Science and Culture Today | Page 1205 | Discovering Design in Nature

In two previous posts, I have discussed Randy Isaac’s essay, “Science and the Question of God,” published at the BioLogos Foundation website. The final section of Isaac’s essay is called “The Two Book Model.” This phrase normally refers to the traditional Christian view that God reveals himself in history and Scripture, which is his “special” revelation, as well as in the created order, which is “general” revelation. So we have two complementary books of revelation: the book of Scripture and the book of nature. Though we can’t learn everything about God from general revelation that we learn from God’s special revelation, we can learn something.

P.Z. Myers was at his hissing best in reply to my recent philosophical questions for New Atheists:

…the graveyard of rotting ideas that the Discovery Institute calls a blog…a particularly crusty and dogmatic alchemist stirring beneath the cobwebs of his dead discipline …imposing the cracked and cloudy lens of his superstition…

Imagine my surprise when a couple of days later Myers pens a post lavishly extolling…theologians(!):

I would never deny that there are many smart people among the believers, some are incredibly brilliant and thoughtful scholars. Theology is also awesomely sophisticated and complex…

“Awesomely sophisticated…”? Myers goes on with an unusually long post, part man-crush on Aquinas, part hissing rage, alternately praising theology and excoriating it for twenty five paragraphs.

After yesterday’s plenary session with Dr. Falk at the Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science, I was looking forward to attending his breakout session and hearing more about his view of evolutionary creation.

And I was not disappointed.

There were fewer than twenty of us sitting in a U-shape at tables in a classroom, which felt a little bit like we were all having a small class session on theistic evolution evolutionary creation, up close and personal. In addition to the volunteers working with Dr. Falk on a film project (more on that later), Dr. Walter Bradley, conference organizer Larry Linenschmidt, Dr. Dennis Venema, and Dr. Richard Sternberg were in attendance, as well as a few younger thinkers.

Falk explained what he means by the term “evolutionary creation” and why he prefers it to “theistic evolution,” then outlined his particular view with three major points:

1. God speaks natural laws into existence.
2. Natural laws are a reflection of God’s ongoing activity.
3. Through God’s ongoing natural activity, and through supernatural intervention, God is there at work and we have all the glory of creation.

We were then treated to a clip from a new film BioLogos is doing with Highway Media, which looked very good – beautiful, compelling, and full of talking heads with British accents sitting in nice churches. And a shot of C. S. Lewis’s grave, just in case you didn’t get the point that “evolutionary creation” is the smart Christian choice. (They also have Americans like Brian McLaren, but that’s less impressive to their evangelical targets, IMO.)

Finally, Dr. Falk took questions from the small group of us assembled there.

I’m here at the Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science Conference in Austin, where I’ve enjoyed hearing from Stephen Meyer, Hugh Ross, Darrel Falk, Dan Heinze, and more in presentations to a large auditorium of conference attendees. It’s interesting and I think good to bring together so many different perspectives on science and origins, though sometimes distinctions seemed purposefully blurred so as to preserve unity. An example of this might be Biologos’ Darrel Falk’s plenary session, where he discussed his view of “evolutionary creation” (he doesn’t like “theistic evolution”) as God working through a gradual process. He is right that most of the theists in the room do indeed agree on the point that God is creative and creator, but Read More ›

“Creationism”

In my previous post, I discussed Randy Isaac’s distinction of “evolutionism” and “evolution” in his essay “Science and the Question of God,” published at the BioLogos Foundation website. After proffering a distinction between “evolution” and “evolutionism,” Isaac talks about (young earth) creationism. I have some quibbles with what he says on the subject, especially with respect to biblical authority; however, I do share his concern that many young earth creationists appeal to the “tu quoque” argument. That is, many argue (in effect) that since everyone holds arbitrary presuppositions, it’s no problem for Christians to do so. But saying that everybody begs the question is hardly a reasonable rebuttal to the charge that I’m begging the question. This strategy makes the evidential task far too easy, since very quickly, the only question you’re obligated to answer is whether you’re going to hold atheistic assumptions or young earth assumptions. Pushed to its extreme, this view seems like irrationalism and anti-realism to me. But let’s not tarry on this subject, since it is clearly not the central concern of Isaac’s essay. He seems much more interested in critiquing ID, which he sees as more of a threat than creationism.

Previously I noted that BioLogos has created a taxonomy of various viewpoints in the debate over origins that First Things blogger Christopher Benson called “helpful”. Given how badly it misrepresents ID, in my view it is anything but. Previously I showed that ID finds its supporting evidence in the fields of cosmology/physics and biology, thus refuting BioLogos’s mistaken assertion that “Intelligent design (ID) proponents believe that much of modern science is wrong and must be rejected because of its naturalism.” Let me reiterate two more points I made in response Benson’s orginal post:

I was recently directed to a video lecture on the phenomenon of quorum sensing, the mechanism by which bacteria communicate with one another to establish the population density of micro-organisms of their own kind within their proximal environment. Bonnie Bassler, the lecturer in this video, does a masterful job of portraying fairly technical concepts and ideas to a lay-audience.

The purpose of quorum sensing is essentially to ensure that sufficient cell numbers of a given species are present before initiating a response that requires the population density to be above a certain threshold. A single bacterial cell secreting a toxin into a eukaryotic organism is not likely to do the host any harm and would waste resources. If, however, all of the bacterial cells in a large population co-ordinate the expression of the toxin, the toxin is more likely to have the desired effect.

Each species that employs quorum sensing — which includes most gram negative bacteria, and also some gram positive bacteria — synthesises a tiny signalling molecule (technically called an “autoinducer”), which diffuses freely across the cell’s membrane. Autoinducers are species-specific, which means that each cell of the same species makes the same molecule. This means that the autoinducer is only present in high concentrations inside the cell when there are many cells of the same species nearby. Inside the cell, the autoinducer binds to an activator protein which is specific for that particular molecule and thus signals the bacteria to begin transcription of specific genes. As noted in the video, there is also evidence of a common autoinducer which is shared between many species of bacteria as a “conventional language.”

The BioLogos Foundation recently published a scholarly essay (with several accompanying blog posts) titled “Science and the Question of God” by Randy Isaac. Isaac is a physicist and executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA)–a scholarly society of Christian natural scientists. In his essay, Isaac examines, as he puts it, “three schools of thought regarding the possibility of detecting God’s existence through science: Evolutionism, Creationism, and Intelligent Design.”

In this and two follow-up posts, I’ll respond to some of the themes of Isaac’s essay.

When I began to read “Science and the Question of God,” I worried that Isaac would define ID as an explicit attempt to prove the existence of God.

But, happily, Isaac doesn’t make that mistake, and provides instead an acceptable definition of ID: “The essential principle of ID,” he says, “is that there are patterns in nature that are best explained by the action of an indeterminate intelligent designer.”

Over at the Huffington Post, that organ of sophisticated theological analysis, Matt Rossano argues: If he were alive today would Aquinas be an evolutionist? His writings suggest a mind already resonating with many evolutionary concepts. My sense is that Aquinas, like Aristotle and Albert before him, was just too curious and too smart not be at the intellectual vanguard wrestling with exciting new knowledge. Limping weakly behind with whiny unimaginative creationists would have been far too boring for a mind such as his. In fact, Rossano actually tries to marshal St. Thomas for the least plausible part of the Darwinian program–evolutionay psychology. Rossano finds some simlarities between Thomas’ thought and the ideas of evolutionary psychology. But any two schools of Read More ›