This article first appeared in Christian Research Journal, volume 35, number 01 (2013). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org

On February 1, 2011, NASA’s Kepler mission team announced that they had discovered 1,235 candidate planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets). Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler mission’s primary science objective is to determine the fraction of Earth-size planets that orbit within the circumstellar habitable zones (CHZs) of their host stars. A terrestrial planet within the CHZ can maintain liquid surface water, a prerequisite for life.

Kepler searches for planets using the photometric transit method, whereby a star dims slightly as a planet crosses between us and the star. This method has been employed successfully with small ground-based telescopes since 1999, but the Kepler telescope is much more sensitive thanks to its location outside Earth’s atmosphere.

What made this announcement truly historic was the discovery of three to six exoplanet candidates less than twice the size of Earth within the CHZs of their host stars. So, now we know for the first time in history that planets comparable in size to Earth orbit other sun-like stars. How common are they? Based on observations of more than one hundred fifty thousand stars during Kepler’s first four months of operation, astronomers estimate that 1 to 3 percent of sun-like stars have planets less than twice the size of Earth and within their CHZs.¹ This result is still preliminary, given the short duration of the observations to date, but ongoing observations in 2012 and 2013 should give us a solid number.

These discoveries have brought back to the fore the ancient questions of life beyond Earth and our status in the universe. Are Earth-like planets rare? Are we alone, or might the universe be teeming with life? What are the broader philosophical and theological implications? We can give answers to these questions with varying degrees of confidence. Let’s take each in turn.

RARE EARTH OR NOT?

The Kepler results are allowing us to begin to answer our first question with some degree of confidence, but we still have a long way to go. The early data are showing that Earth-size planets in the CHZs of sun-like stars are rare. However, a factor of two in the ratio of sizes of terrestrial planets translates into roughly a factor of ten in the ratio of their masses. The candidate planets found by Kepler in the CHZs of their host stars are close to twice the size of Earth. Such “super-Earths” should not be called Earthlike. They should have very different atmospheric and geological properties than Earth.

While Kepler can measure the sizes of exoplanets and their orbits, it cannot determine their shapes. The shape of a planetary orbit is characterized by its eccentricity. This is an important planetary property to know. Large eccentricity values result in less stable climates.

Planets in our solar system are characterized by relatively large circular orbits. Ground-based observations of exoplanets using the Doppler method have shown them to have much more eccentric orbits, on average, than the planets in our solar system. What’s more, many Jovian class exoplanets orbit much closer to their host stars than the Jovian planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) in our solar system. Veteran exoplanet hunter Geoff Marcy admits, “Our system is a rarity, there’s no longer a question about that.”² But does a planet need to be Earthlike to host life?

ARE WE ALONE?

Everyone wants to know the answer to this question, though I don’t think this is the most profound question one can ask. The exoplanet discoveries made by astronomers during the past fifteen years may lead the casual observer to be optimistic about life beyond Earth. It is easy to believe that the sheer number of planets in the universe is enough to guarantee that we are not alone. However, I advise caution before heading down this path.

It is helpful to step back and review briefly the history of debate on this question. The ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is the only one of its kind…there must be countless worlds and inhabitants thereof.”³ This is not a very persuasive argument if you don’t buy into its premise. This idea would return during the Renaissance as the Principle of Plentitude, with little more to recommend it than what was offered by the Greeks.

About the same time, the Copernican Principle (more recently called the Principle of Mediocrity) entered the scene. In a nutshell, it is a statement of our and Earth’s mediocrity. Its adherents claim that the history of science since Copernicus has reinforced our insignificance on the cosmic scale. Taken together, the Principle of Plentitude and the Copernican Principle have served as the primary motivations for belief in life beyond Earth. However, the Copernican Principle is based on false history and faulty logic.⁴

So strong have been these motivations that at one time or another each of the planets in the solar system has been proposed to host life, even intelligent life. No less an astronomer than Sir William Herschel believed all the planets were inhabited, and also the Sun! All such speculations have been proven wrong in the twentieth century, but it has taken direct evidence to the contrary to squelch the belief in civilizations on the other planets in the solar system.

Today, Copernican Principle advocates continue to hold out hope that “simple” life survives underground in Mars or in the subsurface ocean of the Galilean moon  Europa. These places, at least, provide one life-essential ingredient—liquid water. It is unlikely that a different substance could substitute for water as the “universal solvent” for life.⁵ Thus, NASA’s strategy is to “follow the water” in our solar system. But the ingredients for life call for much more than liquid water.

Setting aside for the moment the problem of the origin of life, necessary, though insufficient, ingredients in life’s recipe include about seventeen chemical elements; add another ten for complex life. These need to be in the right chemical forms and abundances. Other requirements in the recipe include cycling of said elements, long-lived energy sources, protection from ionizing radiation, and stability of the environment. Places where these conditions are satisfied include the CHZ on the small scale and the Galactic Habitable Zone on the large scale.⁶

Copernican advocates are coming to realize that life cannot just exist anywhere. We really do need to look for Earth-like planets if we are to have any hope of discovering life (especially complex life) on them.

