lost the axis responsible for reason and/or honesty here.

So far we have seen that neo-Darwinism does not refute the physico-theological argument. At most, it deals with describing the way the Creator works, but not with His actual existence. However, a further look shows that neo-Darwinism even strengthens this argument. Let us now compare two scenarios: A. An entire universe like ours is created all at once in a single moment. B. There is a system of natural laws that are synchronized in such a way that when we start with a small point of matter, in a process that begins with the Big Bang and continues through abiogenesis (the formation of the first protein chains) we arrive at life as we know it today. Now I will ask the intelligent reader: Which of these two possibilities points more strongly to the existence of a guiding hand? It seems to me that the second is undoubtedly the case. The first possibility can perhaps be narrowly interpreted as a successful case. But the establishment of a set of laws that clearly guides the world over about fifteen billion years from a point of matter straight to the complexities and life as we know it today clearly indicates a deliberate hand with a very impressive intelligence that created the laws that govern this process. They are the ones responsible for the evolutionary process reaching its current state. We have found that the less steep the slope up the improbable mountain, the stronger the physico-theological view. This is the third mistake (and there are many others) of Dawkins and his friends.

In conclusion, I will add an important clarification here. The physico-theological argument can be challenged in other ways (although, as far as I understand, it is a very good argument) that I have not touched on here. For example, even if we accept the physico-theological argument, what does the philosophical God presented here (a creator, and perhaps also the administrator of the world) have to do with the religious God? There are also other arguments that challenge the body of the physico-theological argument in various ways. Some will argue that an explanation in terms of God cannot be considered an explanation (because the concept of God is not really understood and familiar to us). Others will say that the conclusion about the existence of a creator is only required in situations where we know from our experience that things of the type we are observing should have a creator (like a watch, or an airplane).[4] There are also those who claim that there is nothing special about life as we know it now, and that many other systems of laws would have produced other kinds of complex creatures. All of these, in my opinion, are false claims, but I will not go into them here because my goal in this article was to clarify the role of neo-Darwinism in this debate. The conclusion is that neo-Darwinism is irrelevant to the theological debate in any way. Those who do not accept the physico-theological evidence for these or other reasons could have rejected it (mistakenly, in my opinion) even in the tenth century. And those who do accept it should only be strengthened in their conclusions in the era after Darwin. My arguments in this article should not be dealt with through attacks on the physico-theological argument. In order to formulate a position on what I have said, the reader must ask himself whether, in his opinion, neo-Darwinism makes any difference to this matter. That, and that alone, is what I have been dealing with here.

[1] For more information, I refer the reader to my book, God Plays Dice – What Evolution Really Tells Us, Yedioth Books, 2011.

[2] The translation is taken from the "Freedom" website, but this should not be seen as a recommendation of this website. To the best of my judgment, not many websites present so many errors of the Sr. and so little open-mindedness, as is found there. There are much more successful presentations (even if, in my opinion, incorrect) of atheist positions.

[3] On this matter, you can also see my book, The Sciences of Freedom, Yedioth Sfarim 2013, in the sixth chapter, mainly from page 201 onwards.

[4] See the last appendix of God's books on this, Playing with Dice.