Intelligent design theory in the biological realm does not draw conclusions as to the identity of the designer or creator. Most theists, however, do draw such a conclusion, for reasons outside the scope of ID. Many Christians and other theists also routinely accept the idea of Darwinian evolution — by which I mean the common descent of all life from some common ancestor by natural selection acting on random variation — as a scientifically accurate account of “how God created.”
Our colleague Jonathan Witt, in his recent paper in the peer-reviewed journal Religions, argues not only that this position proves untenable, but that the widespread acceptance of the Darwinian narrative, even within theism, has “pernicious cultural implications.” In “Darwinian Narratives: Cultural Impact and Reconsideration,” Witt examines how the Darwinian narrative about the development of life is also a narrative about what humans are and what we do. He teases out why Daniel Dennett’s identification of Darwinian theory as a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view” is both accurate and at the same time defeating to the Darwinian narrative itself.
It Comes Down to This
However life arose, if it then developed by an undirected process of natural selection acting on random variation into what we see today, then the claims of Christianity about what a human being is are radically undermined. The standing of humans as exceptional among all created things is replaced with the understanding that we are “just animals” like any other, and just as accidental. Witt shows how such a conclusion has aided and abetted relativism, nihilism, and atheism.
It is a central tenet of Christianity (and of Judaism and Islam) that God created life, and that he specially created human life. It is a central tenet of Darwinian theory that life is fundamentally accidental and “the descent of man” was undirected. If you want to argue that God created by directing the process of evolution, then you are not arguing for a Darwinian conception of evolution. As Witt puts it:
The Christian biologist may hold to a purposive and directed form of evolution, one that God informed and guided along the way in the history of life, thus maintaining the Christian vision of a created order marked by divine purpose and foresight. But in this case, the biologist isn’t holding to evolution as Darwin envisioned it, or to evolution as the theory was reformulated in the twentieth century under the label of neo-Darwinism, or indeed to any form of modern evolutionary theory considered mainstream.
So, it doesn’t seem possible to maintain a Christian vision of creation without foregoing some central features of modern Darwinian theory. But is it possible to adopt a Darwinian narrative without fundamentally altering or undermining both rationality and Christianity? Witt says this:
If modern Darwinism is true and demonstrable, then any lover of truth apprised of the relevant facts has no choice but to accept the theory and work out from the theory to a consistent and coherent theory of life, one involving a steely eyed look at one’s prior faith in such notions as a transcendent father God, the Imago Dei, and good and evil as immaterial realities — at least until one gets far enough along in the exercise of worldview realignment to realize that Darwinism taken to its logical extreme may vitiate the ground for supposing that we can reason our way to truth, or that there is a moral calling to pursue truth in the first place.
A Necessary and Logical Implication
There is also, though, a necessary and logical implication of Darwinian materialism that vitiates the whole materialist narrative, Darwinism included. This comes to light when we think, under the assumption of Darwinian materialism, about why humans seem to seek truth. This was a problem for Darwin, who cared about truth and worried that his theory undermined the trustworthiness of human reason. Witt quotes him: “[W]ith me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
And what are we to make of rationality and creativity, of our awareness of the moral order? In the Judeo-Christian tradition, these markers of the Imago Dei are elevated; in materialism they are denigrated as the products of brain chemistry. Indeed, Witt argues,
The humanist-evolutionist might seek to retreat to art and religion to touch the sublime and transcendent, finding there some ground for meaning and purpose. But this is difficult to manage without first throwing overboard a reductionist story close to the heart of Darwinism, according to which some of our ancestors had one or more natural and wholly random variations/mutations that led them to believe in a spiritual dimension that included immaterial qualities like nobility, good, and evil.
As the Story Goes
These random mutations conferred a survival advantage, the story goes, and so all things religious came to be as the product of natural selection. But pay attention here: What is supposed to have been selected? A capacity for useful delusion. This brings us back to Darwin’s “horrid doubt,” and it is where the Darwinian narrative falls apart, logically. If the state of being deluded has a survival advantage, then in a Darwinian narrative, where survival is the be all and end all, there is no reason to think that what we believe corresponds to truth. We’ve survived thus far, it seems, thanks in part to our capacity to be deluded. And thus the entire basis for believing the Darwinian story is undermined.
Where does all this leave the Christian? The theist? The materialist? Witt delves into all of that, and I’ll leave it to him. You can read his entire paper here.