Evolution vs. Religion: Anything New? | Closer To Truth

I like when evolution and religion tangle, whether battle, accommodate, or harmonize. Could untangling the evolution-religion knot clarify both? I take evolution to mean Darwinian origin of species by natural selection over multiple generations producing human beings. I take religion to mean an ultimate reality beyond the physical, in the Abrahamic religions, the existence of a creator god, and scriptural stories of human origins told without evolution. For decades, I've tracked the major strands of the tangle. Evolution defeats religion. Intelligence design defeats evolution. Evolution and religion are each its own world, and theistic evolution harmonizes evolution and religion. I'm all for harmony, but not at the cost of truth. Is there anything new out there? Of late, I've been exploring philosophy of biology, applying philosophical thinking to biological puzzles. So, how do philosophers of biology, all of whom prioritize evolution, consider religion? Evolution versus religion? Anything new? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. In my search for meaning at different times, at different places, religion and evolution has each loomed large. I've considered each in isolation. I've explored each's claim against the other. I've examined their putative harmony. Atheists have no problem. Evolution-religion is as irrelevant as it is resolved. Evolution is true. God is not. Abrahamic theists have the problem. If evolution, how is God the creator and their scriptures inspired? I want to make one thing clear. I do not seek debate among the three beliefs. One, evolution is true and God is false. Two, God is true and evolution is false. Three, God is true and evolution is true. It's ground well worn. What I do seek is how philosophers of biology think about evolution and religion. I shall alternate opposing views. I do not start with the neutral observer because I want the tangle. I start with the distinguished evolutionary biologist and incisive atheist, author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins. I think supernatural religion is a very interesting scientific theory, which is wrong, but it's profoundly important in the sense that if it were right, it would be a very different kind of world we live in. So I'm not one of those who says, well, it's nothing to do with science, you can believe if you like and leave me out of it. I mean, it is a very important scientific theory. If there really is some kind of brooding great spirit at the base of the universe which created everything and supervises everything, then that is a totally different kind of universe from one where there is no such creature. And so I think it's a scientific question. It doesn't mean you can answer it scientifically necessarily, but I think we can think about it scientifically. And I do so and have concluded that it's highly unlikely that there is such a great spirit. Where it affects my own field of evolutionary biology, of course, is that it's a direct competitor in that there are organized religion, Christianity and Islam and Judaism, all in their fundamentalist form, subscribed to a book which proposes a myth which is scientifically false. And so to that extent, I have to be involved in controversy because evolution is true and we need to educate people about it. Many people in those traditions that you refer to now take evolution on board. Sometimes they do it in a theistic way. Sometimes they do it at a quantum level so there's no interruption of the mechanism of the world. Some do it deistically. One person told me that it's a much cleverer god to work through evolution because just to say, you know, there's the dinosaur, just create it, that's easy. But to do it through evolution, starting with the plasma at the Big Bang and going through evolution to get that dinosaur, I mean, that's really clever. No, it's pathetic. It's very unimpressive because why on earth would he choose to use the one method where he's not necessary? Write himself out of the script. I think there's no support in biology. I think that if there's any support for supernaturalism, I don't think there is, but if there was any, it might come from physics where you might say something like the fine-tuning of the universe. And I don't think that's a good argument, but that's better than any biological argument anyway. If there was a creator, all bets would be off then. It would be a completely different enterprise that we're engaged upon when we try to understand what's going on. Richard is precise and unequivocal. God is a scientific theory that is wrong. Evolution shows no God is needed, and the results of religion overall is negative. No surprise, but I love the clarity. Do all atheists feel the same? I meet a pioneer of philosophy of biology, known for both vigorously opposing creation science and constructively engaging Christian philosophers, Michael Ruse. On the one hand, there's no question but that science and religion can clash, and that evolution and Christianity can clash. If you believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, that we were created in six days, that there was a universal flood. Now, if you're an evolutionist, these are all false. So you can't do the two together. However, anybody who's done any history