To have a truly balanced view of the implications of astrobiology research, then, one should look not only at the number of exoplanets discovered in the last two decades, but also at the theoretical advancements in our understanding of habitability requirements. Every year astrobiologists discover new factors that had previously been neglected in considering the habitability of a planet. Examples include the presence of a large moon, properties of Jovian planet neighbors, coupling of planetary geodynamics with orbital properties, galactic-scale trends in composition (which determine how likely it is for a planet to form in a given place in the Milky Way), and the effects of gamma ray bursts. While astrobiologists cannot say precisely how rare habitable planets are, that they are rare is no longer disputable.

WHAT ARE THE BROADER IMPLICATIONS?

If one day we discover some species of bacteria living under the surface of Mars, I don’t think the implications would be very significant. First, it is likely that Earth has contaminated Mars with its microbes.⁷ A small fraction of the material blasted off Earth during one of the many impacts by large asteroids or comets in its past could have carried one-celled bacteria to Mars and seeded it.

What if Martian bacteria are found, instead, to have had an independent origin on Mars? First, this would not mean, as many believe, that life is easy to get started by natural means. An intelligent designer would still be the best explanation for the origin of life on Mars, as it is for life on Earth. The same goes for life discovered on a distant exoplanet. On the other hand, what if, after continued searching, we find no evidence for life on Mars? Mars is the most Earth-like planet we know of, and it’s nearby, sharing the same sun and planetary neighbors. If Earth failed to infect Mars, then we can only conclude that Mars is not sufficiently Earthlike to host even “simple” life. How much less likely, then, are exoplanets to host life?

The more interesting question concerns the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). If we discover ETI comparable in intelligence to a dog or a monkey, then I don’t think the implications would be significant. However, the common view among opinion makers today seems to be that Christians should worry about discovery of an advanced ETI. Space.com blogger Clara Moskowitz wrote recently on MSNBC.com, “Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.”⁸

ETI is not a new topic to Christians. On one of the few occasions that C. S. Lewis opined about ETI, he wrote:

We know that God has visited and redeemed His people, and that tells us just as much about the general character of the creation as a dose given to one sick hen on a big farm tells us about the general character of farming in England.…It is, of course, the essence of Christianity that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. But that does not prove that man is the sole end of nature. In the parable, it was one lost sheep that the shepherd went in search of: it was not the only sheep in the flock, and we are not told that it was the most valuable—save insofar as the most desperately in need has, while the need lasts, a peculiar value in the eyes of Love. The doctrine of the Incarnation would conflict with what we know of this vast universe only if we knew also there were other rational species in it who had, like us, fallen, and who needed redemption in the same mode, and they had not been vouchsafed it. But we know of none of these things.⁹

What’s more, the doctrine of the Incarnation has always meant that God became incarnate to reconcile all of creation to Himself. It doesn’t say God became man to the exclusion of everything else. Both Catholics and Protestants have offered serious theological analyses of ETI. Two examples are Christianity and Extraterrestrials? A Catholic Perspective by Thomist Marie I. George and The Logic of God Incarnate by Thomas Morris. It appears that Christians have enough theological resources to account for the existence of ETI. When all is said, we have to remember that these are hypothetical questions, there is no evidence for ETI, and our answers are necessarily speculative. Lewis dryly commented on atheists’ attempts to use both sides of the ETI debate as a weapon against Christianity:

If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting Christianity. If the universe is teeming with life, this, we are told, reduces to absurdity the Christian claim—or what is thought to be the Christian claim—that man is unique, and the Christian doctrine that to this one planet God came down and was incarnate for us men and our salvation. If, on the other hand, the earth is really unique, then that proves that life is only an accidental byproduct in the universe, and so again disproves our religion. Really, we are hard to please.¹⁰

Certainly, God is free to create a universe in which life is rare or common or even unique. For the ETI optimist, the better choice is theism or ID. This is perhaps the central irony. The naturalist’s explanatory toolkit is too limited to explain ETI, let alone us.¹¹

Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D., is an associate professor of astronomy and physics at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania. He is author of nearly eighty scientific papers and co-author with Jay W. Richards of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery (Regnery, 2004).

 NOTES

1. Joseph Catanzarite and Michael Shao, “The Occurrence Rate of Earth Analog Planets Orbiting Sun-like Stars,” The Astrophysical Journal 738, 2 (2011): doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/738/2/151.
2. Quoted in Lee Billings, “No Place like Home: Our Lonesome Solar System,” New Scientist (May 14, 2011): 46–49.
3. Lucretius (98–55 BC), De Rerum Natura.
4. Dennis Danielson, “The Great Copernican Cliché,” American Journal of Physics 69, 10 (October 2001): 1029. See chapters 11 and 12 in Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: How our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004).
5. Gonzalez and Richards, The Privileged Planet, Chapter 2.
6. Guillermo Gonzalez, “Habitable Zones in the Universe,” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 36, 6 (2005): 555–606.
7. Bret Gladman, Luke Dones, Harold F. Levison, and Joseph A. Burns, “Impact Seeding and Reseeding in the Inner Solar System,” Astrobiology 5, 4 (2005): 483–96.
8. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44749017/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.TqBzHd6Ike6. Accessed November 2, 2011.
9. C. S. Lewis, “Dogma and the Universe,” from God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 14.
10. 10     Ibid.
11. Given that we exist, then the universe should be just barely habitable according to naturalism, since the number of barely habitable universes should far outnumber the number of highly habitable universes in any one of the many multiverse scenarios offered up by cosmologists.

