The American Spectator

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Just a few months ago, I would have disagreed with Mr. Neumayr in his claim that Darwinism was intrinsically atheistic. While it might make God seem less necessary, I would have said, surely it leaves open the door that He intended and brought about humans indirectly. However, after analyzing the issue, I'm afraid I have to agree with him.

Much like Neumayr, I suspect, my revised conclusion was based not so much on the pronouncements of diehard atheists like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, who I would expect to try to represent science as supporting their view in any case. Rather it was a combination of my own analysis, and the incoherent theologies that I have seen espoused in the writings and statements of various "theistic" Darwinists like John Haught, Kenneth Miller, John Derbyshire, and George Coyne in their efforts to harmonize their religious sensibilities with their Darwinism.

The difference between a theist and an atheist is not that the theist believes in an ultimate reality and the atheist does not. Everyone believes in an ultimate reality. The difference is that the theist believes that the ultimate reality is a person, a Mind, who brought about the universe, life, and humans through intent, or Will (though not necessarily directly), while the atheist believes that the ultimate reality is mindless, consisting of primordial chaos or blind law. Entailed in the theist position, then, is the idea that will, or intent, is a real cause, at least for God.

Prior to becoming familiar with this debate, I had assumed that a theistic evolutionist meant someone who believed that God had intended humans to exist, and had brought about His design indirectly through an evolutionary process, perhaps by winding the universe up with such extreme precision that humans were inevitable, perhaps by instituting special laws that would guarantee the outcome he wanted, or perhaps even through intervention, among other possibilities. However, it's become clear to me since then that this would actually be a form of ID. I'm not really sure what theistic evolution means anymore.

Most theistic evolutionists espouse methodological naturalism, the idea that science must assume, but only for the sake of argument, that everything in the universe can be correctly explained in terms of undirected material causes. They contrast this with philosophical naturalism, the belief that things really are that way, which they claim to reject. Hence, the implication of this view is that science is only after an approximate, relativized "truth," rather than objective, actual truth.

Accordingly, I had expected the theistic evolutionist position to be that evolution wasn't literally a matter of random variation and selection without a goal, but that we just had to pretend for the sake of scientific argument that it was. However, I have found that, as Neumayr has documented, they do in fact mean it literally. They consider the randomness to be an objective philosophical fact, and this is evident from the way they strain to work it into their theologies, something they wouldn't need to do if they were only using it as a methodology. Miller says that "randomness is a key feature of the mind of God." Haught and Coyne explicitly argue that humans were not, in fact, an intentional outcome, even via indirect processes, but rather that the universe was set up to run randomly (something they both conflate with "freedom"), and that humans were a lucky accident. Derbyshire is a Universal Darwinist (one who believes that Darwinism applies to every aspect of our nature), a position that only follows if you take the materialistic and undirected account of life as objective and all-encompassing, and in a recent article on evolutionary psychology, he ends with an indication that, despite defining science such that it is relativized to materialism, he sees it as a guide to the objective truth: "We have it on good authority, though, that we shall know the truth, and the truth shall make us free. I believe that if we hold fast to faith in that proposition, and trust science to uncover the truth, neither we nor our country will come to any harm." Talk about using the rhetoric of theism to upend theism!

In a way, it's easy to see why they take the undirectedness of Darwinism to be literal, rather than merely methodological. The explanatory content of Darwinism requires that variations be actually random. A theory that only said that lifeforms arose through variations that may or may not have been random, and selection that may or may not have been directed, would be pretty meaningless beyond asserting common descent. One might allow that variations were random, but that selection was directed towards overarching goals, or vice versa, but allowing intentional planning into one and not the other would simply be arbitrary.

As I said above, the difference between a theist and an atheist is that the theist believes that the ultimate reality is a person who intended life, while the atheist believes that the ultimate reality is impersonal. To that end, Miller's claim that randomness is a "key feature" of the mind of God is incoherent. Mind implies an entity that has beliefs and reasons, and makes choices based on them. This is diametrically opposed to randomness, which implies action that happens for no reason. Miller is improperly conflating the two. What his statement really means is that a "key feature" of God's "mind" is not a mind at all, but rather impersonal chaos. Haught and Coyne both speak of God leaving the universe to run randomly out of "love" for it, under the rationale that when you love someone, you allow them freedom of autonomy rather than compelling them by force. However, like Miller's statement, this equivocates between "freedom" in the sense of making your own intentional choices and freedom in the sense of impersonal randomness. Finally, evolutionary psychology, entailed by Universal Darwinism, holds that there is no such thing as a "self" to speak of, the "mind" being a haphazard bottom-up construction of disparate blind material causes rather than a single rational entity, and our perception of ourselves as unified "persons" an illusion. Of course, if there's no such thing as a real "person" in our experience, then it is meaningless when we describe God as one. All of these Darwinian theologies are simply taking the impersonal and calling it "God". However, using inventive terminology doesn't change reality. This is simply atheism being described with theological terminology.

p>As a closing note, I have noticed that when theistic evolutionists criticize other Christians who advocate design, they typically portray it as requiring direct intervention, and as being opposed to common descent, despite the fact that most of them must surely know better. I used to wonder why this was, but I think I know now. It is convenient for them to portray the distinction as a simple difference between whether God achieved his goals directly or through indirect means, when in fact the real divide between design and their view lies in whether we were intended at all. Were they to promote their actual views on Christianity upfront when badgering guys like Cardinal Schonborn, believing Christians would quickly recognize it as blasphemy. Much better to first get Christians to sign off on their view under false pretenses, then slip in their real position once their guards are down. While aggressive, unabashed atheists like E.O. Wilson may be annoying, they actually provide a service by putting their whole position and what it entails out there for the public to consider. Would that everyone would seek to bring clarity to the debate. br> -- unsigned /p> p> I have but one question for the evolutionists, anti-evolutionists, creationists, and all of the other "-ists" involved in this long-standing debate: Who or what made the species evolve? If any of you out there have an answer for me, please, by all means, let me hear or read it. br> --

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