In my previous post I mentioned the two sections of “General Introductions” written respectively by Stephen Meyer and Wayne Grudem. I should have added that an excerpt including these sections has been graciously provided free of charge to everyone by the publisher, Crossway. The link is here. It is a 79 page excerpt of which 45 pages are text and constitute the “Scientific and Philosophical Introduction” by Meyer and the “Biblical and Theological Introduction” by Grudem. In that previous post, I commented on Grudem’s statement of the goals of the book. In this post I will cover Meyer’s summary of the scientific and philosophical sections of the book.

Meyer lays out the message of the book as follows:

“We start our scientific critique of theistic evolution discussing the alleged creative power of the main mechanisms of evolutionary change because theistic evolutionists want to argue that God has worked undetectably through these various evolutionary mechanisms and processes to produce all the forms of life on our planet today. They equate and identify evolutionary processes such as natural selection and random mutation with the creative work of God. Yet, we will argue in the opening section of this book, chapters 1–9, that the main mechanisms postulated in both biological and chemical evolutionary theory lack the creative power necessary to produce genuine biological innovation and morphological novelty.” (p. 50)

These all seem to be well known critiques covered in many previous publications. Setting aside for now the key issue of divine action in the process, the focus of this section seems to be on the scientific evidence, or lack thereof, for the creative capability of evolutionary mechanisms. In my opinion, the lack of validity or relevance of all these critiques has also been published elsewhere. In future posts, we’ll address some of these chapters in more detail. After briefly summarizing each of those 9 chapters, Meyer continues to explain the next section.

“After critiquing versions of theistic evolution that affirm the sufficiency of various naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms, the second part of the science section of the book (chapters 10–17) critiques versions of theistic evolution that assume the truth of universal common descent, the second meaning of evolution discussed above. These chapters also take a critical look at the claims of evolutionary anthropologists who assert that human beings and chimpanzees have evolved from a common ancestor.” (p. 53)

These chapters focus on oft-repeated claims that the scientific evidence for universal common ancestry and, particularly human ancestry, are not compelling. We’ll repeat the weaknesses of these claims in future posts. Finally, Meyer explains the section on philosophy.

“Our critique of theistic evolution does not stop with scientific concerns, however. In the second section of the book, we address philosophical problems with the versions of theistic evolution critiqued in our science section. Given the known scientific inadequacy of the neoDarwinian mutation/natural selection mechanism, and the absence of any alternative evolutionary mechanism with sufficient creative power to explain the origin of major innovations in biological form and information, we argue that theistic evolution devolves into little more than an a priori commitment to methodological naturalism—the idea that scientists must limit themselves to strictly materialistic explanations and that scientists may not offer explanations making reference to intelligent design or divine action, or make any reference to theology in scientific discourse.”

These philosophical points are also well traveled and are extremely important to understand. I’ll share a contrary viewpoint to these chapters in the future.

But first, I want to draw attention to a far more important consideration which Steve Meyer correctly raises in the first part of his introduction. This regards the question “is the evolutionary process guided or unguided?” Or stated in another way, “In theistic evolution, does God direct evolution or is evolution undirected? If directed by God, then how and what does it really mean?” In my next post I’d like to share a few thoughts on this but I’ll let all of you think about it for a while.