Theistic Evolution and the Reasonable Christian.
Collins’s main argument in The Language of God makes three related claims:

1. “Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps” (p. 93). We cannot use causal action by a transcendent intelligence to explain puzzling natural phenomena. In short, no God‐of-the‐ gaps allowed.
2. “Darwin’s framework of variation and natural selection,” but especially Darwin’s picture of a Tree of Life—the common ancestry of all organisms on Earth—“is unquestionably correct” (141). Universal common descent by natural processes is scientifically non‐negotiable. The theory of neo‐Darwinian evolution cannot rationally be doubted by any educated person.
3. The best way to reconcile the propositional content of a transcendentally grounded morality with modern evolutionary theory is what Collins calls “BioLogos,” his renaming of “theistic evolution.” BioLogos is “not intended as a scientific theory” (204), but it is “by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying” (210) of the alternatives in the science/religion debate (the others being atheism or agnosticism, young‐earth creation, and intelligent design). BioLogos “will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous [and] provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions” (210).
   Given this, a reasonable Christian will find herself embracing theistic evolution—BioLogos—if she wishes to be heard in our current culture.

The former Calvin College physicist Howard Van Till prominently advocated a similar position, until his recent exodus from Christianity, in such books as The Fourth Day and Science Held Hostage. Brown University cell biologist Kenneth Miller argues in his book Finding Darwin’s God and in his extensive public lectures that Christian faith and neo‐Darwinian evolution are compatible, a view also held by a majority of the members of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), an organization of Christians in the sciences. As Collins notes, his position is the mainstream view for many believing scientists and scientifically informed theologians:

Theistic evolution is the dominant position of serious biologists who are also serious believers. That includes Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief advocate in the United States, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, the twentieth‐century architect of evolutionary theory. It is the view espoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, including Pope John Paul II. (199)

For Collins, a necessary condition of being seen as a “serious biologist” is acceptance of Darwin’s theory of common descent via random variation and natural selection, and the only rational stance for a Christian is acceptance of BioLogos or theistic evolution.

Collins’s Failure to Realize the Depth of the Conflict.
Collins fails to understand fully the real conflict in the origins debate—philosophical naturalism —or the extent of its grip on modern evolutionary theory. This leads him into the central flaw that winds its way into every corner of his argument.

He locates evidence for the God of Christian theism in the fine‐tuning of the universe itself and in the “Moral Law” that governs human behavior. Cosmological fine‐tuning falls outside the purview of neo‐Darwinian theory, whereas explanation of human behavior is one of its goals, so I will only consider the latter here. On what grounds does the existence of universal standards of “right” and “wrong” behavior —of consistent moral categories across human cultures—count as evidence for the existence of God?

For Collins, humans behave altruistically because they are governed by a divinely authored moral law. The evidential significance of altruism and the moral law arises from the inability of standard evolutionary theory to explain it. Collins argues:

Agape, or selfless altruism…cannot be accounted for by the drive of individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves. Quite the contrary: it may lead humans to make sacrifices that lead to great personal suffering, injury, or death, without any evidence of benefit. (27)

This mode of reasoning resembles exactly what Collins elsewhere derides as God‐of‐the‐gaps thinking.

Would a Darwinian biologist agree with Collins? Let me explain why I think not, by recounting two revealing personal experiences I had with David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at SUNY-Binghamton, and Elliott Sober, a philosopher of biology at the University of Wisconsin. Wilson and Sober are coauthors of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1998), in which they attempt to explain human moral behavior generally and altruistic behavior in particular. The fact that humans are known to perform actions that appear not to benefit the actor, but someone else, is an explanatory puzzle for Darwinian evolutionary theory because such altruism appears not to be favored by natural selection.

I once spoke with Wilson about his views at a conference in Arizona. Human moral and religious behavior, he told me, is what makes us most distinctive as biological objects—and these are the characteristics of Homo sapiens most in need of evolutionary explanation. Does God Himself exist? I asked. Is there any being properly addressed as “Lord” truly out there in reality, as the object of the prayers of those people in church? No, he said to me. Once the task of evolutionary explanation is complete, under the philosophical guidance of naturalism, there is no unexplained remainder.

In the spring of 2006, in a seminar at the University of Wisconsin, I argued that naturalism cannot be reconciled with Christianity; one cannot pray to a God who does not exist. Sober, who served as a co-panelist, e‐mailed me some time later to say that I had misunderstood evolutionary theory. Explaining the causal origin of a biological characteristic such as moral or religious behavior, he wrote, does not prove that God does not exist. Evolutionary explanation, however, does destroy the evidential status of that behavior as pointing uniquely to a divine source.

In my experience, evolutionary biologists who are not already Christians—and that’s most of them—see Collins’s arguments about the divine origin of the Moral Law as wholly unpersuasive. If some humans pray or act sacrificially (say, in adopting handicapped children), then those actions, the biologists say, are facts about human biology that are in need of evolutionary explanation.