of Christianity knows that this is not traditional Christianity. St. Augustine, 400 AD, wrestled with this one, and what he said was the ancient Jews were not sophisticated people like us Romans. If God had spoken to them in terms of science, they wouldn't have known what the hell he was talking about, so he spoke to them allegorically. Consequently, I've always felt, and I think a lot of people feel, that when you come to something like evolutionary biology, those immediate things of, oh, it can't work because it clashes with six days, that's not where more sophisticated thinkers are at, either Christians or Darwinians. So where do you go from there? Now, there are certainly those like Richard Dawkins who want to say, nevertheless, evolutionary theory shows that all the claims about Christianity have to be false and that, you know, it just doesn't work. So for me, the whole question about God and these is the unknown. It doesn't mean to say that God does exist, but for me to say God does not exist, you know, is equally wrong. I personally do not have faith, but for me, having faith is not going to involve you in making claims that science is going to disagree with. Science says, yes, it all started with the Big Bang. What does Christianity, what does religion say? It doesn't say it's quite happy with the Big Bang, but its question is not when did it start like that, but Heidegger's fundamental question in metaphysics, why is there something rather than nothing? And that is not a question that science even addresses. It's not in the paradigm. Michael gives no comfort to evolution deniers, early creationists, intelligent design advocates, that's hardly a shock. But nor does he reject that Christianity could be compatible with evolution. That's a bit of a surprise. I now want a philosopher who does reject any compatibility between evolution and religion, and I know just who he is, a strict reductionist, Alex Rosenberg. We understand perfectly well why there'd be a strong imperative to render the theistic, Christian point of view compatible with Darwinism, right? Arguing that God is smart enough, omniscient in fact, that He could have produced the world as we see it and could have employed the mechanism of blind variation and natural selection to produce us. And if He was smart enough to have done it that way, then there's no reason why we biologists or philosophers of biology thoroughly and completely committed to Darwinism should think that our commitment to Darwinism prevents us from also accepting at least the intelligibility or the possibility of Christian theism. Now I think that's wrong. Okay. And I'm going to tell you why. The process of blind variation and natural selection is driven by objective chance. It's driven by the second law of thermodynamics. How do we know this? Evolution is a time asymmetrical process. The fundamental laws of physics are all time symmetrical. You take a video of the balls moving on a billiard table in one direction, you run it backwards, and that's perfectly compatible with the laws of physics all the way down to the Schrodinger wave equation. Evolution as a process is time directed. It's asymmetrical. And it's therefore driven by the second law of thermodynamics because that's the only time asymmetrical principle in physics. If you're a reductionist like me and you see processes at the higher level are reducible to processes at the lower level without remainder, they must ultimately be driven by, especially a time asymmetrical process like evolution on this planet or anywhere else in the universe, must be driven by the second law. And what does the second law say to us? It says that as a matter of objective chance, entropy increases. And it's that same objective chance that operates in the blind variation that produces the substance on which selection, on which the environmental filtration works, that generates adaptation. And in a universe that's governed by an omniscient agent and an omnipotent agent, there's no room for objective chance. How can God, who knows everything, who knows the truth of every proposition that's true and the falsity of every proposition that's false, how can he arrange the universe in accordance with his omniscience and allow that there might be events occurring in the course of the history of the universe that nobody could predict, including the omniscient God? I like Alex. His views are sharp, sophisticated, coherent. He argues that objective chance, based on the second law of thermodynamics, undermines an omnipotent, omniscient God. Of course, there are opposing views and contrary arguments. Some who take Abrahamic religion seriously dismiss the challenges of evolution. They either reject evolution outright or they espouse theistic evolution. The former strains credulity. The latter requires unpacking. Me, I've taken Abrahamic religion seriously, but I've never minimized the challenges of evolution. That's why I seek a philosopher who both takes religion as ultimate reality and faces up to evolution's challenges. I discuss this with a philosopher of religion and of cognitive science, Helen de Cruz. Many people who work in science and religion, they would say there is no challenge of evolution to religion, and it's totally compatible. But I think there is a challenge. First, there is the concept