Stephen Barr

This is the final installment of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here, and the second post can be found here.

The Collins/Barr Approach: A God Who Misleads?

Stephen Barr identifies himself with the position of Francis Collins who argues that although evolution looks like “a random and undirected process,” it nevertheless could have been guided by God. “Evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.” [Collins, The Language of God, p. 205.]

Barr takes me to task for highlighting Collins’ use of the word “could” because I implied that “Collins is not sure whether God did in fact know beforehand. Anyone who has read Collins’s book, however, should realize that Collins absolutely and unequivocally holds the belief that God knows all events from all eternity.” Really? In the same book that Collins says that God “could” have known and specified the outcome of evolution, he also claims that much of our DNA is basically junk that certainly was not the product of God’s intentional design. In particular, Collins goes on at length about “Ancient Repetitive Elements,” which he disparages as “genetic flotsam and jetsam” that make up “roughly 45 percent of the human genome.” Collins concedes that “some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as ‘junk DNA’ just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation.” [Language of God, p. 156, emphasis added] In other words, Collins rejects as credulous the idea that such DNA were planned by God for a reason. So much for the idea that God knew and specified the outcomes of evolution from eternity.

This is the second of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here.

Mainstream Theistic Evolution: Directed or Undirected?

In the initial decades after Darwin proposed his theory, theistic evolution typically was presented as a form of guided evolution. Although Darwin himself rejected the idea that evolution was guided by God to accomplish particular ends, many of Darwin’s contemporaries (including those in the scientific community) rejected undirected natural selection as sufficient to explain all the major advances in the history of life. Instead, according to historian Peter Bowler, there was widespread acceptance of the idea “that evolution was an essentially purposeful process… The human mind and moral values were seen as the intended outcome of a process that was built into the very fabric of nature and that could thus be interpreted as the Creator’s plan.” [Bowler, Darwinism (1993), p. 6]

This view of evolution as a purposeful process began to disintegrate early in the twentieth century after Darwinian natural selection underwent a resurgence due to work in experimental genetics. Once Darwin’s theory of undirected evolution became the consensus of the scientific community, the task for mainstream theistic evolution became considerably harder: Now one had to reconcile theism not just with the idea of universal common ancestry, but with the idea that the development of life was driven by an undirected process based on random genetic mistakes. But how can God “direct” an “undirected” process? The answer of many leading theistic evolutionists is clear: God didn’t.

Theistic evolutionist Stephen Barr is a serious and thoughtful man, and on the First Things blog, he has raised some serious and thoughtful objections to an essay I wrote for The Washington Post as well as to reflections on that essay by Joe Carter (also at the First Things blog). Unfortunately, I think Barr’s criticisms confuse matters more than they clarify them. Nevertheless, I’m grateful that he has aired his objections, because some of his misunderstandings are shared by other conservative intellectuals, and they deserve a response. This is the first of three posts responding to Barr.

False Dilemma or Wishful Thinking: Is Darwinian Evolution Undirected or Not?

Barr first claims that Joe Carter and I “are trapped in a false dilemma” because we wrongly think that random processes cannot be directed by God. Barr points out that even random events, properly defined, are part of God’s sovereign plan. Just because something is random from our point of view, doesn’t mean that it is outside of God’s providence. Barr may be surprised to learn that I agree with him. Indeed, most, if not all, of the scholars who believe that nature provides evidence of intelligent design would agree with him. The problem with Barr’s argument is not with his understanding of the proper meaning of random, but with his seeming blindness to the fact that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists do not share his view. Barr’s ultimate disagreement here is not with me or Joe Carter, but with the discipline of evolutionary biology itself.