A Pervasive Contradiction.
We may summarize the central flaw of Collins’s position as follows:

1. As a Christian, Collins cannot endorse philosophical naturalism. He indeed does not. He accepts, for instance, the historical reality of the Resurrection.
2. If philosophical naturalism fails, however, then methodological naturalism—its putatively or supposedly neutral cousin for the practice of science—must, for any Christian, fail, too. For Collins, that point of failure corresponds with the moral uniqueness of human beings. Evolutionary theory does not explain altruism or human moral categories such as “right” and “wrong.”
3. If methodological naturalism is unsound as a global rule for scientific practice, however, then defying naturalism for such puzzles as the origin of life or the Cambrian Explosion—as intelligent design theorists do—is not by itself a defect in one’s scientific reasoning. If there can be a “gap” in biological history at one location, as Collins argues is the case for the origin of human moral behavior, then there can be “gaps” elsewhere, and these could be discovered by science. Suspend methodological naturalism anywhere, and one has the right to suspend it elsewhere.

Science in the twenty‐first century could use many more such brave Christians as Collins who speak plainly, in high profile settings, about their faith. Collins needs to think much more deeply, however, about what his understanding of reality entails. Pressing methodological naturalism on others, as Collins does, when he rejects it himself, is bad practice for a proponent of science. It is my hope that as the science of intelligent design matures, Collins will revisit his current certainty about its inevitable failure. I expect he is in for a major (and pleasant) surprise.

— reviewed by Paul Nelson

For future issues of the Christian Research Journal subscribe or renew your subscription or give a gift subscription.

This article first appeared in Christian Research Journal, volume35, number01 (2012). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org

Christianity Today recently had a cover story reporting on Christians who claim that human beings could not all have descended from a single human couple. That story was a symptom of a current trend: more and more Christians, even self-identified evangelicals, claim that Christians must make their peace with evolutionary theory. In recent years, scientists such as Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, Ken Miller, Darrell Falk, and others have written books defending theistic evolution or evolutionary creationism. The historical reality of Adam and Eve is obviously central to historic Christianity; but it is just one of many issues that, as Christians, we must consider when exploring the broader debate over God and evolution. Unfortunately, the debate is often marred by confusion and ambiguity. Though we can’t discuss every related issue here, let’s see what we can do to think more clearly about the subject.

CAN WE GET A DEFINITION?

I am often asked questions such as, “Can you believe in God and evolution?” and “Isn’t evolution just God’s way of creating?” I always respond: “That depends. What do you mean by ‘God’ and what do you mean by ‘evolution’?” That might seem like a dodge, but everything hinges on the definitions. Presumably, a theistic evolutionist claims that both theism in some sense and evolution in some sense are true, that both God and evolution somehow work together in explaining the world. But of course, all the real interest is hidden behind the phrase “in some sense.” So we have to get more specific.

“THEISM”

A theist believes that a transcendent God created the world and continues to conserve and interact in and with it. God can act directly in nature or indirectly through so-called secondary causes, such as physical laws or the actions of human beings. At all times, however, God oversees and providentially superintends His entire creation, even as He allows His creatures the freedom appropriate to their station. Nothing happens as the result of a purposeless process. This is a minimal definition of theism. If someone believes a transcendent God created the world but denies that God can and does act within nature, then at best, he’s a deist.

“EVOLUTION”

It’s a lot easier to define theism than to define evolution. It’s been called the ultimate weasel word. In an illuminating article called “The Meanings of Evolution,” Stephen Meyer and Michael Keas attempt to catch the weasel by distinguishing six different ways in which “evolution” is commonly used:

1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature. 2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population. 3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor. 4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited descent with modification, chiefly natural selection acting on random variations or mutations. 5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor. 6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.¹

The first meaning is uncontroversial-even trivial. The most convinced young earth creationist agrees that things change over time-that the universe has a history.² Populations of animals wax and wane depending on changes in climate and the environment. At one time, certain flora and fauna prospered on the earth, but they later disappeared, leaving mere impressions in the rocks to mark their existence for future generations. There’s also cosmic “evolution,” the idea that the early universe started in a hot, dense state, and over billions of years, cooled off and spread out, formed stars, galaxies, planets, and so forth. This includes the idea of cosmic nucleosynthesis, which describes the production of heavy elements (everything heavier than helium) in the universe through a process of star birth, growth, and death. These events involve change over time, but they refer to the history of the inanimate physical universe rather than the history of life. Parts of this picture of cosmic evolution contradict young earth creationism, but the generic idea that one form of matter gives rise, under the influence of various natural laws and processes, to other forms of matter, does not contradict theism. Surely God could directly guide such a process in innumerable ways, could set up a series of secondary natural processes that could do the job, or could do some combination of both. In fact, to make a long story short, virtually no one denies the truth of “evolution” in senses 1, 2, or 3. And, pretty much everyone agrees that natural selection and mutations explain some things in biology (number 4). What about the fifth sense of evolution, universal common ancestry? This is the claim that all organisms on earth are descended from a single common ancestor that lived sometime in the distant past. Note that this is not the same as the mechanism of change. Universal common ancestry is compatible with all sorts of different mechanisms or sources for change, though the most popular mechanism is the broadly Darwinian one. It’s hard to square universal common descent with the biblical texts; nevertheless, it is logically compatible with theism. If God could turn dirt into a man, or a man’s rib into a woman, then presumably He could, if He so chose, turn a bacterium into a bonobo or a dinosaur into a deer. An unbroken evolutionary tree of life guided and intended by God, in which every organism descends from some original organism, sounds like a logical possibility.³ Besides the six senses mentioned by Meyer and Keas, there is also the metaphorical sense of evolution, in which Darwinian theory is used as a template to explain things other than nature, like the rise and fall of civilizations or sports careers. Finally, there’s evolution in the sense of progress or growth. Natural evolution has often been understood in this way, so that cosmic history is interpreted as a purposeful movement toward greater perfection, complexity, mind, or spirit. A pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution was the idea of a slow unfolding of something that existed in nascent form from the beginning, like an acorn slowly becoming a great oak tree. If anything, this sense of evolution tends toward theism rather than away from it, since it suggests a purposive plan. That’s why Darwin didn’t even use the word in early editions of his Origin of Species. It’s also why many contemporary evolutionists (such as the late Stephen Jay Gould) go out of their way to deny that evolution is progressive, and argue instead that cosmic history is not going anywhere in particular. It should now be clear that theism is compatible with many senses of evolution. In fact, for most of the senses of evolution we’ve considered, there’s little hint of contradiction. Of course, this is a logical point. It doesn’t tell us what is true-only what could be true.

SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE

But there’s one clear exception-the blind watchmaker thesis. Of all the senses of evolution, this one seems to fit with theism like oil with water. According to the blind watchmaker thesis, all the apparent design in life is just that-apparent. It’s really the result of natural selection working on random genetic mutations. (Darwin proposed “variation.” Neo-Darwinism attributes new variations to genetic mutations.) The word “random” in the blind watchmaker thesis carries a lot of metaphysical baggage. In Neo-Darwinian theory, random doesn’t mean uncaused; it means that the changes aren’t directed-they don’t happen for any purpose. Moreover, they aren’t predictable, like gravity, and don’t occur for the benefit of individual organisms, species, or eco-systems, even if, under the guidance of natural selection, an occasional mutation might enhance a species’ odds of survival. The blind watchmaker thesis is more or less the same as Neo-Darwinism as its leading advocates understand it. It is usually wedded to some materialistic origin of life scenario, which isn’t about biological evolution per se. This so-called chemical evolution is often combined with biological evolution as two parts of a single narrative. Unfortunately, the blind watchmaker thesis isn’t an eccentric definition of the word evolution. It’s textbook orthodoxy.⁴ For instance, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson explained evolution by saying, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”⁵ Darwin himself understood his theory this way: “There seems to be no more design,” he wrote, “in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the winds blow.”⁶ And here’s how the late Darwinist Ernst Mayr put it: “The real core of Darwinism, however, is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the ‘design’ of the natural theologian, by natural means, instead of by divine intervention.”⁷ Notice that Mayr says, “instead of.” These are representative quotes from the literature. From the time of Darwin to the present, Darwinists have always contrasted their idea with the claim that biological forms are designed or created. That’s the whole point of the theory. Theists claim that the world, including the biological world, exists for a purpose; that it is, in some sense, designed. The blind watchmaker thesis denies this. So anyone wanting to reconcile strict Darwinian evolution with theism has a Grade A dilemma on his hands.

RESOLVING THE DILEMMA, SORT OF

One way out is to redefine the theistic part. For instance, one could defend deism, with God getting things started at the beginning but not knowing or superintending nature after that. Dissolving a dilemma, however, is not the same as resolving it. If the adjective theistic in theistic evolution is not to be a misnomer, it should include a theistic view of God. What about redefining it in the other direction? A theistic evolutionist could maintain that God sets up and guides nature so that it gives rise to everything from stars to starfish through a slowly developing process. Organisms perhaps share a common ancestor but reach their goal as intended by God. God works in nature, perhaps through cosmic initial conditions, physical laws, secondary processes, discrete acts, or some combination, to bring about His intended results, rather than creating everything from scratch. Whatever the details, on this view, the process of change and adaptation wouldn’t be random or purposeless. It would implement a plan, and would reflect God’s purposes. This would be a teleological version of evolution, and so would flatly reject the Darwinian blind watchmaker thesis. This was the view of some early theistic evolutionists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the concept of natural selection. Here the word evolution is being used in the pre-Darwinian, even anti-Darwinian sense. History is the unfolding of a purposeful plan. This is a logically possible view; it is not, however, the view of many of today’s theistic evolutionists, such as Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller. They seek to reconcile Christian theism with Darwinian evolution. They may affirm design in some broad sense at the cosmic level, but not in biology. How should we respond? There’s not much use in looking for evidence for this brand of theistic evolution, for the simple reason that it can’t be true. It’s not logically possible. It makes no sense to talk about a purposeful process that is nevertheless purposeless, or to talk about God directing an undirected process. To the degree that a view is Darwinian (as Darwinists understand it), it will not be theistic. And to the degree that it is theistic, it will not be Darwinian. If you understand that basic point, you’ll be much better equipped to navigate the current debate over theistic evolution.

Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute, editor of God and Evolution (Discovery Institute Press, 2010), and the author of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (Harper One, 2009).

NOTES

1 In Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, ed. John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004).

2 See the explanation for the meaning of “evolution” from the BioLogos Foundation, which seeks to give a Christian defense of evolution. The explanation begins with “change over time,” then goes on to fill out the definition with common descent and the Darwinian mechanism. But it quickly slips from defining the term to presenting the details as if they were uncontested facts. At: http://biologos.org/questions/what-is-evolution/.

3 I’m not saying this is true. I’m merely dealing with the logic of the ideas here. Since design is logically compatible with universal common descent, one could, strictly speaking, endorse both intelligent design and theistic evolution. Nevertheless, these days, ID and theistic evolution often describe people with different positions. See discussion of this point in the comments of Thomas Cudworth, “Olive Branch from Karl Giberson,” Uncommon Descent (April 15, 2010), at: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/olive-branch-from-karl-giberson/#more-13010.