of teleology. So it's very important. Most religious traditions, and particularly the Abrahamic monotheisms, they say that God has a purpose. The reason that we are here, that there are humans, is not that there's some sort of cosmic accident, but that God intended it that way. If you look at the Middle Ages, then the idea is that everything had its own teleology. So for example, why do acorns turn into oak trees? Well, that is because it is within the teleology of the acorn to become an oak tree. That is its purpose. And that's Aristotle's view. And Aristotle's view was very influential in the history of biology. But then you had the scientific revolution, and one of the things that did was bring in universal covering laws. So with Newton and Galileo, the idea being that there are laws and they apply everywhere. So everything having its own teleology didn't work anymore. So you had to have like a bigger laws. So all of a sudden people were wondering, okay, if there are universal laws, then why do we have incisors for biting and molars for chewing? It doesn't make sense. And then the idea was, well, God intended it that way. So natural theology is the idea that you can look at nature and you can infer that there's a God and that God has certain properties, actually only began when we had our modern conceptions of laws of nature, no longer the individual teleologies, but a genuine big teleology. So you see the influence of science already then, but then you had evolutionary theory. And famously, Darwin and Wallace said that it isn't the case that there is an alternative explanation for all of this. The alternative explanation for God did it is that you have mutations, you have variation, and you have adaptation. And so you have a problem, not so much with religion per se, but with a natural theology that became dominant after the scientific revolution. Okay. So as evolutionary theory has developed, teleology in a sense has crept back a little bit over the last few decades, such as a sense that organisms can even affect their environment and the environment affects them because they're sort of heading towards a greater complexity. I think that, yes, we are changing the course of evolution. And that, I think, has to be incorporated in natural theological thinking. So we have to get out of like the 18th century sort of like idea about, you know, God is the divine legislator and everything works for a purpose because God has sort of directly ordained it, like you could do that. But I think you just have to look at all this new insights about niche construction, construct our own environment and change it. I think that's very important to help us think about teleology in a sophisticated way. Teleology purpose is a big deal. Helen has teleology working its magic in two ways, from small individual teleologies or purposes to a grand collective teleology or purpose with a capital P and from God making all the decisions to various agents in evolution playing active roles. I see Helen's perspective. If I were a believer, I might go with her. But doesn't all this assume that religion is ultimate reality? So to turn the evolution religion argument on its head, what does evolution say about the origin of religion? I ask a philosopher of biology who takes on all sorts of pseudoscience, Massimo Piglucci. Religion is obviously a human invention. It probably does respond to deep psychological needs that humans have for meaning for survival after death, because consciousness makes us aware of the fact that we're going to be gone one of these days. But in terms of actually being a thing that we really need to respect some kind of magisterium, as Stephen Jay Gould famously put it, that is separate from that of science. There is no such a thing. The only suggestion one can reasonably make is that science deals with facts and religion deals with morality, ethics. We all do respect to Stephen Gould, where the heck is philosophy there? It's philosophy that deals with ethics and not religion. Religion certainly can be understood as a subset of one way of doing philosophy and one way of doing ethics. Then we have to ask ourselves, where do we get our ethics? Where is it that our morality comes from? And there, I tend to favor an evolutionary view. Ethics or morality are concerned with the problem of how do we live in harmony, more or less, with other human beings, which, because we are an intelligent social species, that's a problem we have to solve, right? Let me put it bluntly in terms of the religious positions on evolution. In the Abrahamic religions, there are three different positions. Well, maybe for early earth creationists. Number two is an intelligent design movement. A third might be theistic evolution with subtleties that God can only do it at the quantum joints. And the fourth would be a deistic system in which God set it all in motion so it all worked exactly the way we see it. There's no intervention that God had to do, but God was so smart that he put the whole system together so that the gravitation and the various forces would lend itself through this random process to create what we have. It's a reasonable spectrum. Now, I don't see any reason, however, to take any of those positions seriously. They do vary in degree of ridiculousness, if you like. Certainly the in-your-face