Q&A: Evolution and God
Evolution and God
Question
In one of the lessons on faith, you talked about the possibility that evolution makes a guiding hand unnecessary, because everything is random, and you argued that even if everything is random, it still happens within a framework of laws that some kind of entity has to create. You added that in truth it may not be random at all but deterministic; it’s just that we don’t know all the data, and therefore we can’t calculate evolution. But if we could calculate it, then already at the Big Bang we would know that after such-and-such a number of years there would be human beings. And on that point you argued that then there certainly has to be a guiding hand. I didn’t understand that claim, because why would the fact that at the Big Bang we could in principle (if we knew the data) calculate that human beings would appear prove more strongly that there is a guiding hand than if it were random? Because to claim that if it is deterministic then necessarily someone wanted it that way seems, on the face of it, circular, since first you have to assume that there is someone. (I hope I explained myself well.)
And as an aside, I thought that regarding causality and quantum theory, it is דווקא the atheists who use a God of the gaps, because they use the fact that we don’t know the causes in quantum mechanics as proof that not everything needs a cause, whereas if we do more research maybe we’ll discover the causes.
Answer
Let me sharpen it a bit more, because you didn’t describe it precisely. My claim is that even if there is an explanation in terms of the laws for how life was formed, that does not refute the physicotheological proof, because the proof comes from the existence of the laws, even though they contain random components. The claim you quote from me is that if the process were completely deterministic (with no random component), and it still led in the direction of life and human beings and so on, then the proof for the existence of God would be stronger. In that situation everything is clearly directed toward a goal, and it is evident that there is a guiding hand. My point is that even if there is a random component, the laws that direct it also constitute evidence.
They are not relying on the fact that we do not know the cause, but on the claim that there is no cause. The argument is that future research will not discover causes, because there is no cause.
Discussion on Answer
I’ll go over it one more time, although I don’t understand what’s unclear.
There is a very surprising result here (the formation of life), which is unlikely to happen without a guiding hand. From that it follows that there is probably a Creator. That was the situation until Darwin, and the proof was very strong. When Darwin proposed evolution, people thought (and still think) that this refuted the proof, because it showed that even through a random process (without a guiding hand) one can reach this result.
Now I come and argue that it did not refute it, because the proof comes from the existence of those laws that govern the random process. But this is still a weaker argument than the argument that would exist if the progress toward the result were deterministic. When something happens in a purposive way and advances directly toward a goal, it is clear that someone is managing the process and wants that outcome. By contrast, when something proceeds randomly but in the end still reaches the result, it is less clear that there is a guiding hand. There is more room to say that the result was achieved by chance.
Very simple.
The fact that the whole process is deterministic rather than random can at most tell me something about the creator—maybe that he wanted something to come out at the end of the process, namely a human being and not some other complex thing—but it can’t tell me that there is a creator any more than if the process were random. Because the question under discussion is whether there is a creator or whether everything happened by itself. And if I think, for whatever reason, that such laws could happen by themselves, then just as well there could be a set of laws that would randomly lead to the existence of complex life, and a set of laws that would deterministically lead to complex life. That doesn’t reveal anything more, and it doesn’t increase the likelihood that such a process was created by someone.