4 For discussion, see Casey Luskin, “Smelling Blood in the Water: Why Theistic Evolution Won’t Appease the Atheists,” in God and Evolution, ed. Jay W. Richards (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2010).

5 G. G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 345.

6 Francis Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (New York: Appleton, 1887), 280, 283-84, 278-79.

7 Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversy, with a foreword by Ernst Mayr (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982), xi-xii. Quoted in ibid.

Welcome to the world of weblogs, or blogs, and the cyberspace they all inhabit, known as the blogosphere. This is an inherently democratic realm where Kathy from Kalamazoo has the same platform for her views on religion as a scholar with a fistful of advanced degrees. Therein lies the greatest opportunity and the greatest difficulty with how Christians engage the religion blogosphere.

“The beauty and danger of blogging is that it gives a voice to the common man,” said Rich Tatum, a blogger who has been on the cutting edge of all things Internet in various capacities with church denominations and ministries including the Assemblies of God and Christianity Today International. “Everybody becomes a publisher. They create a lot of noise, and sometimes it’s hard to find the signal in the noise. But there’s a surprising number of interesting writers out there who are posting interesting content.”

Blog Basics. Since blogs made their first appearance on the Internet in the late 1990s, they have changed in appearance and function while proliferating in numbers. The first weblogs were simple lists of Web sites of interest to the site host. These blogs also contained chronological lists, arranged from oldest to newest, of any changes made to a Web site. That style quickly evolved into the current arrangement of posts, arranged from newest to oldest, of short items written in a journalistic, diaristic style, Tatum told the Journal.

Internet surfers can interact with a blog in a variety of ways. The vast majority of visitors simply clicks on the blog and reads its content. Others may subscribe to the blog and automatically receive any new posts. Each blog contains a mechanism where readers can comment on a post and thereby interact with the blogger and other commenters.

There’s plenty to comment about, according to Web sites such as Technorati (http://technorati.com) and BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com), which monitor the world of blogs. A feature on the front page of BlogPulse offers stark evidence of how massive the blogosphere is. As of August 3 this year, the blogosphere contained nearly 79 million identified blogs. In the previous 24 hours, 93,041 new blogs became live, and 651,253 posts were indexed.

Cats, Bosses, and Other Denizens of the Blogosphere. Bloggers, including those who comment on religion, fall into one of three categories developed by business author and blogger Seth Godin. “Cat bloggers” are so called because they tend to be the kind of people who will share very personal items, such as what their cat did today, that would be considered by many other people to be trivial or mundane. A Christian cat blogger is someone who shares personal details of their daily devotional lives. “Boss bloggers” are those who speak with some authority for an organization through their blogs, such as pastors and CEOs. An “idea blogger” is anyone who has an idea they want to share with others. These bloggers can be authors, teachers, and theologians.

Michael Kress, managing editor of Beliefnet, sees two general categories, personal blogs and issue blogs, each with subcategories. “Some personal blogs are pure diaries from doubters and people who are struggling or from people who are more devotionally oriented and who want to get other people to worship and pray with them,” said Kress to the Journal. Issue blogs comment on news stories and how they affect particular religious beliefs and practices.

Devotees, Skeptics, and the Inquisitive. Web surfers normally read religion blogs for two reasons. The first is to monitor current events and trends. “People are thinking about the interaction of Christianity and everyday life on their own, and now they can see how other people are thinking. That’s how we view our blog: as an application of Christian worldview to life,” said Melinda Penner, co-founder and blogger for the apologetics ministry Stand to Reason, in an interview with the Journal.

The second reason is belief-centered. People will search out blogs written by like-minded thinkers in an effort to bolster their own beliefs. The reverse is also true: readers occasionally will monitor and engage with bloggers opposed to their own beliefs. “People read bloggers they identify with,” said Kress. “This person articulates how the reader sees the world and becomes a mouthpiece on an issue or a factor of life such as religion. But there are also those who love to pick a fight and argue. They get so riled up and incensed by this person that they must read their blog in order to respond.”

Non-Christian Blogs. Evangelical Christians have plenty to choose from when exploring the portion of the blogosphere populated by those who do not share their religious faith. All the other major world religions are represented with the tone and subject matter ranging from serious to whimsical. Judaism features sober-minded issue discussions on Jewschool (http://jewschool.com) and more personal reflections from The Velveteen Rabbi (http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com). People interested in Islam can consult a comprehensive blog called Mere Islam (http://www.mereislam.info). There are even blogs devoted to Shinto and Zoroastrianism.

Blogs about New Age religion and atheism are easy to find and often provocative. Quest for Personal Nirvana (http://success-nirvana.blogspot.com) offers assistance in using “New Age tools such as Subliminality, Lucid Dreaming, Hypnosis (and) Binaural Beats.” Atheist Revolution (http:// www.atheistrev.com) features the tagline, “Breaking away from irrational belief and opposing Christian extremism in America.” Scientology backers will like Scientology and Me (http://scientologyandme.wordpress.com), but will not find comfortable reading in Formerly Fooled and Finally Free From the Deceptive Cult Called Scientology (http://free-from-scientology.blogspot.com).