creationism, you know, the earth is 12,000 years old or 6,000 years old, etc., etc., that is empirically groundless even, not to mention philosophically problematic, incoherent, etc., etc. Now, if you move toward the other in the progression that you just outlined, of course, the one that is most difficult to reject is the deist position, right? Sure, if God just exists, created the universe, and then essentially retired, well, the only thing we have to say about it is why are you even talking about God in the first place? I mean, essentially what you're describing is the universe came into being somehow because, you know, to put the label God there doesn't actually explain anything. One of the interesting things in philosophy of religion is that sometimes people think, seem to think, that to say God did it is an actual explanation. It's not. It's just a label for our ignorance, so we can do without it. To Massimo, religion fulfills psychological and social needs, but religion has no basis in ultimate reality. No religious approach to evolution should be taken seriously. I certainly see religion's psychosocial powers, but that in no way negates the possible existence of God as argued quite apart from religion per se. Is this why some philosophers of biology, experts in evolution, and non-theists themselves accommodate the possible existence of God? I ask a founder of philosophy of biology who put evolutionary theory into philosophical focus, Elliot Sober. I think evolutionary theory properly understood is logically consistent with the existence of God. That doesn't mean that God exists. However, there are certain formulations of theism which are inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Young Earth creationism, we have tons of evidence in evolutionary biology that life is almost four billion years old on our planet. Those are in conflict, but there are other views about what God did or his characteristics that are not ruled out by evolutionary theory, like the bare statement that God created the universe is not in conflict with evolutionary theory, which is not about the evolution of the universe. It's about what happened on our planet in the last four billion years. One detail I'll add is I think the theory as we understand it is consistent with the hypothesis, not just that God existed, but that God sometimes intervened in human history. That's a further claim. That's a kind of interventionist theism. And that's a more serious accommodation. Yes, so I think there's no conflict in that. You say you're not a theist yourself. You're just describing what you think is a logical relationship and the illogic of saying that evolution is a contradiction to various kinds of theistic approaches to evolution. That if God did intervene in the evolutionary process, how would that have happened? I have no idea. I don't believe that it did happen. No, no, I know you don't believe, but you're an accommodationist to allow that to be true. I say it's left open by the theory. I don't say that it's true. Some would deny that. Some would say it's not open to the theory. Show me the part of the theory that said that that could never have happened. So how did God do it? Did God flip a couple of base pairs here and there? I mean, would that be allowed? One way to get this to make sense is to think of God intervening in ways that the science we have now can't reveal. Like what? I don't know. Like I said, I'm not saying that this is the true theory. No, no, but some would say that there are no ways to do that. That's to say that the theory we have now is not a work in progress, but it's a complete description of reality. Why do people believe that? Well, I mean, I'm happy to say that it's true. The idea that there is no detail that is left untouched, that's a much stronger claim. Right. But I think that's what's behind the objection. It's the assumption that the theory is not just true, it's causally complete, that there's no causal action aside from what we can write down now. And it may be causally complete, but I don't think we have any argument that that's true. And so that's the opening. Evolution and religion have a fraught history. Does evolution destroy creator God myths, or does religion harmonize its creator God? Can philosophers of biology untangle the evolution religion not? Here's what they say. Religion is a scientific theory that is false, a betrayal of science. If there were a God, the universe would be radically different. While evolution and religion can clash, this does not mean that God does not exist. It is not possible for even an all-powerful God to employ blind variation and natural selection to produce us. A new teleology with active agents empowering evolution can revitalize natural theology. Religion is not the equal of science. If religion provides morality and ethics, it is only as a subset of philosophy. Accommodationism is logically required. There is no contradiction between the theory of evolution, which is still incomplete, and the existence of God. Personally, I celebrate the tangle. It clarifies evolution, and it stress tests religion. While philosophers of biology do scant untangling, they do provide insight and nuance. And for this, I am grateful. But I am not shouting, I'm any closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com