Other blogs are found on Web sites that invite participation from all religious beliefs and practices. A major player in this category is Beliefnet, which was started in 1999 and was purchased in 2007 by Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Blogs are a small but growing part of Beliefnet, according to Kress.

“We have a wide net, but we’re always looking to fill certain gaps where we feel we need more content or a balancing voice. If we tilt too liberal, we find a more conservative voice to balance it out. Since bloggers are opinionated, we are committed to providing content to everyone on every side of the spectrum,” she said. Beliefnet blogs, which can all be found from a pulldown menu at the site’s homepage (http://www.beliefnet.com) include “God’s Politics” by liberal evangelical Jim Wallis and its more conservative counterpart “Crunchy Con” by Rod Dreher; “Conversations With God,” based on the book of the same name by Neale Donald Walsch; and “Deepak Chopra and Family.”

The God Blogs. Christians were quick to catch on to the potential of blogging, said Tatum. Today, nearly every denomination and official organization’s Web site has a spot for a blog. Pastors, priests, and ministry leaders are frequent contributors as boss bloggers and idea bloggers. Anglicans who were not able to attend the once-a-decade Lambeth conference in Canterbury, United Kingdom, could keep informed by reading the blogs of a number of attending bishops, from both the conservative and liberal viewpoints. Some local church Web sites include boss blogs from their pastors.

Christian cat bloggers use their sites to share devotional thoughts or other items for everyday people. For example, “Sprittibee” is the nickname of a Christian homeschooling mom and also the name of her blog (http:// sbees.blogspot.com). Other blogs blur the categories of cat, boss, and idea blogs. Tatum’s “Blog Rodent” (http://tatumweb.com/blog) is primarily an idea blog, but has also featured posts updating readers about family news. Other blogs take an outside-the-box tone, such as “The Shrine of the Holy Whapping” (http:// holywhapping.blogspot.com), which consists of posts by a group of self-styled “Catholic nerds.”

Within Christianity, a subcategory of blogs focuses on apologetics. Some of these blogs are concentrated on a particular tenet of Christian belief or against a particular perceived error. Examples include “Faith and Gender” (http:// faithandgender.wordpress.com), which defends “the Bible’s teaching on the nature and rela­tion­ship of the sexes”; “Reformed Baptist Apolo­getics” (http://reformedbatistapologetics. blogspot.com), which is based on the beliefs and writings of seventeenth-century Particular Baptists; and a defense of young-earth creation­ism from the blog of Ken Hamm, founder of Answers In Genesis (http:// blogs. answersingenesis.org/aroundtheworld/feed).

Another category of apologetics blogs is more general in nature. Stand to Reason, an organization that equips believers to give a full explanation for Christianity and Christian values, started its blog after overcoming some initial reluctance. “People had been suggesting it as long as three and a half years ago,” said Penner. “At that time I saw blogs as mostly political, and we are not a political organization. But then I realized that the staff here was always talking about things in the news and evaluating things we had read. Then I realized a lot of other people might like to hear the kinds of things we talk about.”

Stand to Reason blog posts have explored topics such as the arguments made by the new batch of best-selling atheist authors, the place of doubt in the life of a Christian, same-sex marriage, and the Trinity. “What interests us about the specific topics and events we blog about are the interactions of ideas and life and understanding what people believe,” said Penner.

Opinions vary on the effectiveness of apologetics in the blogosphere. “I enjoy reading apologetics from people who have written a text, but I’m not a huge fan of following it on a blog,” said Tatum. “Blog authors tend to generate an audience of like-minded readers. The people who disagree with you on a blog are not likely to be devoted readers. They will cruise by and probably drop a comment here and there and never come back again.”

An Evangelical Navigation Guide to the Blogosphere. The sheer amount of blogs and the shortage of discretionary time in the average person’s day make exploring the blog­osphere a daunting prospect. How can Christians best develop the ability to separate the gold from the dross? One motivating factor may be the awareness that people and organizations hostile to Christianity are active and aggressive in the blogosphere. Case in point: Atheist Revolution has a series of postings instructing other atheist bloggers how to get the most visibility from their sites.

For readers of blogs, discernment and an assessment of the credibility of the blogger are keys. Kress suggests reading the “About Me” biographical sketch. “Some of these have very little information, and that bothers me,” she said. “I want to know about this person before I decide to read.” Examine the “blogroll,” which is a list of favorite blogs. If the work of a blogger receives consistent mention from his or her peers on blogrolls, readers can take this as a sign of quality. “You get a real sense of who’s respected when you see them listed over and over,” said Amy Hall, one of the Stand to Reason bloggers.

Thinking of starting your own blog? The first notion to dispense with is that blogging will be lucrative. Very few blogs are profitable. Most are maintained for reasons other than cash flow. Blogging, if done properly, will require a significant investment of time. There is also a certain kind of writing that works best in blogs. “You need immediacy. You need to get straight to the point,” advises Kress. “Longer posts are fine, but they have to be relevant. Does your blog have a point, and does it stay on point?”

The best apologetics blogs have a set of qualities in common, say Stand to Reason’s Penner and Hall. One of them is a winsome ability to make a strong argument without overstating the case and maligning the character of an opponent. They recommend taking the same tone on a blog as you would when standing face-to-face with a person with whom you are sharing faith.

Tatum adds that changing minds on a blog depends on building a relationship with someone who disagrees. “That’s the biggest problem with mediated communication like blogs, instant messaging, and Skype (an Internet telephone software). It’s not face-to-face. You don’t have all the nonverbals, which means you don’t have an easy way to communicate passion and concern. You have to be very good with words,” said Tatum.

—Lee A. Dean

First, ID proponents are willing to follow scientific evidence wherever it leads. ID theorists neither presuppose nor preclude supernatural explanations for the phenomena they encounter in an information–rich universe. As such, the ID movement rightly practices open–minded science.

Furthermore, ID begins with the common scientific principle that intelligent design is detectable wherever there is specified, organized complexity (i.e., “information”). This design principle is central to many scientific fields, including archaeology, forensic pathology, crime scene investigation, cryptology, and the search for extra–terrestrial intelligence (SETI). When applied to information–rich DNA, irreducibly complex biochemical systems, the Cambrian Explosion in the fossil record, as well as the fact that earth is perfectly situated in the Milky Way for both life and scientific discovery, the existence of an intelligent designer is the most plausible scientific explanation.

Finally, although its conclusions are not worldview–neutral, ID lends no more support to Christian theism than Darwinian evolution lends to atheism. Thus, the appropriateness of ID for public education ought to be judged on the basis of the theory’s explanatory power, not on its metaphysical implications.

For further study, see William Dembski, The Design Revolution (Grand Rapids: IVP, 2004); see also Francis J. Beckwith, “Intelligent Design in the Schools: Is It Constitutional?”

Get the Book

In response, it should first be noted that whether Darwin did or did not renounce evolution does not speak to the issue of whether or not evolution is true or false. Maybe Darwin renounced evolution because he was senile or he had taken a mind-altering drug. He may have even just hedged his bets with some “eternal fire insurance.”

Furthermore, as followers of the One who proclaimed himself to be not only “the way” and “the life” but also “the truth” (John 14:6) we must set the standard for the evolutionist, not vice versa. James Fegan was correct in calling the Darwin legend “an illustration of the recklessness with which the Protestant Controversialists seek to support any cause they are advocating.”

Finally, in The Darwin Legend, James Moore painstakingly documents the fact that there is no substantial evidence that Darwin ever repented, but there is abundant evidence that he consistently held to his evolutionary paradigm.

For further study, see James Moore, The Darwin Legend (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994).

Get the Book

“[Natural] selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species. . . . The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethic revolts. . . . I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.”

First, the biblical account of creation specifically states that God created living creatures according to their own “kinds” (Genesis 1:24–25) As confirmed by science, the DNA for a fetus is not the DNA for a frog, and the DNA for a frog is not the DNA for a fish. Rather the DNA of a fetus, frog, or fish is uniquely programmed for reproduction after its own kind. Thus while the Bible allows for microevolution (transitions within “the kinds”) it does not allow for macroevolution (amoebas evolving into apes or apes evolving into astronauts).

Furthermore, evolutionary biology cannot account for metaphysical realities such as ego and ethos. Without data demonstrating that physical processes can produce metaphysical realities, there is no warrant for dogmatically declaring that humans evolved from hominids.

Finally, an omnipotent, omniscient God does not have to painfully plod through millions of mistakes, misfits, and mutations in order to have fellowship with humans. As the biblical account of creation confirms he can create humans instantaneously (Genesis 2:7).

Evolutionism is fighting for its very life. Rather than prop it up with theories like theistic evolution, thinking people everywhere must be on the vanguard of demonstrating its demise.

Adapted from Fatal Flaws

For further study, see J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds, eds., Three Views on Creation and Evolution (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1999).

Get the Book

Furthermore, for evolution to succeed, it is as crucial that the unfit die as that the fittest survive. Marvin Lubenow graphically portrays the ghastly consequences of such beliefs in his book Bones of Contention: “If the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue to ‘infect’ the fit with their less fit genes. The result is that the more fit genes would be diluted and compromised by the less fit genes, and evolution could not take place.” Adolf Hitler’s philosophy that Jews were subhuman and that Aryans were supermen led to the extermination of six million Jews. In the words of Sir Arthur Keith, a militant anti-Christian physical anthropologist: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consistently sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.” It is significant to note that crusaders who used force to further their creeds in the name of God were acting in direct opposition to the teachings of Christ, while the worldview of Hitler, however, was completely consistent with the teachings of Darwin. Indeed, social Darwinism has provided the scientific substructure for some of the most significant atrocities in human history.

Finally, while the evolutionary racism of Darwin’s day is politically incorrect today, current biology textbooks still promote vestiges of racism. For example, the inherently racist recapitulation theory* not only is common fare in science curricula but has been championed in our generation by such luminaries as Carl Sagan. This despite the fact that modern studies in molecular genetics have demonstrated the utter falsity of the recapitulation theory. The fact that recapitulation is inherently racist is underscored by no less an evolutionary authority than Stephen Jay Gould who lamented that “recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the pervasive racism of white scientists” in the modern era.

Adapted from Fatal Flaws

For further study, see Hank Hanegraaff, Fatal Flaws: What Evolutionists Don’t Want You to Know (Nashville:W Publishing,2003).

*Recapitulation theory, better known by the popular evolutionary phrase, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” is the odd predilection that in the course of an embryo’s development the embryo repeats or recapitulates the evolutionary history of its species.

Get the Book